Chapter 34
RYKER
“Damn,” she muttered. “You think you were drugged?”
The photo on the screen wasn’t taken at the party.
It was Nate the next day, standing outside a coffee shop with a paper cup in his hand and that proud, reckless grin on his face.
Sloane was half in frame beside him with the kind of expression that said she’d already read him the riot act and he’d still done it anyway.
Plastic wrap clung to his forearm. The rabbit sat beneath it, sharp and fresh, the skin around it pink and irritated. I stared at the ink too long.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was seventeen. I drank. I smoked. I did plenty of things that would explain a blackout.”
Sloane didn’t blink. “But you don’t normally pass out the second something touches your skin.”
“No,” I admitted. “I don’t.”
She clicked and pulled up a picture of my tattoo from the bunker, the one she’d taken when she thought I wasn’t paying attention. Then she placed it beside Nate’s and zoomed in until the edges went soft.
Same placement. Same design. Same wrong little curve at the ear that made it look intentional instead of artistic. The skin under the ink wasn’t flat on his either. There was a tiny ridge beneath it that never felt fully healed.
“Tell me what you remember about the tattoo guy,” she said. “Not the party. Him. The setup. Anything.”
I dragged my hand over my mouth, forcing my brain back to that night. “It was a small room. He had a table set up. Everything laid out clean. Too clean for a party. He wore black gloves. Not the cheap kind. And it smelled … sterile, not like booze and sweat.”
Sloane’s fingers stilled on the mouse. Her eyes went distant for a second, like she was matching the smell to a memory she didn’t want.
“Chlorhexidine,” she explained.
I frowned, unfamiliar with what it was.
“It’s a surgical prep. Some legit artists use it too. Party guys usually don’t.” She leaned back a fraction, studying me. “And you said you passed out when he turned the needle on.”
“Right when it started. Not later. Not after. Immediately. After that, I don’t remember shit.”
Sloane nodded, then opened a different folder.
A spreadsheet-style list appeared, rows of names and dates and case numbers. At first glance it looked like paperwork. The kind of list people made when they couldn’t stop making lists.
Then I saw the repeated notes.
Fell asleep instantly.
Woke up elsewhere.
Memory gap.
Tox screen: unclear / inconsistent.
Tattoo at party.
My pulse slowed with the kind of stillness that hit right before something broke. “That’s not just me.”
“No,” she replied quietly. “It isn’t.”
She scrolled, and the screen filled with images of arms. Different skin tones, different angles, different lighting. The same rabbit over and over.
I gritted my teeth. “How many?”
Sloane swallowed. “Thirty-seven that I can connect cleanly. Tattoo plus missing time. Tattoo plus a missing kid. Tattoo plus a sudden shift in behavior. Some were never reported because they came home.”
I didn’t like the way she said that last part. Some came home. Which meant some didn’t.
Sloane clicked into one case file and opened a report excerpt. “Listen to this. Oregon. Seventeen. Party tattoo. He wrote: ‘I didn’t even feel the needle. I blinked and it was morning.’”
She opened another. “Illinois. Sixteen. Same story. ‘Fell asleep the second it started.’”
Another. “North Carolina. Eighteen. ‘Woke up in a car. Didn’t know whose.’”
My stomach rolled hard. I’d spent years telling myself it was my fault. Bad decisions. Bad mix. Typical blackout. The pattern on her screen didn’t read as teenage stupidity.
It read as method.
Sloane zoomed in on the tattoo in one of the photos and pointed to a tiny break in the line at the base of the rabbit’s ear. “This.”
I leaned closer. The notch was small enough you’d miss it if you weren’t hunting for it.
She switched to another photo and zoomed again.
Same notch. Another. Same.
“I think it’s a signature.” My skin went cold.
“Or a marker. Something consistent. Either he couldn’t help doing it, or he wanted it there.”
I straightened slowly, the room tightening around my chest. Not the house. The room. The board. The fact that my life and Nate’s were pinned on a wall together with red thread like somebody had been playing with us for years.
“You didn’t find thirty-seven rabbit tattoos by chance,” I said.
“No. Something about Nate’s tattoo bothered me enough for me not to ignore my instincts.” She pressed her lips into a thin line. “Then I learned Nate wasn’t the only one. Once I stopped treating the rabbit as a tattoo and started treating it as a tag, everything changed.”
“A tag for what?” I asked.
“Look at what they had in common.” Sloane clicked into another tab and my pulse skipped a beat.
School records. Evaluations. Notes from counselors. Comments pulled from reports.
I scanned the screen, the words hitting in sequence.
