The bartender looked up from drying a glass. “Carrera. Heard you were back.”
“Jimmy.” I nodded in greeting. “That girl Dr. Thompson was asking about—did you see her last night?”
“Yeah. Quiet girl. Sat over there.” He jerked his chin toward the corner table by the window, beneath a neon beer sign. “Coffee, laptop. Left after one, I think.”
“Alone?”
“Far as I saw. I was in and out of the back. Didn’t actually see her leave.”
“Anybody pay her undue attention?”
He shook his head. “Didn’t notice.”
“Thanks. Kitchen still open?”
“For a bit.”
I ordered that burger and took a seat at the far end of the bar, facing the window where Priya had last sat. The faint reflection of neon shimmered on the glass, the docks beyond swallowed by dark.
Somewhere out there, she’d vanished.
And I knew, deep down, that if the system was already dragging its feet, someone had to move faster.
Eight
MADDEN
Astrid’s office looked like someone had tried to cram an entire ocean into a twelve-by-twelve room and given up halfway.
Maps layered the walls—shoreline charts, satellite images with nest markers in red pen, printouts color-coded in ways that meant something to the people who worked here and nothing at all to me. A whiteboard behind her desk was crowded with dates and codes—N-17, N-19, S-03—each with a cluster of tiny notes. A battered metal file cabinet did double duty as a coffee station, the ancient drip machine burbling resentfully beside a jumble of mismatched mugs. Somewhere down the hall, pumps thrummed, keeping water moving through specimen tanks I hadn’t bothered to count on the way in.
Maya and Tyler stood in front of Astrid’s desk like they were waiting for a verdict as she scanned something on a tablet. The pair of them looked like they’d been dragged down the beach backward.
“Go home,” Astrid ordered. “Eat something that isn’t out of a cooler. Sleep. And do not come back on site until check-in tonight.”
Tyler’s throat worked. “If you hear anything?—”
“You’ll be the first to know,” she promised. “Text me when you’re home, so I know you made it.”
They nodded in unison, relief and helplessness wrapped up together, and shuffled out past me. The door clicked shut behind them, and the room seemed to exhale.
Astrid slumped back in her chair as if someone had cut her strings. She tipped her head back, eyes closing briefly as the worn mesh creaked in protest.
I noticed the tremor in her hands. “Did you sleep at all?”
“Fits and starts.” She rubbed the heel of her hand over her sternum like she could physically dislodge the worry lodged there. “Every time I closed my eyes, I started thinking about everything that could have happened to her. Every scenario was worse than the last.”
Yeah. I knew that particular spiral far too well, both from Gwen and from the cases that had crossed my desk.
To keep myself from pacing, I dropped into one of the chairs opposite her. “Did you hear from her parents? Or whoever’s listed as her emergency contact?”
“I called both numbers on her forms.” Astrid’s voice was flat. “No answer. Left messages. I didn’t spell it out in those, just asked them to call me and told them it was urgent. I couldn’t just say, ‘Oh, hey, your daughter is missing,’ in a voicemail. Especially not as her family is in India this summer visiting relatives.”
“Good call.”
“But I don’t know what I’m going to say when they call back.”
The computer on her desk chimed. A single bright ding that cut through the low mechanical hum of the building.
