Chapter 16
Sixteen
MADDEN
Subject: Public Records Request – Missing Persons Files
Chief Carson,
Under the North Carolina Public Records Act, I am formally requesting digital copies of all missing persons reports submitted to the Sutter’s Ferry Police Department from January 1, 2011 to present, including:
·initial report
·follow-up notes
·investigative supplements
·closure or status determinations
This request is for public records, not confidential case materials. If any portion must be redacted, please cite the specific statutory exemption for each redaction.
Please acknowledge receipt of this email today. For transparency, I have copied the Town Clerk.
Electronic delivery to this address is preferred.
Regards,
Madden Reilly
CC: Barbara Channing, Town Clerk
By the time I made it through my third draft of the FOIA request, my eyes burned.
I read it one more time to double check for typos—as if that would make anyone more inclined to cooperate—and hit send.
The email vanished off the screen, leaving me staring at the empty inbox like something might magically appear to justify the effort.
“Congratulations,” I muttered. “You’ve sent one bureaucratic request. Gold star.”
I pushed back from the tiny dinette table on the Second Wind and scrubbed my hands over my face. A half-empty mug of coffee cooled next to my laptop, the surface sheen gone dull. I took a sip anyway. Bitter. Lukewarm. Fitting for the past fifteen hours of research.
The other tab I’d left open showed the Seaside Sentinel’s online archive.
I’d fallen down that rabbit hole at eleven last night, chasing headlines: petty thefts, noise complaints, seasonal ordinances, the occasional human-interest piece about somebody’s impressive tomato harvest. Nothing about vanished women.
Nothing about tourists who didn’t make their checkout times. Nothing about patterns.
Just Gwen.
Always Gwen.
I’d reread those articles, too. That had been a mistake.
It was one thing to know the words by heart.
It was another to see them again—the grainy yearbook photo, the hollow-eyed photos of my aunt begging for any information about her daughter, the confident assurances from Chief Carson that gave way to the exhaustion of “We have not forgotten.”
My sleep after that hadn’t been sleep so much as a slow drowning in old images.
Gwen’s laugh. Gwen’s empty bedroom. The bonfire.
The way I’d sat in the back of Carson’s office at seventeen, listening as adults talked about my cousin like she was a puzzle instead of a person.
She’d ceased to be Gwen and had instead become her disappearance.
I stared at the laptop until the letters blurred.
None of this told me whether Priya was the first since Gwen. Or just the first one who had people who refused to let her be written off.
A voice cracked across the water, sharp enough to jolt me out of my spiral. “Reilly!”
I blinked, shoved my chair back, and stepped out of the cabin into the bright slap of morning.
Rios stood on the deck of his boat in the next slip over.
Shirtless.
For a second, that was the only detail my brain registered.
Broad chest, shoulders cut with muscle and scattered with old scars, a line of dark hair arrowing down as he wiped sweat off his neck with a towel.
The sun glanced off the damp planes of his skin like the universe had decided subtlety was overrated.
I spotted dark lines of ink on the curve of one biceps, but I couldn’t make out the design from here.
Not that my brain was doing a whole lot of processing just now.
Holy hell, the Navy had done incredible things for that body.
My mouth went dry.
He hooked the towel around his neck and lifted his chin. “You alive over there?”
Barely.
“What?” I managed.
He jerked his thumb toward the dock, all business. “We heard from Sanders. Get dressed. We’re going.”
Right. Willie Sanders. The dockhand. Our only known witness.
I dragged my eyes up to Rios’s face. Only marginally safer territory, because scruff darkened his jaw in a way that made him look deliciously dangerous. Like every good girl’s bad boy fantasy come to life.
Words. They were a thing I normally knew how to use. How did they work again?
“Yeah. Okay. Give me five.” I retreated into the cabin before I could humiliate myself further by openly ogling him like a thirsty barfly.
“Get it together,” I muttered at my reflection in the tiny bathroom mirror.
My cheeks were still flushed from sleep—what little I’d managed—and far too much screen time.
I splashed cold water on my face until my skin prickled, then did the world’s fastest triage: ponytail, a swipe of eyeliner and mascara, clean t-shirt, jeans that could handle whatever grime today had on deck.
Boots. Willie Sanders was not a judge I had to impress.
