Page 40 of Hunted in the Silence

“He’ll come at us harder,” Cole said with an understanding nod.

“He’ll come at the thing that represents the greatest threat to his sense of control.” Silas held his gaze. “Right now, that’s Brynn Holt. Not the investigation. Not the FBI. Her. She got away from him. She built a life. She’s been working against him for years in his own territory and he hasn’t been able to stop it. That is the wound that doesn’t close for a man like this.”

Cole was quiet, mulling over the gravity of his words.

“She’s right that he’ll come for her,” Silas continued. “She’s been right about him all along, I expect, because she spent three years studying him up close and she’s been thinking about him for years since. Her read on him is better than anything I can build from a file.” He picked up his coffee. “What I can add is the timing. He won’t wait. The FBI presence in his territory, the surveillance on his buildings, Webb being spotted near the center? He knows the net is closing. A man who was going to run would already be gone. He’s still here. That means he’s likely decided to come after her before he loses the chance.”

“How soon?”

“Today or tomorrow,” Silas said. “I’d lean toward today, because tomorrow you go into that building and that changes everything. He may not know the when, but he feels it coming, and he needs to move before that happens or not at all.” He looked at Cole steadily. “Where is she right now?”

“Safe house on the east side. She’s coming here at noon.”

“Good.” Silas paused. “When she gets here, I’d like to talk to her separately. There are things she knows about how he thinks in a crisis that I want to hear directly from her. Not from the files, not secondhand.”

Cole nodded grimly. “I’ll set it up.”

Silas nodded and looked back at the board. “Tell me about tomorrow. The full plan.”

Cole walked him through it. The Harlan building, the entry sequence, Dax on the rear padlock, the south room. Silas listened and asked his questions, all of them pointed at the gaps Cole had already been losing sleep over. What happened if the count inside was higher than estimated. What happened if Devlin himself was in the building rather than at an extraction point. What happened if the girls inside panicked during entry and moved toward the wrong door.

The second question he didn’t have a clean answer for and he said so.

“If Devlin is in that building tomorrow,” Silas said, “he won’t give up easily. He’ll see it as the final test of the system he’s built. Whether it holds, whether he’s as in control as he’s always believed.” He was quiet for a moment. “He’ll use the girls as leverage if he thinks it’ll work. You need to be prepared for that.”

Cole looked at the board. At the photograph of Caitlin Marsh from the surveillance footage, the girl in the dark jacket at the loading dock. At the three other photographs below it, girls from Brynn’s intake files whose names were in the record now.

“We’re prepared for it,” he said.

“Make sure Brynn is too,” Silas said. “Not because she can’t handle it. Because she needs to hear it directly and have time to sit with it before she’s in the building.”

***

Brynn arrived at noon exactly.

Cole watched her come through the door and, as usual, couldn’t take his eyes off her. At least he’d stopped apologizing to himself for it. She was in a dark coat with her hair down, a bag with the safe house’s logo on her shoulder, and she looked like she’d finally gotten some rest. Her eyes moved over the room when she came in, registered Silas at the desk, and held for a fraction of a second before she crossed to them.

Silas stood. He was a few inches taller than Cole, and when he stood, he was an even more imposing figure than he was sitting down. He extended his hand.

“Silas Kane,” he said. “I’ve been looking forward to talking with you.”

Brynn shook his hand and looked at him up and down, taking his measure like she did with everyone new. Whatever she found in Silas Kane’s pale eyes seemed to satisfy her. “Same,” she said. “I’ve read the profile you wrote on the Wellington case.”

Something shifted in Silas’s expression, a very small, almost imperceptible movement. “That profile had a flaw in the third section.”

“The victimology overlap,” Brynn said with a knowing nod. “I noticed. But the behavioral architecture in the first section was the most accurate read of a methodical predator I’ve seen in print.”

Silas stared at her for a moment. “You would have caught that faster than I did,” he said. Not as a compliment exactly, just a matter of fact.

“Maybe,” Brynn said. “Different vantage point.”

Cole studied the pair, realizing how similar they were. He’d seen Silas study someone before. But it wasn’t often he had the tables turned on him so effectively.

“I’d like to talk with you,” Silas told Brynn. “About Devlin. I’ve read the file, but I want your personal take on how he responds under pressure.”

“Okay.” She glanced at Cole. He gestured for them to follow him to the interview room at the back, and once she and Silas went in, Cole closed the door and left them to it.

Olivia looked at him from across the room. “She’s been holding back from us, but she’s going to tell him everything.”