Because whoever had done this hadn’t been sloppy.
He had a key.
She’d change the locks after shift.
Taking something would’ve been sloppy.
Leaving something meant he wanted her thinking about him.
Sara’s gaze landed on the kitchen table, on the stack of folders she’d been working through late at night when nobody was looking.
LAUREN PIERCE.
The cold case that wasn’t cold anymore.
The girl who’d vanished out of Jackson Valley University and never came back.
Sara had felt it from the start—something in the way the file read too clean, too incomplete.
Now the air in her apartment felt like that file.
Cold.
“This is about her,” she whispered.
No one answered.
Sara forced herself to check the closet. Under the bed. Behind the shower curtain again, just to prove she wasn’t losing her mind.
Still nothing.
But the fear stayed.
Because the message wasn’the’s here.
The message washe can be.
Sara locked the deadbolt. Then the chain.
Then she stood with her back against the door, eyes burning, and made herself decide.
She could call Burke right now.
She could call Scout.
But she pictured the bullpen—everyone still wrung out from Caitlin’s case. No sleep. No patience. No room for her to say someone rearranged my bed and left me a book. She needed to see if he’d contact her again.
Tomorrow, she told herself.
I’ll tell them tomorrow morning.
And she meant it.
She grabbed her keys and left the apartment anyway, locking up behind her like that could undo what had already been done.
Down the stairs. Into the cold.
Her hands were shaking now—not from adrenaline, but from rage.
