My eyebrows shot up. Shade was not known for her laughter. “She laughed? Like out loud?”
“For a whole three seconds,” Wren confirmed. “We had a good time. It was relaxing.”
“Dude,” Maddox said, shaking his head at Wren, “it was fifty degrees and drizzling the whole time you were in themountains. I checked the weather. I don’t get how hiking up a mountain all day carrying a pack and then camping in the rain is relaxing.”
Wren sent him a sneer that shouted younger sister. “That’s because you consider it camping if your sheets have less than a five-hundred-thread-count.”
“Exactly,” Maddox said. “I can sleep anywhere, but when I have the option, I appreciate civilization. Like a normal human.”
“Nothing about you is normal,” Wren teased. Turning to me, she said, “I went through the bin you brought back from the post office.”
Maddox and I followed her to the cubicle where she’d left the mail bin. Inside, the junk mail was neatly stacked, the envelope Silas had left on the top.
“Other than the envelope, there’s nothing in here,” she said. “We’ll save everything just in case, but I’m 99.9 percent confident the letter was the only thing he needed you to see. And he had to know you were going to find it. Soon.”
“Because,” Maddox added, “the postmistress told you she’d been about to contact you to re-up the rental fee, so you would have known the box existed within a few weeks, even if you hadn’t gone down there.”
“He must want you to track down the clue,” Wren said.
She picked up the envelope and pulled out the sheet of paper inside. “It says internal, missing persons. But these numbers, which look to me like they could be a birth date, and these letters, which could be part of a name, don’t exist in any of our missing persons files. They don’t exist, as far as I can tell, in any of our case files from Creed Global at all.”
“Well, fuck,” I said. “I guess it was too much to hope it would be easy.”
“Right?” Wren said, lifting an eyebrow. She tucked back a piece of blonde hair that had slipped from her stubby ponytail. “I searched every way I could think. Nothing.”
“I wonder,” I said, looking at the letters in the code. “Delsh. I think we can agree that’s not a name.”
“Part of a name, maybe,” Maddox said. “But yeah, it’s nothing on its own.”
“I wonder what—” Wren asked, squinting down at the paper.
I tapped the letters. “S Has in Shaw?”
“Doesn’t say Emily orM,” Wren said. “No. And theShdoesn’t mean Shaw necessarily. It’s just— We have a case, someone linked to Silas, with a last name that starts withSh, and then this code. It could be related. It’d be easier to know if we could figure out what the numbers mean.”
“True,” I said. “I don’t understand why Silas would make it this difficult.”
“He disappeared,” Maddox said, rolling his neck as if aggravated. “He’s making everything difficult.”
“You don’t know that,” Wren snapped. “Silas has never—” She cut off as I jolted and craned my neck to see if Sylvie was coming back.
That was the second time Wren had said Silas’s name too loudly.
“What?” she asked, and then, as if she put the pieces together, she scowled up at me. “Eli, have you not told her?”
“Told who what?” I asked, sounding exasperated in the hopes that it would stop this line of questioning. I felt squirrely enough on my own about not coming clean to Sylvie. I didn’t need to hear it from my team.
Wren shook her head. “It’s going to bite you in the ass. You know that, right?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied.
Maddox cleared his throat, sounding more like he was choking off a laugh, and rolled his eyes. He crossed his beefy arms over his chest and pinned me with a dark look. “Please. You’re not fooling anybody.”
“I’m not trying to,” I said, shoving my hands in my pockets, going for innocent when I knew I was anything but.
“Right,” Wren said. “Are you going to pretend you guys are using both bedrooms in that safe house?”
“What makes you think we’re not?” I asked, casting my thoughts back. We hadn’t done anything overt. She’d put her head on my shoulder yesterday, but so had Wren in the past, and I wasn’t fucking her. I cringed inside at the thought. Wren was like my sister. Sylvie was very much not.
