CHAPTER 11 - Raleigh, North Carolina Friday, July 19, 2024

CHAPTER 11

Raleigh, North Carolina Friday, July 19, 2024

IT HAD BEEN A WHIRLWIND OF A WEEK.

Day one had started with a patrol officer stopping by the Hastings residence to listen to Sloan’s story and take a formal statement. Day two involved a detective from the missing persons division of the Raleigh Police Department. Day three held a visit from the same detective, plus an FBI agent associated with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Accompanying the FBI agent was an evidence technician who asked Sloan to sign a consent form before he swabbed the inside of her cheek and took a vial of blood. Proof that the FBI worked faster than even James the genealogist, two agents from the FBI’s Criminal Investigation Unit arrived at the Hastings home seventy-two hours later with confirmation that Sloan’s DNA, indeed, matched the DNA sample from Charlotte Margolis, which had sat undisturbed in an evidence locker at the Harrison County Sheriff’s Office in Cedar Creek, Nevada, for nearly thirty years.

The next three days saw FBI agents politely but formally interview Dolly and Todd Hastings. The initial questions centered around how, exactly, the Hastings had adopted Sloan in November of 1995, four months after baby Charlotte Margolis went missing. After preliminary inquiries, the agents separated Dolly and Todd and asked more probing questions. Sloan had holed up in her childhood bedroom during that first day, when the Hastings home became an interrogation center. The following day, her parents had been whisked away to answer questions at the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation headquarters in Raleigh, leaving Sloan to nervously pace her apartment as she waited. On Friday, the third day of questioning, Sloan’s parents were escorted to the FBI headquarters in Charlotte, two and a half hours away. Sloan tried to tough it out, but the walls of her apartment began to close in, and she felt a desperate need for space.

Looking to distract her mind and escape the obsessive thoughts about her parents, the questions they were answering, and the FBI’s suspicions about their role in her disappearance decades earlier, she decided work was the best place to be. She grabbed her keys on the way out of her apartment and headed to the morgue.

As she turned out of the parking lot of her apartment complex, with her mind racing and preoccupied, she was oblivious to the SUV that pulled into traffic behind her.