Page 10 of Hunted in the Silence

“Come look at this,” she said by way of greeting, and turned back into the building without waiting for him.

See? Professional. She didn’t even think of him as anything other than a source related to the case. Any inkling she may have considered him beyond that was completely false.

He shook his head and followed her inside.

Her office had transformed since that morning. The desk was still there, but it had become a secondary surface. She’d pulled the large corkboard from the wall behind it and moved it to the center of the room, angling it toward the window light, and what was pinned to it was not the orderly file system of an advocate’s office but the dense, interconnected map of someone who had been building a picture for hours.

He stood in front of it and stared.

She’d printed photographs. Three of them, of girls who had come through the center in the past eighteen months, specifically the three who bore Devlin’s tattoo. Below each photograph was a card with the girl’s age, date of intake, method of approach, and a description of the man who had done the selecting. Below that, thread. Red thread, running between the cards and to a central point where she’d pinned a single index card that said Devlin, A. in her precise handwriting.

Branching out from that card were three other threads. Each led to a separate card. Two had names on them. One had a question mark.

She was standing beside the board with her arms crossed, studying it with the focused, dissatisfied expression of someone who knew the picture was almost right but not quite.

Cole could help but look at her in awe.

“The man I identified in Mia’s description as the recruiter at the club,” she said, tapping one of the named cards without touching the thread. Cole’s attention pulled back to the map. “He shows up in two of the three prior cases. Different girls, different locations, but the same description often enough that I’m confident it’s the same person. I think he’s Devlin’s primary talent scout for this region.”

Cole studied the card. She’d written a physical description, precise and detailed, the kind that came from multiple consistent sources rather than one uncertain account.

“You built this from victim testimony.”

“From intake interviews I conducted myself over two years. I keep full notes.” She glanced at him. “I know how it looks. I know it doesn’t have evidentiary standing on its own.”

“I’m not worried about evidentiary standing right now,” he grunted. He stepped closer to the board, tracking the thread from the recruiter card back to the Devlin card, then out to the question mark. “Who’s this?”

“Someone the girls mentioned but couldn’t identify. A woman. They described her as the one who handled logistics on the back end. Transportation, coordination.” Brynn’s jaw tightened slightly. “They said she was kind to them, in the beginning. Before they understood what kind was being used for.”

Cole had heard that before. The soft entry. The manufactured warmth, designed to create dependency before the dependency was needed. It was one of the more difficult things about these cases. The people in them didn’t always read the way juries needed them to read.

“Your Thursday confirmation,” he said, turning from the board. “Combined with what Olivia pulled on Barton Industrial this morning, we have a picture of how the logistics are running. There’s a property in the industrial district. Meridian Logistics, a derelict freight operation on paper with an active Thursday delivery schedule.”

Brynn went still the same way she had that morning when he’d shown her Devlin’s photograph. Not frightened. Absorbing.

“That’s off Miller Road,” she said thoughtfully. “I know that area.”

“You do?”

“I grew up twelve blocks from there.” She said it without self-consciousness. Just a simple fact. “I know every building on that corridor. The Meridian property has been dark for years. Nobody goes near it.” She looked at him. “Which means nobody notices what’s there.”

Cole pulled the map from under his arm and spread it on the nearest flat surface, which was the edge of the desk. They both leaned over it. She pointed to the location without having to look twice, her finger landing directly on it, and he became momentarily aware of her close beside him, the faint scent of something clean and subtle, the dark auburn of her hair in his peripheral vision.

He looked at the map.

“If that’s where he’s staging transfers,” she said, “then Thursday is two days away. We could sit on it. Document what comes in and out. Build the chain of custody on the logistics operation before we move.”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” Cole said.

She looked up from the map, and they were closer than he’d realized, both leaning over the desk, and for a second neither of them moved. He was aware of the brown of her eyes, the slight furrow between them when she was working something through, the fact that she was watching him with the same careful assessment she applied to everything.

She straightened first.

He straightened a moment after.

“I want to be there,” she said, her voice entirely level. “When you sit on it. I can tell you things about that operation just from watching it that your agents won’t know to look for.”

He picked up the map. Refolded it along the original creases, which gave him something to do with his hands. “I’m not going to fight you on it.” She was brilliant. Remarkable. And he couldn’t find one good reason to exclude her. Plain and simple, she was an asset they couldn’t afford to ignore.