Page 33 of Veil of Silence

Hours had passed since Austin’s earlier attempts to figure out his father’s code, but the numbers he’d already tried had been useless. His parents’ anniversary. His mother’s birthday. The old passcode his father had used years ago.

He entered his father’s Bureau badge number—the one Dad used to recite like a punch line.

Wrong.

Austin stared at the screen.

He couldn’t keep guessing. Not when the phone might hold the last conversations his father had ever had. He couldn’t risk being locked out.

He set it on the comforter and pressed both hands over his eyes until orange bloomed behind them.

Think.

Austin picked up the phone and entered his own birthday.

The screen unlocked.

He stared at it, still in disbelief that his birthday had worked.

His mind went back in time. Suddenly, he was twenty-two years old again and standing in the hospital while his mother’s monitors went silent. Waiting for a father who arrived four hours later smelling like gas-station coffee.

Ten years of clipped phone calls. Christmases rescheduled around cases. Conversations in which Dad’s attention always seemed to be somewhere else.

A man who’d spent a decade searching for somebody else’s son.

And this was the pin number his father had chosen. Austin’s birthday.

Austin pressed his eyes closed and leaned over the phone.

One of his tears plopped against the cracked corner of the case. He wiped it away with his thumb, but another replaced it. Then another.

His chest tightened until he couldn’t pull in a full breath.

He pressed the heel of one hand against his mouth, holding back whatever sound wanted to come. The walls at the Mountain View weren’t thick. Besides, he wouldn’t have known how to explain the grief if someone heard him.

It wasn’t only that his father was dead.

It was that Austin would never get answers.

For several minutes, he sat bent over the phone as questions about his father’s death and his final moments pummeled him.

Finally, Austin’s breathing steadied. He wiped his face with his sleeve and opened the call log. His gaze went to his father’s last phone call.

It had happened on Wednesday at 11:42 a.m. Incoming. Twenty-two seconds.

The number had no name attached.

Austin did a quick search for the number but, just as suspected, it didn’t turn up anything.

Twenty-two seconds wasn’t much time for a conversation.

But it might have been enough to send his father out of that motel room—and toward the trail where he died.

Nora had the dishwasher half loaded when Wren walked into the kitchen from the hallway.

“Mason’s finally asleep in the spare bedroom.” She lowered her voice as she crossed the room. “It took twenty minutes, two glasses of water, and a promise that nobody was going to disappear tonight.”

Nora slid a plate into the rack. “Where’s Bo?”