Page 14 of Hunted in the Silence

He sighed. “I know. We document everything we can tonight and we let it run.”

“And then we get them all,” Brynn said. “Not just these three.”

“And then we get them all.” He said it like a promise, and she believed it, for reasons she didn’t quite understand.

They documented everything. For the next hour, they noted times, plates, faces, the number of girls they could confirm, the routes the vehicles took leaving the property. Cole was methodical and fast and utterly, admirably efficient, and she matched him, and somewhere in that hour of cold and focus and the dark intimacy of shared purpose she stopped being aware of the distance between them and simply worked.

By eleven p.m. the dock was dark again and the access road was empty. Cole sent the package of photographs and plate numbers to Olivia with a message that was four words: Run everything. Call me.

Then he sat back and was quiet for a moment.

“You held it together,” he said. Not looking at her. Looking at the building. “When they brought the girls out.”

“It’s not the first time I’ve had to.”

“I know. That’s what I mean.” He turned, and the low light of the instruments caught the green of his eyes, and the look in them was the same one she’d been trying not to let mean anything for three days. Direct and careful and something else underneath it, something heavier. “Most people wouldn’t be in this car right now. Most people who’d been through what you’ve been through would have built a wall between themselves and this work years ago, or the work would have already broken them. You’re neither of those things.”

She held his gaze because looking away felt like admitting something. “What am I, then?”

He considered the question the way he considered everything, without rushing it. “Necessary,” he said finally. “In every sense of the word.”

She didn’t know what to say to that, which was rare enough to be notable. She looked back at the dark building instead, and for a moment neither of them said anything. The cold came in through the seams of the car, and she was aware of the eight inches between them as something that required active maintenance to keep intact. At least on her part.

“We should go,” she said. “We have a lot to run down tomorrow.”

“Yeah.” He didn’t move for another second. But then he started the car, and she felt a tiny note of disappointment deep down inside.

The drive back through Blackridge was quiet. The town had gone dark around them, the residential streets empty and still. Cole drove unhurried, and she watched the darkened storefronts pass and thought about the three girls in the white van and the pipeline they were going to dismantle and the man whose walk she would know anywhere.

Cole pulled up in front of the advocacy center and kept the engine running.

“Get some sleep,” he said. “Real sleep, not four hours.”

It wasn’t likely, but she agreed and returned the sentiment. “You too.”

“I’ll try.” He said it like he meant it and didn’t entirely believe it, which was honest, and she respected honest more than reassuring.

She got out of the car and then turned back, one hand on the door. “Cole.”

He looked at her, and the interior light that had come on when she opened the door caught the lines of his face, the tiredness in it and the thing underneath the tiredness that wasn’t tiredness at all.

“You’re necessary too,” she said. “In case no one’s said it.”

She closed the door before she could see his expression change or force a response, and walked to the building without looking back.

But she heard the car stay idling in the parking lot for a full minute after she went inside.

And that had to mean something…right?

Chapter 6

The field office whiteboard had stopped being a whiteboard somewhere around Wednesday and become something else entirely. Cole stood in front of it Thursday morning with a cold cup of coffee and looked at what three days of work had produced.

Two confirmed trafficking locations. One active logistics pipeline with a documented Thursday rotation. A commercial van, plates now traced to a shell company registered in Nevada with a mailing address that turned out to be a UPS store in Las Vegas. A recruiter identified by Brynn from intake records, now also caught on camera at the Meridian property, whose name the database had just handed them as Mario Teller, two prior arrests in Indiana both dismissed before trial. A logistics structure built on the back of a legitimate electrical supply company. And at the center of all of it, still stubbornly absent from anything that would constitute admissible evidence, the name Andre Devlin.

Cole had been up since four-thirty. Not because of the case, or not only because of the case. He’d slept three hours and then woken up again, his mind churning in that restless, grinding momentum that meant a piece of the puzzle was close to fitting.

He’d thought about the pipeline. About Chicago. About Jeremy Vance.