Page 111 of Forever Gone

One hand settled on his shoulder.

Her perfume reached him, light and sweet, like a breeze on an autumn day. Cheryl rubbed his shoulder once, the touch brief and gentle.

“I know, Connor,” she said. “I know.”

Then she stepped away.

A smile remained as she left the room, but it held less hope than before.

Connor listened to her footsteps move down the corridor.

Did she know?

Maybe she understood more than he had said. Maybe everyone in the station had seen the pain he carried since the marriage ended. It had left him sitting on the night shift after working all day, trying to hold the county together one thread at a time because going home offered nothing he wanted to find.

The computer waited.

Connor picked up the fork and ate a piece of pie while opening the next directory.

The apples were soft, the crust still crisp at the edges. Cheryl had warmed it slightly before bringing it in. That small kindness made him feel worse.

A folder labeled COMMUNITIES contained more than two hundred closed groups covered by the order. Some dealt with addiction, grief, marriage, workplace complaints, and medical conditions. Others used vague titles that revealed nothing.

He opened the largest export.

Posts appeared in chronological order, each attached to a username and timestamp. There were thousands. Some were a sentence long. Others filled pages. The conversations covered affairs, abuse, resentment, money, fear, and private fantasies people would never attach to their legal names.

Connor searched for Elmsview.

Four results appeared; none tied to the victims.

Harlan produced thirty-seven, most referring to the county or places outside Kentucky.

He tried Eagleton, Loyall, school names, employer names, street names, and phrases from the victim interviews. Each search returned either nothing or too many irrelevant results.

The warrant production had given him access to the words.

It had not given him a reliable way to identify who had written them.

Connor opened the legal notice again.

HearthSpace retained account-activity timestamps longer than source IP addresses. The latter had already been overwritten, leaving Connor with correlation rather than identification.

He pushed back from the desk.

“How the hell am I going to figure out which ones belong to the victims?”

The murder board offered no answer.

Karen’s phone had not been recovered, and the smashed word processor contained no useful account data. Ruth’s phone was missing as well; the laptop from her study was still being examined. Linda’s phone had not been found with the body, and Phil did not know her passwords. Perhaps Selena or Kelly would see a route Connor had missed.

The thought irritated him.

Selena understood databases, warrants, and digital records better than he did. Kelly probably did, too. Connor had spent his career reading people in rooms, tracing local grudges, and noticing when a familiar story changed by one detail. Thousands of anonymous posts turned those instincts into guesswork.

He checked his watch.

6:53.