As I dressed, I tried not to think about the fact that my first truly coherent thought of the day had been Rios is hot instead of Find the missing girl.
One was a problem. The other was a priority.
By the time I stepped back onto the dock, he was already there, leaning against his truck with his arms folded.
Mercifully, a gray t-shirt now covered his torso.
Less distracting. Also, somehow worse, because it clung to all those muscles that would now be living rent free in my brain in all their tan, sweaty glory.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Yeah.” My voice came out steadier this time. Progress.
I climbed into the passenger seat and tugged the door shut. He backed out of the marina lot and turned us toward the narrow spine of road that ran north.
For a minute, the only sound was the hum of the engine and the low rush of the wind through the open windows.
I tipped my face into it, appreciating the hint of salt in the air instead of the smog I’d have gotten in Los Angeles.
A part of me really was happy to be home, which hadn’t been a certainty when I’d impulsively driven cross-country to be here.
My skin prickled with awareness, and I glanced over to find Rios watching me, expression inscrutable.
Not at all sure what he’d see, I defaulted to business. “I sent the FOIA request. Every missing persons report on Hatterwick in the last fifteen years. We’ll see how much Carson tries to stonewall.”
Rios turned his gaze back to the road. “Carson always stonewalls.”
“True. But he can’t magically make the existence of public records disappear. If there’s nothing else… that’s something. If there is, I want to know.”
“Yeah.” He tapped the steering wheel with his thumb, a small, restless rhythm. “I spoke to my contact last night. He confirmed the last ping of Priya’s phone was in the vicinity of the ferry terminal at six in the morning day before yesterday. Since then, it’s been switched off or destroyed.”
I glanced toward him. “Do I want to know who this contact is?”
“Probably not. But we’re not building a case for you to prosecute. He also confirmed that the email did come from her device.”
“From her device, but no way of knowing if she was the one who sent it,” I murmured.
“Exactly. He’s doing some more digging to see if he can find any electronic trail of harassment.”
I definitely didn’t want to know about that. Anybody who could get access to that information without a warrant was breaking a multitude of laws.
“I went at it from a different angle and hit up the grad students again last night. Asked if they’d noticed anything off with Priya the past week—anyone bothering her, weird phone calls, that kind of thing. Nothing. No change in behavior they can point to.”
“None of the usual signs of her being harassed,” I translated. “So that theoretically cuts one possible connection between the alley attack and her disappearance.”
His glance showed approval for my having intuited his line of thinking.
“Unless she didn’t feel safe saying anything,” I added.
“Could be,” he allowed. “But if she’d been jumped behind Home Port and still showed up to work like nothing happened… that tells us something about how she handles shit, too.”
“Self-contained,” I said. “Private.”
“Yeah.”
We fell quiet as the village thinned behind us. Businesses gave way to clusters of small houses, then to stretches of marsh and scrub broken up by the occasional weather-beaten mailbox. The sky was a washed-out blue, already hinting that we were in for a scorcher.
“So, you heard from Sanders?” I prompted.
“Yeah. Texted a little after three this morning. Said he was back in and gonna crash for a few hours but was happy to talk to us this morning if we met him at his place.”
“Sounds like he’s still willing to help, at least.” Guilt had been written all over Willie’s face yesterday, even through the high. “Assuming he didn’t lose his nerve.”
“Or that he didn’t get high again and ruin our shot,” Rios muttered. “Gotta temper our expectations of what we’re gonna get out of this interview.”
I didn’t answer. The possibility of another failed lead sat between us, heavy and unwelcome.
We turned off onto a side road that dead-ended into a cluster of low apartment buildings crouched near the salt marsh. The siding was faded, the parking lot cracked, but a few potted plants on stoops and a kid’s bicycle chained to a stair rail made the place feel lived in rather than abandoned.
As Rios scanned the building, I noted a tightness in his jaw.
I wondered what he saw here. Something that reminded him of old cases?
Or something that reminded him of growing up on this side of the island?
I dimly remembered that his neighborhood had been a few streets over.
I’d picked his sister Gabi up a few times to drive her, Gwen, and Willa to a few things.
I knew their home life hadn’t been a good one, so I didn’t push.
If Rios was thinking of his past, walking into a place like this as an adult carried a weight. One that was none of my business.