Page 33 of Hunted in the Silence

Brynn moved through it like she’d been walking this corridor her whole life, which he guessed she had. She pointed things out in a low voice as they went, not stopping, not looking directly at what she was referencing. The camera mounted on the corner of a freight building that covered the north approach to Harlan. The gap in the fence line on the west side that an approach team could use to reach the rear of the building without crossing the main sightline. The angle of the nearest working streetlight and the shadow it threw across the side entrance at this hour.

Cole listened and watched and updated the map he was building in his head, and distantly he thought she would have made a great detective.

“The camera,” he said quietly. “Blackridge PD or private?”

“Private. The freight company put it up two years ago after a break-in. It covers their property, not the street.” She didn’t look at it. “But the angle catches the northwest corner of the Harlan lot. If Devlin’s people are monitoring city cameras, they won’t see us. If they’re monitoring that one, they will.”

“We assume they’re monitoring it.”

“We assume they’re monitoring everything that can be monitored,” she stated the obvious. “That’s always been his approach. Information control is their first line of defense.”

They reached the south end of the block and turned without discussion, looping back on the opposite side of the street. From this angle, the Harlan building’s rear loading area was visible, the padlock on the outside of the door exactly where Finn Steele’s photographs had shown it. The sight lines from the rear were better than Cole had expected. A team approaching from the south along the fence line would have cover for most of the approach and a clean final fifteen yards to the door.

Fifteen yards was longer than ideal when the variable was unknown.

“How many people do you think are inside right now?” he wondered.

Brynn was quiet for a moment, her eyes moving over the building. “Two handlers minimum, based on what Mia described. Possibly three. A rotation schedule, so not all of them on at once.” She paused. “The girls. Caitlin came in four days ago. I don’t know if she’s alone or with others. Devlin doesn’t usually hold single girls in a fixed location. Too much overhead for one asset.” The word came out flat and deliberate, informational so to distance herself from the reality of it, which always made Cole think of the girl she was and what she must have endured. It made a growing part inside him seethe with anger toward a man he hadn’t yet met but couldn’t wait to get his hands on. “I’d estimate between two and five girls currently inside.”

Cole looked at the building. Ordinary from the outside. A warehouse all the rest on this street.

“After Thursday,” he said, “when they would have moved whoever’s inside, does Devlin typically replenish the location quickly or leave it dark for a period?”

“Dark for two to three weeks. Then a new cycle.” She turned away from the building, and they continued walking. “He runs his locations the way you’d run any facility. Maintenance periods, inspections, upgrades. He takes care of his infrastructure.”

The word infrastructure was an unsettling way to describe what was going on, but Cole had grown used to the weight of everything in this line of work.

By six forty-five they had completed two full passes of the warehouse district, and Brynn had given him enough to finalize the approach plan. They stopped at the corner where he’d found her, the city coming alive around them, a coffee cart two blocks north doing its first business of the day.

“Coffee,” Cole said with a jerk of his chin.

Brynn looked at the cart and a soft smile emerged. “Yes.”

They walked to it and stood in the thin line that had formed and ordered when they reached the front, and the man behind the cart handed them two cups with barely a glance. Cole paid before Brynn could. She looked at him briefly over the rim of the cup as she took her first sip, something in her expression that was neither a thank you nor an objection but landed somewhere in between.

“How did you sleep?” he asked.

“Better than my apartment,” she said. “The neighborhood is quieter.”

He’d driven past her apartment building at eleven-thirty last night, after she’d gone to her colleague’s place, just to see the street. The car she’d described was gone. That meant nothing. Could mean the owner had simply gone home for the night, could mean something else. He’d noted the building number and the street layout and the sight lines from the nearest intersections as well. One could never be too thorough.

“We should talk about Thursday,” she said. “After the girls are out.”

“I know.”

“You agreed I’d stay in the vehicle.”

“I know what I agreed to.” He looked at her over his own cup. “And I know we need to go over it again.”

She held his gaze. The morning light was coming up now, thin and pale, and it caught the brown of her eyes in a way that made them warmer than the cold air around them. “The first thing those girls are going to hear when that door comes open is federal agents shouting commands. There’s no getting around that. But it’s also going to be terrifying for them and that will make the rest of it harder than it needs to be.” She paused. “I need to be inside the building within two minutes of the entry team. Not leading. Not getting in the way. But there.”

Cole thought about it for a beat, which was all it took to come to the conclusion he’d been running through his head all week. “You stay back until the space is secure. You don’t move until I tell you it’s clear. And you wear a vest.”

Brynn looked at him, a flicker of satisfaction in her eyes. “Agreed.”

“All three.”

“All three,” she said with a nod. “Cole. I know how to follow directions. I’ve done it before.”