Mom is now settled in a very comfortable home, only an hour’s drive away. Sunset Peak is bigger, has better facilities, and that’s where she said she wanted to be. As much as it pained me to leave her behind, she urged me to return to work. Said I needed it. To have purpose again. Purpose besides meal prep and nightly med deliveries.
When Alex called and said men had been going missing, I knew exactly what that purpose was.
Alex leans over my shoulder, staring at the screen with me. The screen that tells me there’s more than one open missing person’s case in the last month.
“Before you say anything, I’ve done a tiny bit of digging, and I can’t find any connection to Chloe Stark.”A tiny bit of digging.You need a fuckingexcavator to dig up whatever Chloe’s hiding. He nods toward my laptop. “No real similarities,” Alex says over my shoulder. “Varying stages of life, varying stages of hair loss,” he jokes, crossing his arms and leaning against the desk next to me.
There might not appear to be similarities on the surface, but they’re there, and I am going to find them. I will find the connection to Chloe Stark if it’s the last thing I do.
“Conference room, now.” Captain Barrett’s booming voice splits the air, interrupting the beginning of Alex’s rundown of the case.
I rise from my chair too eagerly, desperate to know what they’re doing with the case. Alex pushes off the desk and heads for the conference room, beckoning me to follow with a nod. When I find myself in the conference room with the rest of the team, our boss stands in front of a whiteboard with the pictures of the missing men taped to it.
“Mills, welcome back,” my captain says, inviting my peers in the room to nod and wave in greeting. “You are here for observation purposes only. You are not active on this case.”
“Captain—”
“If you can’t handle that, you can kiss these case huddles goodbye.” His voice is stern, leaving no room for argument. As much as I do want to argue, I decide to hold off.
For now.
His parting words when I left to care for my mother ring through my head.
Tunnel vision. Not thinking clearly.Worried about me.
That was the worst one.
“Worried aboutme? How about being worried about the men who might lose their lives because we’re turning a blind eye to Caroline Stark’s devil spawn?” My voice was growing louder in the confines of his office, drawing the attentionof the rest of the teams on the floor who began hazarding glances in our direction.
The captain had just stared at me in disbelief at that point, tapping his pen against his desk. “That’s exactly why I think you need to leave. You’re too close to this.”
“Captain—” I’d tried to argue.
“There’s no evidence!” he roared, standing and towering over his desk as he held my stare. I saw the movement out of the corner of my eye, my brothers and sisters in blue turning their heads back to their desks. “And you’re going to get a lawsuit against the department.” He smoothed his hands over his suit and sat back down. “Your mother needs you. And you need a break.”
It was a demand disguised as concern.
So leaving wasn’t entirely up to me. I can’t say I would have, had he not dangled my badge in front of me.
But he was right. I was too close. I’d gotten too close toher. My boundaries were blurring. Which was another reason I knew I had to leave.
I return every pitying look in the conference room with a glare, balling my fists and silently lowering myself into a chair at a table in front of the whiteboard.
“Alex,” the captain starts, “lead the way.”
My partner moves to the front of the room and clears his throat. He points to a picture of an elderly man with glasses and thinning hair. “Richard Soffett is seventy-years-old, a history teacher at Little Peak High. He’s been missing for a little over a month. There have been no sightings of him and no contact made since then. His phone has not been found, nor has his wallet or any scrap of clothing he might have been wearing.”
The other detectives and officers in the room start volleying questions to Alex.
“Who reported him missing?”
“His children who live up in Mt. Lance. They hadn’t heard from him for about two weeks, and by the time they realized, they called it in.”
Absent family. Reminds me of my own.
“A friend of his who works at the high school—” Alex pauses to turn to the board and check the name, “—Wanda Sterling, reported he was headed out for a hike the day he went missing.”
“Maybe he fell off a cliff,” Lucy chimes in. She’s the newest detective in our department, having transferred from beyond the Four Peaks County lines just in the last month, according to what Alex told me.
