The night he’d stormed into the station after the secondraid, gotten in Vance’s face, demanded to know who’d been in the cabin. I’d watched that and calculated whether it was a territorial cop or a compromised one.
Neither. He’d been frantic to know if his niece had been inside, and nobody in the room had understood the question he was actually asking.
The hostility toward Donovan and me from day one. Not resentment of outsiders. Fear that outside investigators would restrict his access to operations, to the drug locations he was systematically working through, to the only tool he had for finding a girl who’d vanished into a world that would chew her up and not bother spitting her out.
Even Jace’s financial deep dive had told a story I’d read wrong. Clean bank statements, no unexplained deposits, a charity record that outpaced everyone else in the department. A man who gave away money because he knew what it was like to watch someone you loved have nothing.
He wasn’t dirty. He wasdesperate. And there was a world of difference between the two.
I looked at Mia. She was watching me with more awareness now, her eyes tracking my face, my hands.
Briggson turned back to Mia. “Have you eaten?” He nodded toward the fast-food bag on the dresser. “You need to eat something.”
“I tried.” She shook her head. “My stomach won’t stop.”
“Okay. That’s okay. We’ll get you something else later. Something easier for your system.” He smoothed the tangled hair back from her face. “You’re safe now. You hear me? You’re safe.”
She cried first. Messy, heaving sobs that she tried to muffle against Briggson’s shoulder. She said she’d messed up. She said her mom was never going to forgive her. Briggson held her and told her that wasn’t true, that her mom hadbeen searching for her every single day, that nobody was angry. She cried harder when he said that.
Then the rest came. She talked to Briggson, not to me, her eyes on his face like he was the only solid thing in the room. Four months of it poured out in pieces. Staying with people she barely knew, moving every few days, getting pulled deeper into the orbit of people who dealt Drift and used Drift and disappeared when the heat came.
Doing things to get Drift she obviously was ashamed to mention.
Her voice went flat, and her eyes dropped to the floor. She couldn’t bring herself to say the specifics out loud, but Briggson and I both knew what she meant.
I had to give the other man credit. He didn’t push through those silences. He just held her and waited for the words to come back. Although even when they did, half of what she said ran together—names that might have been first names or nicknames or nothing at all, places described by furniture or random odd details rather than by address.
When the words finally slowed, Briggson pulled back enough to look at her face. “Does anyone know you’re here? Is anyone looking for you? Do you owe anybody money who might come for you?”
Mia shook her head. Then nodded. Then shook it again. “I don’t…no. I just left. Because they were…” She trailed off, her fingers working the hoodie strings. “Everyone was being weird. Packing. Moving stuff. Everybody was yelling about something, and then everyone started…” She lost the thread, staring at the wall behind me. “They were scared. I could tell because they kept talking like I wasn’t even there. Like it didn’t matter what I heard.”
“Scared of what?” Briggson kept his voice soft.
“Something big. I kept hearing…” She rubbed her eyes hard with the heels of her hands. “A move. A big move. People kept saying it. Everybody was freaking out. That was freaking me out.”
She rubbed her eyes.
“I didn’t want to be there anymore. It was scary. Everybody was yelling, running around. Packing stuff up. Said it was going tonight. The green door. Midnight. The green door. It was scary.” Her voice had dropped to almost nothing. “So I walked here. I think. I don’t remember all of it.”
Briggson glanced at me. I’d caught it too. Buried under all the rambling, had she just said what we thought she had?
“Mia,” Briggson said. “This is important. Are you saying they were packing up the drugs?”
She nodded way too enthusiastically. “Yes. It had to go tonight. Midnight. Everything goes to the green door.”
“What green door?” I asked. “Do you know?” Was the syndicate doing a big move-out of their product?
She blinked at me. Slow, unfocused. “A warehouse. The one with the green door. Off the…” She waved vaguely. “The old highway. The one that goes past the gas station that’s closed.”
Briggson nodded. Evidently, that was a real location.
“Tonight, honey?” Briggson asked. “You think they’re moving everything tonight at midnight?”
“That’s what they said. They weren’t talking to me. They told me I either had to blow them or get out. So I got out. But that’s what they said.”
Holy shit. We had both a time and a location. Because the dealers had seen a young girl as nothing more than furniture and felt free to talk around her.
Pure shit luck that her uncle happened to be a cop.
