Page 23 of Hunted in the Silence

“I’ll be there at two.”

He nodded. Neither of them moved immediately, and the pause was thick with tension that neither of them were willing to put a name to.

“What you did in there,” he said, keeping his eyes on the house. “With her. The way you—” He stopped, reorganized. “She needed to know you understood it from the inside. She needed that more than she needed anything I could give her. And you gave it to her without making it about yourself. That’s a harder thing than it sounds.”

Brynn was quiet for a moment. “She reminded me of my own grandmother,” she said. “My grandmother raised me too. She died while I was still in that life.” A pause, clean-edged. “She never knew I was still alive. I’ve thought about that a lot over the years. What it must have done to her. Whether she knew.”

Cole looked at her. The morning light was on the side of her face, catching the brown of her hair where it crossed her cheek, and her expression was the open, unguarded one that appeared sometimes when she wasn’t actively managing herself.

He wanted to say something that was equal to what she’d just given him. He didn’t have it. So he said the only true thing he had to offer. “She would have been proud of who you became.”

Brynn looked at him for a long moment. Something moved through her expression, too quick and too complex to read entirely.

“Go get that phone to the lab,” she said quietly.

He nodded, and without allowing the twinge of disappointment to take root, he went.

The drive to the county forensics lab took forty minutes, and he spent most of it on the phone with Olivia, walking her through the Ruth Marsh visit and the phone and the timeline of Caitlin’s recruitment. Olivia listened, asked a few questions, and by the end of the call had already filed a request to expedite the phone extraction and reached out to the Chicago field office contact to flag the potential new identifying information.

“How did Holt do with the grandmother?” Olivia asked.

“Better than I did.”

“Mm.” A pause. “I’m not surprised.” Another pause that he knew was leading where he didn’t want it to go. “She coming in this afternoon?”

“Two o’clock.”

“Good. I want to walk her through the Barton financial structure. There are some things in the accounting patterns I want her instincts on.” She grew quiet, thinking. “Also, I made her a copy of the updated geographic map and she should have it.”

Cole glanced at the road. “Since when are you and Brynn working directly?”

“Since I called her yesterday to clarify a point about Devlin’s rotation methodology and she answered some questions I’d been stuck on for two days in a matter of minutes.” Olivia’s voice was entirely professional and entirely aware of the implications. “She’s a resource, Cole. I’m using the resource.”

“I know she’s a resource,” he said a bit too defensively.

“Yes,” Olivia said. “You do.” And then she moved on to the next item before he could respond to whatever that meant.

He dropped the phone at the lab at ten forty-five. The forensics tech told him the initial extraction would take two to three hours for a basic device. Cole told him to make it two and left his cell number.

Then he drove back to the field office and stood at the whiteboard for a while.

The board had changed since this morning because he’d added to it before he left to pick up Brynn. Caitlin Marsh’s name was on it now, connected by a line to the Meridian point and another to the Mario Teller card. Tyler Ames had a card. The entry-level recruiter Tyler had described had a card with a physical description and a question mark. The phone had a card now too, fresh ink, sitting unconnected at the edge of the board waiting for what the lab was going to give him.

He thought about the board in Brynn’s office, the one she’d built alone over two years with no authority and no guarantee. He thought about how it and this one were beginning to converge, the same picture coming into focus from two different directions. He thought about the moment that he’d come to that realization, sitting across her conference table Wednesday night while she walked him through the Barton Industrial cross-reference patiently, as if she’d been waiting for someone like him to come along and see it.

He thought about whether he was the right person for this. He thought about whether he was complicating the case by avoiding whatever this was happening between him and Brynn that was demanding an increasingly effortful focus to the point it was as if he were pushing water uphill with both hands.

He wrote Entry-level recruiter: identify on the board under the question mark and underlined it twice.

His phone buzzed. A text from the lab tech, which was either very good news or a question about the chain of custody form.

It was very good news.

Device older model, lighter encryption. Full extraction complete. Seventeen contacts, 43 messages, 6 days of call log. Sending secure link now.

Cole had the link open on his laptop before he’d finished reading the message. The contacts came up first, a numbered list. He scanned them. Eleven had no label, just numbers. Five had first names only. One was labeled simply M.

He stared at M.