Page 82 of Shhh…It’s A Killer Story

What the fuck were you thinking, Elias.

Eight missing women. Eight months of files sitting on a steel desk inside that brick building. A silver chain with a stylized letter ‘A’ sitting in an evidence locker, cold and heavy. That was the reality. Not the faint scent of rose and vanilla that seemed to have bonded with the upholstery of my truck. Not the way her dark eyes looked when she was arguing with imaginary garden ornaments. She was too young for me. She was part of the landscape I was supposed to be clearing. I rubbed my hands over my face, the rough skin rasping against my chin, and forced my boots out into the gravel.

The automatic door didn't just open when I stepped onto the mat; it slammed back against the housing with a violent, plastic rattle that usually signalled the compressor was failing but nobody looked up. Immediately, the air changed. The station didn't smell like its usual combination of stale chicory coffee, old floor wax, and damp coats. It felt electric, hot with the sudden, chaotic friction of too many people moving through a small space.

The phones were ringing not the steady, bureaucratic chime of the administrative desk, but a frantic, overlapping chorus of lines that had been rolling over for hours. Deputies I’d never seen before, likely pulled from the county lines near the interstate, were moving down the narrow hallway with armfuls of active file jackets. Papers were scattered across the low counter of the dispatch desk like autumn leaves after a hard frost.

From the back office of Sheriff Walker’s office, a voice broke through the din. Walker wasn't just directing traffic; he was barking orders with the kind of sharp, defensive volume that usually meant he’d lost his grip on the narrative.

"...I don't care about the press pool, Collins! Get the yellow tape out to the perimeter and keep the logging trucks off the secondary road! Now!"

Through the frosted glass of the secondary interview room, a muffled, ragged sound leaked into the corridor, someone was crying, the high, rhythmic gasps of a woman who had just been given a piece of information that didn't fit into her world.

My stomach did a slow, heavy roll.

As a detective, you learn to read a house by the way the front door sits on its hinges. You learn to read a station by the volume of its silence. This wasn't another disappearance. A disappearance was a slow leak; it was a file that grew heavier over three weeks while people looked at maps. This was a rupture. Something fucking happened in the dark hours while I was driving home with her scent on my collar. Something worse.

Fuck.

I pulled my phone from my pocket as I rounded the corner by the vending machines, my thumb clearing the lock screen. The screen lit up with a row of red text.

8 Missed Calls.

My phone vibrated again.

Derek. Six missed calls.

Mason. Two missed calls.

I frowned. They knew better than to blow up my phone unless something had gone spectacularly wrong.

Fuck.

I stopped walking, my back hitting the beige cinderblock wall. What the hell were they doing calling my personal line at three in the morning? Mason didn't use the phone unless someone was dead or about to be, and Derek usually preferred to text three-word coordinates rather than have a conversation. They were three hundred miles away running a private security firm that handled high-value assets near the coast. They had no business with the Blackridge County grid.

Before my thumb could find the callback button, a young deputy, Collins’s younger brother, or someone who looked just like him rushed past me, his uniform cap crooked on his head.

"Detective!" he gasped, his eyes wide and bloodshot under the fluorescent tubes. "Walkers in the main box. He’s been looking for you since six."

"What am I walking into, kid?" I reached out, my hand clamping down on his shoulder to pin him to the floor before he could bolt.

"The conference room," he stammered, his eyes darting toward the end of the hall. "Just... go inside, sir."

I let him go and walked toward the glass-fronted conference room at the end of the hall. The room was known as the 'main box' because it was the only space in the building with a white board that didn't have grease stains from thirty years of budget meetings.

As I approached the glass, my boots slowed. Through the clear pane, two men were standing by the long laminate table. They weren't wearing the grey twill of the county sheriff or the brown campaign hats of the state troopers. They were dressed in black the heavy, functional canvas of utility jackets and tactical trousers that hadn't seen a washing machine since they left the field.

My stomach dropped three inches into my boots.

Derek was talking with his hands as usual. Mason wasn't moving at all. That worried me more. WHAT THE FUCK happened in the last few hours I wasn’t here.

They shouldn't have been here. The Blackridge disappearance file was an administrative nightmare, a low-priority local puzzle that the state only looked at when a politician’s niece went missing. But seeing the two of them standing their Mason with his hands planted flat on the table, his shoulders hunched over a stack of glossy crime scene photos, and Derek leaning against the whiteboard with his ankles crossed told the reader everything they needed to know.

This wasn't a local search anymore. They were here for something else. Possible murder. For fuck sakes had this changed from a missing’s case to a murder case. Did the kidnapper start murdering them? I pushed the heavy wooden door open. The hinge gave a long, high-pitched whine that cut through the low murmur of the voices inside.

Everyone stopped.

Sheriff Walker was standing at the head of the table, his tie pulled loose, his white shirt stained with coffee near the pocket. His face was the colour of old lard, his eyes small and sunken behind his gold-rimmed glasses. When he saw me, his jaw tightened, a muscle in his cheek twitching with the kind of irritation that usually precedes a shouting match.