Page 41 of Hidden

"They’re patient," Declan says.

"Extremely. But finding where they will go next is impossible. They’re hitting all the states, and random cities.” I look at the map with the lights on where girls have been going missing already.

I pull up the geographic overlay and turn my second monitor outward slightly so they can both see it from where they are. Seven cities plotted. The distances between them are mapped. No cluster, no corridor, nothing that says these places were chosen for proximity or convenience.

"There's no pattern in the geography," I say. "Phoenix, Denver, Austin, Nashville, Portland, Charlotte, Minneapolis. Random distribution across six time zones."

Mason turns his head to look at the screen. "Too random?"

"That's what I think."

"Someone is choosing to avoid a pattern, and the police pinpointing anything to look into it,” Declan adds.

"Someone who knows that patterns are what get you caught." I tag the overlay and add a note. Geographic randomness appears deliberate, suggesting an awareness of investigative methodology. And cross-reference it against the camera gap data. "These aren't crimes of opportunity. Every single one of these was planned. It seems like the girls were chosen before, then it has been executed with enough care that fourteen months in, and seven separate jurisdictions haven't connected them."

"But Cain did," Declan says.

We all sit with that for a moment. Cain doesn't explain how he finds things and we’ve learned not to ask.

Mason picks up the Nashville file: Renee Park, twenty-one, nursing student, last seen leaving a restaurant shift. He's had it for the last hour, and I've watched him read it three times, which means something in it keeps pulling him back. "The exit," he says.

"A side street with no camera on that exit."

"Was there ever a camera on that exit?"

I pull the location data. Cross-check against the restaurant's own records, which I accessed through their management software two days ago via a gap in their point-of-sale system. "Originally yes, but it was removed during a renovation eight months before she disappeared."

Mason looks up at me. "Eight months?"

"Eight months."

"So, whoever took her either knew the renovation history or…"

"Or checked before they chose her." I'm already making the note, pulling the thread, connecting it to the Phoenix car park, which had a blind spot created by a new building that went up six months before Amber Reyes disappeared. "Two locations. Two gaps that were created by construction or renovation before the girls were taken. They are not natural architectural blind spots; they were changes to the environment that someone factored in."

Declan is writing fast now, his pen moving in the way it does when something is forming in his mind. "They're watching the locations evolve," he says. "They're not finding existing gaps. They're waiting for gaps to appear."

The room goes quiet.

That's it. That's the thing I've been circling for since I got the file without quite landing on it, the face in the static. Hearing Declan say it out loud makes it lock into place with the satisfaction of a correct answer that cost something to find.

I pull up the timeline overlay. Then I map the construction and renovation dates against the disappearance dates for each city. It takes eleven minutes. When it’s finished, I turn both monitors fully outward.

"Look at the gap between each environmental change and each disappearance," I say.

Mason leans forward, Declan stands up from the table and comes around to see it properly.

There’s a gap of three to five months every time. The gap is created, whether by a new construction, camera removal, renovation, or maintenance schedule, and then three to five months later, a girl disappears from that location.

There are three to five months of watching, waiting, and planning.

"That's not one person," Mason says quietly.

"No," I agree. "One person doesn't have the bandwidth to watch seven different cities simultaneously."

"So, we're looking at…"

"An operation," Declan says. The word lands flat and heavy.