I think about her sayingI've been watching you too, clean and precise, like it was the most ordinary thing.
The ceiling fan turns.
Sleep doesn't come for a long time.
Chapter 7
Jesslyn
I've been through the bayou frames a dozen times. I know them the way I know any sequence I've worked obsessively: by feel, by the shape of what's in each one, and by the specific quality of the light and the angle of every figure in the cargo glow.
I know where Delacroix stands. I know the second figure farther back, the one I showed Judge two nights ago. I know the girls being loaded, the men working, the containers catching the light. I've been through all of it until the frames run behind my eyes when I'm not looking at them.
I find it on pass thirteen.
Not a person. A truck.
In the later frames, the ones I shot in the thirty seconds between understanding what I was seeing and running, when my hand was moving out of habit and my brain was already three steps ahead, there's a truck at the edge of the tree line. Partially hidden in the cypress, pulled off whatever track runs behind the clearing. I missed it on every previous pass because I was looking at the people, the way you look at faces before you look at the room they're in.
It's a dark pickup, nothing distinctive about the body, but the front grille is visible in two frames and there's a sticker on the rear window that my lens caught at the right angle. It’s oval, white, just the kind of thing you see on the back of vehicles all over the South. A business name. Letters I can make out if I zoom in far enough.
I zoom in.
The image degrades before I can read all of it, but I get enough.
Morata Brothers Salvage. Magnolia Bend, MS.
My hands go still on the trackpad.
Morata. The same name as one of the missing girls. The same name as the prospect downstairs who sits at the breakfast table every morning with his coffee going cold.
I pick up my laptop and go find Judge.
He's in the gun room.
He looks up when I come in, and I turn the laptop toward him without saying anything first because the image says it better than I can. He takes it from me and holds it close to the work light, and I watch his face in the time it takes him to look.
Three seconds. Then something closes behind his eyes.
"The sticker," I say. "Morata Brothers Salvage. Is that?—"
"Grudge’'s family business." His voice is flat. Completely controlled. "His father and uncle run it. Mostly his uncle. They have for thirty years."
"The truck is at the tree line in two frames. Whoever drove it there was watching the operation or was part of it."
He looks at the image for a long time. I watch him process it the way he processes everything: completely, internally, without any of it reaching the surface until he's ready.
"Grudge doesn't know," he says. "I'd stake my life on it."
"I believe you." I do. I've watched Grudge at that breakfast table every morning since I arrived, the specific quality of hisgrief, the way it sits on him like something he carries in his actual body. That's not performance. "But someone in his family does."
Judge is quiet.
"His father," he says finally. "Or his uncle. One of them was there."
"Which means whoever took Maria, whoever is running this route, has a connection to the Morata family. And either Grudge's father or uncle is involved. Willingly or not."
"Or both."
