Page 33 of Diesel’s Desire

Five days.

That’s how long Addison Miller’s been gone, and I know the exact number because I’ve been counting it in hours too, which passed a hundred and twenty this afternoon.

Thunder’s curled under my desk with his chin on my boot, patient in the way only a dog who’s used to twelve-hour shifts can be. I brought him in on day three when Chief Morris stopped pretending he didn’t notice I was sleeping in the break room, and nobody’s said a word about it since. Small-town perks. Nobody writes you up for a Rottweiler in the bullpen when a six-year-old’s still missing.

The bullpen’s empty this time of night except for me and the hum of the fluorescents, and somewhere down the hall a fax machine chokes on something it doesn’t like. I’ve got three case files spread across my desk. I keep going back through them, hoping I’ve missed something.

It doesn’t.

The Miller file sits on top, thickest of the three now, statements and canvass notes and a growing folder of tip-line calls that go nowhere—somebody’s neighbor saw a van, somebody’s cousin heard a girl crying in a basement, somebody’s just lonely and wants a cop to talk to at midnight. I’ve run down every one of them. None of it sticks.

My phone buzzes against the desk. Morris, this time of night, which means it’s not good news.

FBI field office called again. Giving us till Monday before they take the lead. Come by my office later.

I set the phone down harder than I meant to, and Thunder lifts his head at the sound before deciding it’s not worth getting up for.

Monday. Two days. If the Bureau takes this, Addison Miller becomes a case number in Knoxville instead of a six-year-old girl whose mother still leaves the porch light on every night in case she wanders home on her own.

I rub my eyes until they ache and go back to the file, because doing that feels marginally better than sitting here doing nothing, and somewhere in the last twenty minutes of staring at the same twelve interview summaries, something snags.

Girl, six. Gone four days. Returned to family’s porch wearing a new dress, hair braided, holding a stuffed rabbit nobody in the household had ever seen before.

That’s not Addison’s file. That’s a case from three years back I pulled at random, half out of desperation, half out of a hunch I can’t name yet. I flip back to the front page.

Emily Doss, age 6. Reported missing June 14th. Located June 18th, no physical injuries reported.

I didn’t work this one. I wasn’t even in Briar Fork yet. But the shape of it snags something loose in my brain, the same way the ring did, the same way twelve pages on Erik Halvorsen’s murder never sat right no matter how many times I read them.

I open my laptop and start pulling records the department keeps digitized going back a decade, typing search terms I half expect to come up empty. Missing female, age five to seven, Briar Fork or Graves County.

Four results.

Addison Miller, current. Emily Doss, three years back. A girl named Callie Whitfield, five years back. And one more, older, faded enough in the system that half the file’s still on paper somewhere in a box I’d have to physically dig through—Maren Pruitt, seven years back.

I read all three of the closed ones twice each, and by the second pass my stomach’s gone cold enough that I have to get up and pour myself coffee I don’t actually want, just to have something to do with my hands.

Every single one follows the same shape. Girls between five and seven. Gone for four to seven days. Found alive, always described in the same clinical way in the file—returned to family, no signs of physical trauma—and always, always wearing something new. New dress. New shoes once. A stuffed animal the parents said they hadn’t bought.

And every single one of them was closed inside forty-eight hours of the child being found, official explanation vague enough to mean nothing. Misunderstanding regarding custody arrangement. Child had been staying with a family friend. Matter resolved, no charges pursued.

Nobody asks where the child actually was. Nobody follows up on who the family friend even is.

I dig deeper into the parent interviews, the ones actually attached instead of just summarized, and the pattern gets worse the closer I look. Every set of parents sounds relieved on paper. But the interview notes tell a different story. Mrs. Doss appeared reluctant to elaborate further and stated she wished to put the matter behind her. Mr. Whitfield became agitated when pressed for details and asked that the interview be concluded.

That’s not relief. That’s fear. At least, that’s how it reads to me.

And Morris signed off on all three.

I sit back in my chair hard enough that it creaks, and Thunder lifts his head again, ears up this time, picking up on whatever’s shifted in me even if he doesn’t know what it is.

“Okay,” I say out loud, to nobody, to the empty bullpen. “Okay.”

I start pulling threads. Employment records. Property filings. Court dockets, because in a town this small, financial trouble tends to leave paper somewhere even when people are careful. It takes me two hours and four cups of coffee that have long since gone cold, but the same name turns up in all three families’ records.

Douglas Pemberton III.

Owns the building the Doss family rents. Employs Mr. Whitfield’s brother at the lumber yard he owns sixty percent of. Held a private note on the Pruitt family’s house back when the bank wouldn’t touch them, the kind of arrangement that looks generous on paper and reads different once you notice the interest rate.