Page 29 of Hunted in the Silence

Chapter 10

Four days before Thursday, Brynn stopped sleeping more than three hours at a stretch.

She knew the pattern. Had lived it enough times to recognize the way her body responded to being near Devlin the way a compass responded to magnetic north, with an involuntary and unwanted pull that had nothing to do with choice. He was close. She couldn’t see him and couldn’t prove it and had no physical evidence of it, but she had spent three years learning to read the feel of a space he occupied, and the atmosphere of Blackridge had changed in the past week in ways she felt before she could name them.

Small things. A car she didn’t recognize parked on her street two mornings in a row. A phone call to the center that disconnected without a message. The low and constant hum of alertness that lived in her chest now, a frequency her nervous system had been tuned to since she was fourteen years old.

She mentioned none of this to Cole.

She told herself it was because she had no evidence, nothing that would hold up as more than anxiety, and she wasn’t willing to redirect investigative resources based on a feeling. That was mostly true. The rest of it, the part she didn’t look at, was that saying it out loud would make it real in a way she wasn’t ready for.

Instead, she worked. She refined the Barton Industrial timeline and built a cleaner version of the alternating schedule that accounted for the Harlan property. She reviewed every intake interview she’d conducted in the past two years and pulled three additional cases she hadn’t previously connected to Devlin’s network, girls who’d come through the center with details that hadn’t seemed significant until she had the fuller picture. She added them to the board. She drank too much coffee and not enough water and forgot to eat lunch two days in a row, which she only noticed when she stood up too fast and had to put a hand on the desk.

She called her therapist on Wednesday morning. Not in crisis. Just to check in, to say out loud to someone she trusted that she was managing and that it was taking a toll and that she was aware of that.

Her therapist said, “You’re not managing this alone, though. You have people around you on this case.”

“Yes,” Brynn said.

“And that’s different from before.”

It was different from before. She sat with that after she hung up, the unfamiliar reality of not being the only one holding the weight of it. Cole at her whiteboard. Cole across her conference table at seven-thirty at night. Cole on the phone at ten p.m. walking through a detail that could have waited until morning but neither of them had let it wait.

Different from before.

She wasn’t sure yet what to do with that.

***

Wednesday evening, Cole called at six and asked if she could come to the field office. Olivia had something on the Harlan property financials that they wanted her eyes on, and Finn Steele had surveillance photographs from two nights patrolling the corridor that Brynn might be able to interpret better than either of them.

She drove over in the dark, the cold weather sharp enough now that her breath showed in the air between her car and the front door.

Olivia was at her desk with several screens open, her reading glasses pushed up on top of her head, and if Brynn had to guess, she’d been sitting there for hours. She looked up when Brynn came and gave her a single sharp nod and kept working.

Cole was at the whiteboard. He’d added to it since the last time she’d seen it, the picture denser now, more connections between the pieces. He had his back to the door and turned when she came in, and for one unguarded second, something crossed his face that she caught the edge of, and then it was gone. But she’d caught just enough for it to create a brief drop in her stomach, a flutter of something that she refused to acknowledge.

“Finn’s photographs,” he said, moving straight to business, which she was grateful for. He spread a series of surveillance prints across the empty desk beside the board.

She came to stand beside him and looked at them.

Finn Steele was good. The photographs were taken from a distance but with a decent telephoto, and they captured the front and side access points of the Harlan property over two. Three vehicles in and out over forty-eight hours. Two men she didn’t recognize from the front shots. And one, caught at an angle coming out of the side entrance on the second night, whose profile stopped her cold.

She put her finger on the photograph. “This man.”

Cole was close enough beside her that she was aware of the warmth of him in the cold office. He looked at where she was pointing. “You recognize him?”

“His name is Garrett Webb. He recruited two of my girls.” She kept her voice even. “He’s younger than Teller, lower level. He would have been the one who approached Caitlin through Tyler Ames.” She moved her finger to the side entrance behind him in the photograph. “And he went in this way, not the front. Which means the front is not the main entrance. The side access is.”

Olivia was already typing.

Cole looked at the photograph and then at Brynn, and she was still close enough to him that when she turned her head to say something to Olivia their faces were nearer than she’d registered, the distance between them sparking something she felt before she could fully process it. She took a half-step back.

A muscle ticked in Cole’s jaw, and he looked back at the photograph.

“Webb gives us the connection from Tyler Ames up through Teller,” he said. “That’s three levels of the recruitment chain documented with identifiable faces.” He pulled out his phone and photographed the surveillance print. “Olivia, can we run Webb against the database tonight?”

“Already running,” Olivia said without looking up.