Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
Cole
The screen door whines open and Trevor steps through, and I don't look up.
Can't. My hands are already on the table, spreading notebooks, pulling pages from the blue one and the red, the map of Roan unfolded across the sticky Formica with its red-ink lines connecting names and locations like arteries on a body I've been dissecting for two years.
The kitchen is an oven, the July heat pressing through the screen.
My shirt's stuck to my back. My hips ache where the workbench bit into them twelve hours ago, and the ache is its own kind of madness, because it reminds me of Trevor's hands, Trevor's mouth, Trevor inside me with a focus that belonged to another lifetime, and I'm trying very hard not to think about that while thinking about nothing else.
Trevor crosses to the sink. Pours water.
Doesn't drink it. Sets the glass down and stands at the edge of the table, arms crossed, jaw set so tight the muscle jumps.
He's wearing the jacket again, olive drab, canvas, the kind that hides the bruises.
My fingerprints on his shoulder blades, dark and undeniable, under canvas now, which is its own relief and its own loss.
"She talked," he says. Flat. The kind of statement that doesn't need elaboration, because his mind was made up somewhere between Brenda's door and the Ford's ignition.
I nod. Once. Don't trust my voice yet. Keep my hands moving across the table, pulling pages, arranging them — Annette first, then Judy, then Hannah's card at the edge where it's been since yesterday, her name face-up under the yellow light.
"Boyfriend showed up. Early twenties. Clean-cut.
Button-down, khakis, dressed for a job interview.
Had a handwritten list. Hairbrush, paperbacks, photographs.
Nothing worth stealing. Nothing you'd bother with unless you were covering tracks.
" Trevor's voice is low, measured, each word placed like he's laying charges.
"Calloway came himself. Sat at her table.
Turned it back on her. Made her think she drove Annette away. Two years she believed him."
The words land on the table between us. Each one slotting into the framework I've built across two notebooks and three hundred pages, and the fit's too clean to be coincidence.
I tap Annette's name on the map. My finger finds the red line joining Voss to Calloway, Calloway to the lakehouse I've circled in ink so dark it's almost black.
"Pattern holds." Steadier than I expect.
The case voice. The one I use alone in the garage at three in the morning, talking to the pegboard because the pegboard is the only thing that listens.
"Annette Coyle, gone four years ago. Withdrew first. Stopped eating.
Slept through afternoons, went out at dusk, came back late.
Same with Judy Marsh, three years back. Same withdrawal.
Same quiet. Same pulling away." I tap Judy's name.
Then Hannah's. "Hannah Brooks. Seventeen.
Track team. Seen in Voss's car three weeks ago.
Same pattern starting — she's distant, not answering texts, drifting from everyone who knows her.
She's still here, but she's going the way the others went. "
Trevor doesn't move. Arms crossed, eyes tracking the map with that focused, measured attention that makes my chest do something I refuse to name.
Reading it the way he reads everything — fast, thorough, connecting dots before I've finished drawing the lines.
His profile sharp in the kitchen light. Jaw set, the muscle jumping, the tic he's had since the war, the one that surfaces when he's holding something back and the holding's costing him.
"Voss supplies the girls." I trace the red line.
The ink's smudged from handling, the paper soft at the folds.
"Coach. Access. Trust. Brings them to the lakehouse.
Calloway runs it. Every time someone gets close, Calloway shuts it down personally.
Came to Brenda himself. Sat at her table.
Turned her guilt against her." My jaw tightens; I press my thumb to it without thinking.
"That's not corruption. That's method. A system that's run in this town for years because nobody looked, or everyone who looked got quiet, or everyone who didn't get quiet got disappeared. "
The kitchen breathes around us. The fan turns.
The refrigerator hums. Down the hall the concentrator keeps up its steady rhythm.
Trevor's eyes are on the map, the red lines, the names in my cramped hand across two years of pages, and I can see the calculation running behind his face — weighing variables, measuring risk, deciding whether the man across the table is an asset or a liability or something in between that doesn't have a name yet.
"So what do we do with it?" Low. Flat. Stripped of the garage heat and this morning's careful control, replaced with something colder. Tactical. The question hangs between us, the kind that has only one honest answer, and the honest answer is the one neither of us wants.
"Nothing." It's out before I can stop it.
Flat. Hard. A man stating a fact he wishes weren't true.
"Nothing yet. It's all pattern. All hearsay.
Brenda's account is gold, but it's still words.
We need something solid. Something outside Roan's reach.
A witness who'll go on record. Physical evidence.
Something Calloway can't explain away with that reasonable voice.
" I press my palm flat on the map, the ink slightly raised where I've pressed too hard with the pen.
"Right now we don't have it. We have a pattern.
A coach who drives girls to a lakehouse.
A sheriff who silences anyone who asks. And a seventeen-year-old three weeks into the same withdrawal that came before two disappearances, and if we push wrong, too hard too fast, we lose whatever chance we've got of reaching her before they do. "
The silence after is thick. Charged. Trevor's jaw works.
Once. For a second I think he might push back — argue, demand action, do the thing Trevor Hollander does when the arithmetic tilts toward waiting and waiting feels like surrender.
He doesn't. Arms crossed, eyes on the map, the weight of everything we've laid out pressing on us both.
We stand over the notebooks. Close enough that our arms nearly touch.
The kitchen's humid, the air between us thick with heat and the charge of two men with ten years of history packed into a foot and a half of Formica, and neither of us moves away.
I can smell him — canvas, sweat, something underneath that's his alone, that I've spent a decade trying to forget.
His shoulder six inches from mine. Six inches that might as well be the whole county for all the good it does either of us.
I roll up the map. The paper crackles, the red lines folding into themselves.
I shove it into the blue notebook and close the cover.
My hands aren't steady. Nothing about me is — my breathing, my pulse, the want that's been building since Trevor walked back into this house and stood in the doorway looking at me like I was a stranger and the only person he'd ever recognized at the same time.
Trevor doesn't leave the kitchen. Arms crossed, eyes on the notebooks, jaw set, and we leave the thing between us where it lies, unmentioned, the way we've both silently agreed to leave it.
"I've got one outside contact." It's out before I've fully decided to say it. My hand's on the blue notebook, fingers spread across the cover like I'm worried it might leave. Trevor hasn't moved from the doorway. Arms crossed, jaw set, eyes on me with that focused, measured attention.
The fan turns. The refrigerator hums. Outside, a car passes on Cembrook, fading toward town.
I push the notebook aside and lean back.
The chair creaks. The posture's deliberate — shoulders loose, chin up, a man who's decided vulnerability is a luxury he can't afford, especially not in a kitchen where the man across the table fucked him twelve hours ago and hasn't mentioned it.
"Philadelphia cop. Gary Wiseman. Detective, major crimes.
Twenty years on the job." Flat. Factual.
The case voice. The one that doesn't shake.
"Two years ago I drove the four hours to Philly.
Alone. No plan beyond finding a bar where off-duty cops drank and hoping one of them wasn't rotten.
" I bark a sound that isn't a laugh. "Three bars over two nights.
First two were dead ends — sports bars, chain places, everybody watching the game, nobody talking.
Third night I hit McGinty's. Narrow place on Passyunk.
Dartboard in the back. Bartender knew every regular by name, which is how you know it's the right kind of wrong. "
Trevor doesn't interrupt. Arms crossed, eyes on my face, listening the way he listens — completely, without moving, taking in every word and filing it behind those dark eyes I've spent ten years trying not to think about.