9
Ruby found him at the lake.
She'd spent the afternoon calling everyone she could think of, working through Fiona's contacts one by one, getting the same answer from each of them. Haven't seen her. Haven't heard from her. Try her dad. She'd already tried her dad. She'd tried the Sheriff's Office. She'd tried Ethan, who sounded worried in a way that made her more worried, because Ethan was the type to pretend everything was fine even when it wasn't, and he wasn't pretending.
The last thing Fiona had told her was the modeling shoot. Strutz Agency. A photographer named Garrett Finch. Ruby had found his Instagram in about thirty seconds, a feed full of moody portraits and landscape shots tagged around the High Peaks region, and his most recent story, posted two hours ago, showed a tripod set up beside the lake with the caption "golden hour magic." She recognized the shoreline. Everyone who lived here would.
She parked on the access road and walked down toward the water. The evening light was low and warm, filtering through the pines and laying a copper sheen across the surface. Garrett wasabout fifty yards out along the bank, crouched behind a camera on a tripod, shooting a girl who stood ankle-deep in the shallows with her arms out and her head tilted back. The girl was young. Younger than Ruby. She was wearing a summer dress that clung to her legs where the water had soaked through it, and she was smiling the way people smile when someone is watching them and they want to be watched.
"Garrett Finch," Ruby called out.
He didn't look up. He was adjusting something on the camera, his eye pressed to the viewfinder.
"Garrett."
He straightened and turned. He was mid-thirties, dark hair pushed back, stubble that seemed deliberate. Good-looking in the way that men who work around beautiful women learn to be, the grooming and the posture and the eye contact all calibrated to put young girls at ease.
"Do I know you?" he asked.
"Where's Fiona?"
His expression shifted. Not guilt. Confusion, or a very good imitation of it. "Who?"
"Fiona Spence. She was supposed to come to you for a shoot last night. She never came home. She's not answering her phone. No one has heard from her."
Garrett glanced back at the girl in the shallows, who had lowered her arms and was watching them. He held up a hand to her. "Give me a minute." Then he walked toward Ruby, away from the shoreline, lowering his voice as he got closer.
"Look, I don't know what you're talking about. Fiona didn't show last night. I waited for her and she never turned up. I figured she changed her mind. It happens."
"Bullshit."
"Excuse me?"
"She was excited about that shoot. She talked about it all day. She left to drive to see you and nobody has seen her since. So I'll ask you again. Where is she?"
His face hardened. The easy charm dropped away and what was underneath it was irritation, sharp and immediate, from a man who wasn’t used to being challenged by a girl half his age.
"I told you. She didn't show. I don't know where she is. And if you don't leave, I'm calling the cops."
Ruby held his gaze. Then she glanced past him at the girl standing in the shallows, watching them. The girl who appeared older in the golden light and the wet dress but who Ruby had seen around town, at the grocery store, at the school pickup line last fall. She was sixteen at most.
"Go on," Ruby said. "Call them. I'm sure they'd love to know about your underage photoshoots."
She looked at the girl again, long enough to make the point, then back at Garrett. His face had gone still. Not angry anymore. Something colder.
Ruby turned and walked back up the bank toward her car. Her hands were shaking but she kept them at her sides and didn't look back. She got in, closed the door, started the engine, and sat there for a minute watching the lake through the windshield.
Fiona had never made it to the shoot.
Which meant she'd disappeared somewhere between the gas station and Elizabethtown, on a stretch of road that ran through twenty miles of nothing.
Noah paced back and forth,contemplating whether to make the call. He'd met with a former pit boss from Ashford RoyaleCasino earlier that day, a meeting O'Connell had set up. The man refused to be a witness but was willing to answer questions, and what he described painted a clear picture of the laundering operation running through the casino. The one area he wouldn't touch was whether it involved the Sinaloa Cartel. O'Connell had suggested Noah just come straight out with it and ask Natalie directly. He'd considered it multiple times but they had a good thing going. Or maybe he was just deceiving himself.
“Screw it.”
Noah dialed Natalie's number and leaned against the kitchen counter. She picked up on the third ring.
"Hey,” she said in a chipper voice.
