Page 17 of Hunted in the Silence

“There’s something else,” she said softly.

“Tell me.”

“The girl at the dock.”

She paused, and he tried to think back to that moment, but the details wouldn’t come.

“The one in the middle, shorter than the other two, dark jacket.” She paused, and he tried to think back to that moment, but he couldn’t remember clearly. “I think I recognized her. Not her specifically. But her family. There’s a woman who brings her granddaughter to our after-school program on Tuesdays. The girl in the dark jacket had the same bone structure, the same way she held her shoulders.” Another pause, careful. “I could be wrong. The light was bad and I was sixty yards out.”

“Can you get me a photograph of the family?” he asked, and the question tightened something in him. He didn’t like the idea of her being personally connected to anyone caught up in this — didn’t like the idea of her carrying that kind of weight. He shifted in his chair, jaw setting as he pushed past the feeling and waited for her answer.

“Not without a reason that doesn’t compromise their privacy and their trust in the center.” Her voice was firm on this, professional, like someone drawing a familiar line. “But if you can get me a photograph from your surveillance footage, a good clear one, I can tell you within a day whether I’m right.”

“I’ll have it to you by noon,” he vowed.

“Then I’ll have an answer by tonight.”

Cole was quiet for a moment, looking at the board, thinking about what they were building. It was coming together quickly, as if it had been waiting for someone to come along and pull the right thread. He’d felt it before, that shift when the noise dropped away and the pattern finally showed itself.

“Brynn,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Dana Pryce. I’m going to find out what happened to her.”

The silence that followed was different from the others. Softer at the edges.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said quietly.

“I know.” He looked at the name on his legal pad. “I’m going to do it anyway.”

She didn’t say thank you. He hadn’t expected her to. What she said instead was, “I’ll talk to you tonight,” and the way she said it made him think she might be starting to trust him.

He set his phone down and looked at the board for a long moment.

Olivia, from across the room, did not look up from her laptop. “That sounded like a very professional phone call,” she said.

“It was.”

“Mm.” She flicked him a quick glance over the top of her screen, a small smirk tugging at one corner. “Just keep telling yourself that.”

Ignoring her comment, Cole picked up his coffee, found it was cold, and went to make a fresh cup. Through the frosted glass front of the office, he watched Blackridge waking up. Trucks on the main road. A woman walking a large dog that looked like it was walking her instead. The ordinary life of a town that didn’t know the darkness that was moving through its shadows.

He thought about the pipeline. About three girls in a white van. About a ledger filled with names, dates, payments—the kind of details that only came from years of people looking the other way.

And briefly, between one thought and the next, he thought about a voice on the phone that had said her name was Dana—a soft voice, steady in a way that didn’t come cheap, with a warmth that slipped in at the edges before he could brace against it. It reached through the line and lodged somewhere in his chest that had been empty for a long time. It wasn’t dramatic, just a small shift he felt physically—a tightening under his ribs, a pull he didn’t want to examine too closely—and he pushed past it, even as it stayed with him.

He poured his coffee and went back to work.

There was too much at stake for anything else.

Chapter 7

The photograph came through at eleven forty-seven in the morning, and by eleven forty-nine Brynn knew she’d been right.

She sat at her desk and looked at the still frame Cole had pulled from the surveillance footage. The image quality was better than she’d expected given the distance and the dark. The girl in the middle of the three at the loading dock, the one in the dark jacket, was caught in profile, her face turned slightly toward the building, and in that turn Brynn could see what she’d seen through binoculars the night before at sixty yards away.

The line of the jaw. The set of the shoulders. The unique way this girl held herself, a posture Brynn had watched every Tuesday afternoon for the past four months while the girl did homework at the table in the center’s after-school room and pretended not to care whether anyone noticed.