Gifted program.
Top percentile.
Pattern recognition.
Advanced placement.
“Too smart for his age.”
Scholarship track.
“A high-IQ.”
Sloane nodded. “Or at least kids who were flagged that way. The rabbit shows up, then the blackout. Then the missing time.”
My vision narrowed for a second.
Seventeen-year-old me, shoved in the corner at parties because I didn’t belong, because I talked too little and watched too much. The stoner label people slapped on me so they wouldn’t have to call me what I really was.
Smart.
Obsessive. Restless.
The kids didn’t know I had OCD and ADHD. I was just the weirdo, except to Bass and Kip.
The name flashed through my head, sharp and unwanted.
Sloane’s voice pulled me back. “I haven’t said this out loud until now. Because I didn’t want to be wrong. Hell, for that matter, I didn’t want to be right, either.”
“What?”
She turned in her chair and looked at me. “I think whoever did your and Nate’s tattoo wasn’t there for quick cash. I think he was there to mark targets and incapacitate them. I think you were supposed to be out cold. Long enough for someone to do whatever they wanted while you couldn’t fight.”
My hands curled into fists. I forced them open again.
She tucked her hair behind her ear. “Do you have any idea who he was? A name, face, anything?”
I stared at Nate’s coffee shop image, at the rabbit under plastic wrap, at the way Sloane stood beside him with murder in her eyes and love in her posture. “I remember a guy. Older than us. Not drunk. Not sloppy. He didn’t talk much.”
Sloane paused before she continued. “Accent? Tattoos on him? Anything distinctive?”
I shook my head, frustrated. “No. I didn’t even get a good look. I was in that chair and then I was gone.”
She turned back to the screen, fingers moving again, relentless. She opened a side folder and pulled up a grid of dates.
“Do you know what makes me sick?” she asked, more to herself than to me.
“What?”
She tapped Nate’s date, then tapped mine. “The timing.”
I leaned closer. Two dates. Two separate years. Same month. Same week.
Tension slithered through me. “You’re saying it’s seasonal?”
“I’m saying it clusters,” she corrected. “Not just random parties. There are spikes. Like somebody knew where to be and when to be there.”
I didn’t like that at all.
Sloane clicked again and pulled up a map. Pins spread across multiple states, little red markers that made the screen look infected. “They weren’t all in the same area. But they weren’t scattered in a normal way either. You see it?”
I stared until my eyes adjusted. The pins weren’t evenly distributed. They weren’t random.
They ran along routes. Highways. College towns. Places where kids gathered. Places where nobody questioned a stranger with a tattoo kit if he acted confident enough.
“This isn’t a hobby.”
“No.” Sloane opened another case file, and the screen filled with interview notes. A mom crying. A teacher trying to be helpful. A cop writing it all down.
Sloane highlighted a line. “Read that.”
I read it out loud, my voice turning flat as I went. “He had gloves on before he touched anything.”
Sloane scrolled, highlighted another.
“He wiped the skin with something that smelled like a hospital.”
Another.
“He said he was only doing a few because he had to be somewhere else.”
I went still. That last line landed on my memory like a hammer. That part hadn’t come from her files.
It came from me.
“He did say that,” I admitted. “He took only a few of us. Then he said he had another place he had to be.”
Sloane looked over her shoulder at me. “Who does that at a party? If you’re trying to make quick money, you stay and take everyone’s cash.”
“Unless money wasn’t the point.” I rubbed the back of my neck, hoping the tension would ease.
Sloane’s mouse clicked once, then twice, and she pulled up the list again, the thirty-seven names staring back at me.
A pipeline. A selection process. A rabbit tattoo at the front end, clean enough to pass as a stupid choice.
I stepped back from the desk and paced once, then forced myself to stop because movement wouldn’t fix what I was feeling. Movement wouldn’t undo seventeen-year-old me in a chair, trusting the wrong hands.
“How the hell did you get this?” I asked.
“Bits at a time. Old reports. Forums. Archived articles. A few sealed files I shouldn’t have access to anymore.” Her chin lifted with determination. “And once I knew what to search for, I started finding more.”
I stared at her. “You’re not a detective anymore.”
She held my gaze. “As you said before, that doesn’t mean I stopped being one. I’m wired that way.”
My attention moved to the board, to the red thread, to the way she’d connected me to Nate and kept digging until she hit something ugly and dark.
Sloane clicked into another folder. A different list opened. That one didn’t have the “came home” note. It had a blank space where “found” should be. Different names. Different dates. More locations. In the “last known” column, the same phrase appeared again and again.
Party. Tattoo.