Another file. Another bar. Another marina-adjacent parking lot. Another woman in her early twenties with no immediate family in the area and a report filed by someone who hadn’t seen her for a few days and finally thought, maybe this isn’t normal.
The shape of it was starting to seem unmistakable.
I capped the marker and leaned back in my chair, folding my arms. “Okay.”
Rios looked up from the file he was holding. “Okay, what?”
“This isn’t random disappearance. It’s not even serial in the way people usually think of serial. It’s selective.”
“Explain that to me like I’m not already halfway there.”
I pushed up to pace, and the dog lumbered to his feet to follow like a faithful shadow. “If this were opportunistic, we’d see wider variation. Different ages. Different circumstances. At least a few cases where someone reappears or there’s credible evidence of a voluntary exit. But this—” I gestured at the wall where I’d amassed a collage of awful. “This is curated.”
His jaw tightened. “You’re saying someone’s choosing.”
“Yes.” I didn’t soften it. “And they’re choosing people who can disappear quietly.”
He exhaled through his nose, slow. “That tracks with what I’m seeing. No struggle noted. No witnesses who can give more than vibes and impressions. No follow-up pressure from families. Adults, not teenagers who’d have parents who’d make noise.”
“And no bodies,” I added. “Which matters.”
Rios set his file down and leaned back in his chair. “You’ve been circling around this idea since before the fire.”
I met his eyes. “Human trafficking.”
He didn’t flinch as I continued.
“I didn’t want to say it out loud until I could support it. Because people hear that word and immediately jump to sensationalism. But this is logistics. It’s infrastructure. Boats. Seasonal labor. Transient populations. It’s not dramatic—it’s efficient.”
He nodded slowly. “And Sutter’s Ferry sits right where it shouldn’t.”
“Exactly.” I pointed to the dates again. “These clusters? They line up with peak traffic. When no one’s paying attention to who’s new and who’s leaving.”
Silence stretched between us, heavy with the weight of things being named.
Rios reached for another file. “If this is trafficking, where does Priya fit?”
“That’s the problem,” I said. “She doesn’t.”
He looked up.
“She doesn’t match the profile,” I continued. “She’s educated. Connected. Her disappearance caused noise. That’s not what you want if you’re moving people like cargo.”
“So she’s either an outlier,” he said carefully, “or a mistake, as you concluded when we met Rosa.”
My stomach tightened. “Or she crossed paths with someone who wasn’t following the same rules.”
Rios didn’t respond right away. He flipped the file over, then frowned.
“What?”
He turned it slightly so I could see the tab. “This one’s still open.”
I followed his gaze.
Gwen Busby.
For a second, everything in the room seemed to still.
