Page 9 of Hunted in the Silence

“Vance,” Cole said. “I want to know where he’s been in the last six months.”

“Already requested.” She typed something, then stopped. “How did it go this morning? With Holt.”

Cole looked at his notes. “She’s the best intelligence source we have on Devlin. She knows his operational patterns from the inside over a three-year period. The tattoo is his. The rotation method is his. She can map his psychology in a way no file can.”

Olivia was quiet for a moment, staring at him as her fingers remained poised over the keyboard, which with her meant she was deciding whether or not to say the next thing. She said it. “That’s not what I asked.”

Cole met her eyes across the desks. “It went well. She’s professional. She knows the line between her personal stake and her professional utility, and she stays on the right side of it.”

“Mm.” Her eyes narrowed briefly, then Olivia returned to her screen.

Cole cocked an eyebrow. “What does ‘mm’ mean?”

“It means I was at the advocacy center last night for three hours and I have eyes.” She didn’t look up. “And it means you drove forty minutes out of your way this morning to bring her a specific kind of coffee before six a.m.”

Cole’s heart stuttered. How the hell did she know that? “I was already nearby.”

“Cole.”

“The coffee was a professional courtesy.”

“Sure it was.” She typed another line. Stopped. “I’m not making a thing of it. I’m noting it. There’s a difference.”

He didn’t respond to that, which was its own kind of response and both of them knew it. But Cole knew where the line was too, and like Brynn, he knew how to stay on the right side of it.

Right?

He cleared his throat and turned back to the Barton Industrial records and kept working.

The thing about Olivia was that she was rarely wrong about this category of thing. She’d been reading people for twenty years across two careers and she had an instinct for the way that people started lying to themselves before they started lying to anyone else. She’d told him once, mildly, that he had a pattern of throwing himself at cases that activated his guilt about Abby, and he had been irritated about it for two weeks before he’d admitted to himself that she wasn’t wrong about that either.

So even though it was already eating at him, he wasn’t going to think about what she might be right about today.

He worked through lunch, which was a habit, and by early afternoon he had a cleaner picture of the Barton Industrial structure. The delivery schedules were the key. Every Thursday, without exception for the past eight months, the company ran a service route through the industrial district on the east edge of Blackridge. Three stops listed on the official manifest. One of them was a property listed under Meridian Logistics LLC, which pulled up as an inactive freight operation, shuttered eight years ago, currently registered to a holding company Cole couldn’t find a human being attached to without another warrant.

He circled it on the map.

His phone buzzed. A text from a number he’d entered into his contacts that morning under the name Holt, Brynn (Advocacy Center), which he’d been very deliberate about, including the institutional clarifier, for reasons he wasn’t examining closely.

The rotation is Thursdays. I should have said that this morning. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it until now.

He looked at the circled location on his map. At the delivery schedule. At the Thursday notation that appeared eight times in a row.

You just confirmed something, he typed back. Can you talk?

Her response was immediate. Yes. Come to the center. I want to show you something.

He was reaching for his jacket before he’d finished reading it, ignoring the little thrill that threaded through him, which he refused to acknowledge, not even internally. He grabbed the map and the Barton records, and when he caught Olivia’s eye, he said, “I’ll be back in an hour.”

With a certain look in her eye, Olivia returned her attention to the work in front of her. “That’s Holt.”

“Yes.”

“Right.” She turned a page. “Say hi.”

He did not dignify that with a response.

The drive to the advocacy center took twelve minutes. Brynn met him at the door, which meant she’d been watching for his car, and he decided he wasn’t going to draw any conclusions from that because he would be flat-out wrong. She was in different clothes from that morning, dark jeans traded for darker ones, the canvas jacket for a gray fleece that she’d pushed up to her elbows despite the cold draft coming through the gap in the door. Her hair was down. That was the primary difference, and he hated that he noticed any of that or that the thought that she looked amazing swept through his mind.