“That, too.”
We reached the top of the dock. I stopped, turning to look back toward the Sea Breeze. Willie had returned to the overturned bucket, elbows braced on his knees, his head bowed like he was trying to physically hold himself together. Not exactly an ideal witness under the best of circumstances.
I continued turning the information over in my head. “How likely is it that Priya was attacked and didn’t say anything to her friends or adviser?”
Rios considered the question. “Without knowing her? Hard to say. Some women keep quiet. Or they need time. Or they don’t want to relive it. If she was the victim… yeah. Kidnapping would be a hell of an escalation.”
“Is it an escalation? Or did he simply manage to finish what he started?”
“Fair point. If it wasn’t Priya, then we’ve got at least two women of similar build and physical profile being targeted in the same area in under a week.” A muscle in his jaw ticked. “Either way, somebody’s hunting in that alley.”
I blew out a long breath. “Terrifying how easily that sentence comes out of your mouth.”
“Wish it wasn’t,” he said quietly. “But yeah.”
We started toward the parking lot. He matched my pace without comment.
“Do you think he’ll call tomorrow?” I asked.
“I think he wants to do one thing right,” Rios said. “We’ll see if that’s enough to get him there.”
I nodded. “Tomorrow, then.”
“Tomorrow.”
We walked in silence a few more steps before I said, “You want to go back inside Home Port?”
“Do you?” he countered.
I considered. The staff had been cooperative earlier. No one had hesitated; no one had seemed evasive. And after the chaos of last night’s shift, if anyone had witnessed an assault behind the building—even secondhand—they’d have mentioned it when we showed them Priya’s photo.
“I doubt we’ll get anything new,” I admitted. “If they’d heard about the mugging, they would’ve said so. And from the sound of it, Willie’s story never made it past the dockhands.”
“Agreed,” he said. “But we can take five minutes and look at the alley in daylight.”
Which made sense. Doing nothing didn’t sit well with either of us.
We cut between the buildings into the narrow stretch behind Home Port. The space smelled like sun-warmed asphalt and old beer—not exactly comforting, but not sinister either. A couple of dented dumpsters hunched against the fence, one with a lid propped open. Ordinary. Forgettable.
Except it wasn’t.
I’d looked at thousands of crime scene photos in my career—freeze-framed violence rendered into evidence. They were horrible, but they were… buffered. A degree removed. A thing you studied rather than inhabited. I’d gotten good at being objective about it in order to do my job.
But standing in the place where a woman had actually been attacked?
That felt different. And I couldn’t stop the image that flickered up, unbidden and sharp: Gwen backed against a wall just like this. Gwen fighting. Gwen losing. Not that this was what had happened to her, but it was all too easy to fall into imagining the worst with her face.
My throat tightened. I forced myself to look at the siding, at the dumpsters, at the narrow mouth of the alley. Focus on reality. On the victim still missing, not the one who’d been gone for more than a decade.
Rios dropped into that quiet, observant mode he had—the one that made him seem larger, steadier. “Somewhere here. Willie wasn’t precise, but… this general area.”
“Close quarters,” I murmured. “He wanted her trapped.”
Rios moved toward the wall, glancing back at me. An invitation, not a command. I stepped beside him. The boards were rough under my palm. I imagined a woman’s shoulder slamming against them, the scrape of old wood tearing skin. My stomach clenched.
“He had her pinned,” Rios said. “Arm across the chest.”
He lifted his forearm and braced it against the wall near my shoulder—near, not touching, not blocking. But close enough that his warmth bled into the air between us. My breath hitched.
