Page 26 of Hunted in the Silence

Carson’s jaw tightened at the name. “What do you need to find Devlin?”

“His ledger. Brynn believes it exists, and I believe her. It’s the key to the whole structure. But to find the ledger we have to find where he’s operating from, and to find that we need to close the gap in our map of the network.” Cole looked at the whiteboard behind Carson’s desk. “There are three points I can account for. There’s a fourth that Brynn’s map suggests exists somewhere in this region, and it’s the one Devlin orbits closest to. We find that and we find him.”

Carson stood and moved to his own whiteboard, pulling a cap off a marker. “Show me what you have. We’ll see if anything I know about this town fills the gaps.”

They spent an hour at the whiteboard. It was productive. Carson knew things about Blackridge that no federal file captured—which properties had changed hands quietly in the past three years, which business fronts had the kind of foot traffic that didn’t match their stated purpose, which corners of the industrial district had been flagged by his officers for reasons nobody had ever been able to articulate into a chargeable offense.

Three times, information Carson pulled from memory overlapped directly with something on Cole’s map.

“This property,” Cole said, circling a location Carson had mentioned. “Who owns it?”

Carson pulled it up on his computer. “Registered to a Harlan Investment Group. Delaware incorporation.” He looked at Cole. “Same as your Meridian property.”

Cole looked at the two locations on the map. Eight blocks apart, both in the industrial corridor, both with legitimate surface cover and Delaware paper behind them. His pulse kicked up.

“That’s the fourth point,” he said.

Carson looked at the map. “You think Devlin uses both?”

“I think one is storage and one is transit. Separate functions, same network, close enough to coordinate efficiently but far enough apart that a problem at one doesn’t automatically expose the other.” Cole reached for his phone to text Olivia. “The Harlan Group property…what’s the street-level cover?”

“Medical supply warehouse. Looks legitimate from the outside. I’ve driven past it a hundred times.” Carson’s voice was flat, like he was rethinking everything he thought he knew about his own town. “It’s been there for four years.”

Cole was already typing. “Four years is consistent with Devlin’s operational timeline in this region.” He looked up. “Carson. This is good. This is very good.”

Carson sat back down and looked at the map. He was quiet for a long moment, his hands flat on the desk, and Cole let him have it. He understood what it meant to see something like this in a town you’d been watching over, the uncomfortable realization that something like this had been operating right under your nose.

“Caitlin Marsh,” Carson said again, quietly.

“We’re going to get her home,” Cole said. He meant it, though not as reassurance. As a statement of intent.

Carson looked at him. Whatever he found in Cole’s face apparently satisfied something, because he nodded once and stood up again. “I’ll have Finn on the corridor by tonight. You’ll have my personal number and he’ll have yours. Anything he sees, you hear about it before I do.” He extended his hand again. “Welcome to Blackridge, Maddox. Sorry it took three weeks.”

Cole shook it. “I should have come to you sooner.”

“You should have,” Carson agreed, without heat. “Don’t do it again.”

***

Cole drove to the advocacy center from BPD because there were a few things on his list to run by Brynn and because Olivia had texted back about the Harlan Investment Group with enough preliminary information to warrant a conversation in person.

That was the reason. Those were the only reasons. And that’s what he kept telling himself as he got out of the car and went inside.

He found Brynn in her office with the door propped open, sitting cross-legged in her desk chair with a stack of files across her lap and a pen tucked behind her ear, her dark auburn hair down and loose as if she’d been working for a long time. Her desk was organized chaos—legal pads, the Barton Industrial cross-reference she’d built, her coffee going cold beside her elbow as it always did.

On the corner of the desk, beside a ceramic mug that held three pens and a highlighter, was a book. Paperback, well-read, the spine cracked from use. He couldn’t see the cover from the doorway, but he suspected it was a romance.

She looked up when he knocked on the frame and something in her expression shifted the way he noticed it had been doing when he arrived—a brief readjustment that was there and gone in an instant.

“I just got off the phone with Olivia,” she said. “The Harlan Group property.”

“You heard.”

“She texted me the address twenty minutes ago. I’ve driven past that building.” Brynn set the files aside and uncurled from the chair. “Come look at something.”

The corkboard had been updated again. The Harlan property was on it, added recently. He could see the ink was still clean, the card not yet bent at the corners. She’d run a new thread from it to the Meridian card and added a note beneath it: storage + transit, separate functions, coordinated timing.

He looked at it. She’d reached the same conclusion he and Carson had, independently, before he’d even texted Olivia.