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“I need to rule out it’s Sloane’s blood.”

“It is Sloane’s blood. From the nosebleed.”

“I need to confirm that.”

Weariness crossed her face, old and worn through. Her jaw set.

“Fine.”

She handed it over. He bagged it himself and passed it off without looking away from her. The jacket would go to the lab. He already knew what they’d find, and he already knew that wasn’t the point—the point was the two hours between the mirror maze and her appearance in this lobby, which she had not yet explained, and the fact that Sloane had left a group of four women and followed her cousin and ended up unconscious with her head against a curb.

“How is she?”

The question came out quieter than everything else she’d said. She caught herself after, like she hadn’t meant to let it land that soft.

“She’s at the hospital,” he said. “Being looked after.”

The stillness that moved through her face wasn’t relief—not yet. Just someone waiting for more that wasn’t coming.

He moved on to the timeline.

She told him about a friend in Austin. Fired that afternoon from a management role she’d worked three years to earn. Rachel had sat in her car in the festival parking lot for two hours and talked her through it.

“Two hours,” he said.

“That’s not even close to our record.”

He wrote that down too.

“Can I see your phone?”

“You need a warrant for that.”

“You could just show me the call log. The duration.”

She looked at him for a moment, and then her expression settled back into that careful flatness.

“I could,” she said. “I won’t.”

“Will you give me a name?”

“No.”

He had no legal ground to push, and she knew it. She sat across from him with her hands folded on the table and her chin up and her eyes giving him nothing, and he thought: This is not how innocent people act. He also thought: this is exactly how people act when they’ve learned the hard way not to hand cops anything they don’t have to.

He couldn’t decide which it was.

She left not knowing what he thought. That was deliberate—he wasn’t ready to show his hand in either direction. He walked her back to the lobby and said, “Don’t leave town,” and she looked at him for just a second like he’d confirmed what she’d already suspected, and then she was gone.

***

Keith called Austin from his desk at the sheriff’s office.

He framed it as routine, and the officer on the other end took it that way at first—the usual professional pleasantries, the kind of call that goes nowhere because nobody has time. But when Keith mentioned Rachel’s name, the tone shifted.

The officer’s voice dropped half a register.

Oh, that one.