Her shoulders squared. The familiar steel slid back into her spine.
I tightened my arm around her. Not to restrain her. To anchor her.
“We’re gonna need some room to work,” I said. “But first, breakfast.”
Thirty
MADDEN
By the time the light outside the dining room windows shifted from afternoon to early evening, the table was gone.
Not literally—Willa’s solid oak monstrosity still occupied the center of the room—but whatever sense of it as a place meant for meals and massive holiday celebrations had vanished under layers of paper, file folders, legal pads, the laptop I’d borrowed from Willa, Rios’s notebook, and three mismatched coffee mugs that all belonged to other people. We’d moved over here to stay to avoid endangering Caroline’s family, and because there’d be more space and privacy for digging into this next layer of investigation.
Sutter House had turned into a war room.
I hadn’t planned it that way. I’d told myself I was just going to skim. Get a feel for what Grant had risked his career to hand me. One pass through the files so I knew what I was dealing with before I decided where to dig deeper. But we’d done little more than dump our things—mostly Rios’s things and my donated wardrobe—into the guest room before doing a deep dive.
I couldn’t stop myself from stacking. Sorting. Lining things up in ways that were instinctive rather than conscious—dates to the left, names to the right, open cases separate from closed, anything involving disappearances flagged with bright yellow tabs I’d found in the junk drawer. I’d dragged chairs out of the way and started taping photocopies to the wall with blue painter’s tape like I’d been doing this my whole life instead of improvising in someone else’s dining room.
Across the room, Willa’s foster dog—currently on temporary loan for our sanity—snored like he’d personally paid rent. He’d claimed the spot by the bay window after a single lap of the dining room, plopped down with a grunt, and made it clear the only thing he was willing to investigate today was whether the sunbeam moved.
The dog was massive and ridiculous in a way that made him necessary. Some kind of mastiff mix with the heart of a marshmallow and the soulful eyes of a poet. I’d fallen for him on sight. Not that I was in any position to have any sort of pet, let alone one that weighed almost as much as I did. But I appreciated the company. Every time I moved too fast or muttered under my breath, his head lifted, dark eyes tracking me with calm, steady interest.
“You’re judging me,” I told him without looking.
His tail thumped once against the wall.
Rios snorted from the other end of the table. He’d been there the whole time, having claimed one corner of the table early, pulled his notebook close, and started reading alongside me like it was the most natural thing in the world for us to be doing this together.
Which, disconcertingly, it was.
We’d fallen into a rhythm without ever naming it. I read a file, flagged it, and slid it across to him. He skimmed, annotated, sometimes asked a question or made a quiet sound that told me something didn’t sit right. When he finished, he passed it back, and I logged the relevant details into my spreadsheet—name, age, last known location, date reported missing, status.
As far as I could tell, none of the missing had been found.
That alone was enough to make my stomach knot.
“What database are you cross-referencing?” Rios asked after a while.
“Three: missing persons, NCIC summaries, and a scraped dataset Devon built a couple years ago from news archives and nonprofit reports. It’s not perfect, but it catches a lot of cases that never made it into official systems.”
“Devon?”
“He’s a close friend from law school. He started the Unaccounted podcast after his cousin disappeared.”
“I’ve heard an episode or two. Specializes in disappearances of the marginalized, right?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s good at what he does.”
“Yes. He is.”
He nodded, absorbing that without comment. He didn’t ask how I had access to something a podcaster had built or why I trusted it. He trusted me. That was becoming a theme.
The dog padded forward and dropped onto the rug at my feet with a huff.
I stepped back from the wall, marker uncapped, and stared at what I’d built so far.
