23. Holden
TWENTY-THREE
HOLDEN
I pick up my coffee, take a slow sip, and set it down precisely on the ring it’s already left on my desk.
The note on the file says:
Mr. Alan Davis (father) called 7:18 a.m. (Monday, June 1) Requesting status update. Mildly irate. Transferred to Holden Cross as case detective.
Mildly irate is a desk-jockey euphemism that means he yelled. Mildly irate also translates to I’m about to spend an unspecified portion of my morning being yelled at by a man whose son I helped disappear.
Fine.
I check my watch. 7:48 a.m. Best to give the father a few more minutes to calm down before I call. So I hit up Milo instead. I doubt he’s asleep.
“Yo,” he answers after the first ring. “What’s up?”
“Alan Davis, name sound familiar?”
“Mm, Brock’s dad, why?”
I sigh. “He’s just requested a welfare check for Brock.”
“Da fuck? They’ve had every single text answered. My God. Get over yourself.”
I shake my head. “Is that Stephen guy still blowing up his phone?”
“Sure is. Clingy as fuck. Want me to look into him?”
“Maybe. I’ll talk to the father first.”
“Good luck. Hopefully you can piss him off.”
I hang up and turn back to the case sitting on my desk.
I flip through the details. Family attempted to file a missing persons report only two days after he went missing.
The responding officer noted that due to his social media activity and response time to texts, there wasn’t any cause for us to act.
After daily calls and pressure from the parents, officers were sent to the most recent tagged location on his social media accounts: Murphy’s, a dive near Founders, Saturday night.
“Jesus, fucking Christ. I’m gonna kill Milo.”
I flip the page. The responding notes are thin—a waitress, Rhonda, gave a statement confirming she saw him, but couldn’t identify the man he was with as any of his known acquaintances.
She barely remembered Brock to comment any further.
What she did remember, in detail, was “the good-looking guy with the mullet” who took her number and never called.
Asked the officer, twice, if there was any way to track him down for her. The officers said no.
I put my pen down and pinch the bridge of my nose.
Of course she did.
Milo is dead. Dead!
On the next page is the parents’ statement—two paragraphs of sweet fuck all. Says they last saw Brock before they left for vacation. They’ve tried calling, no answer, unlike him to go silent.
The case was flagged as low priority after the officers confirmed he’d been seen alive and well at Murphy’s.
Good. Low priority means it sits in a stack. Stacks buy us some time.
Maybe I won’t kill Milo.
The parents are either genuinely worried or the father is the type who escalates when he doesn’t get what he wants. Either way, he’s making noise, and noise is the one thing that makes me worry for Sage.
I dial the number Hernandez has scrawled at the bottom of the page. He picks up on the second ring.
“Davis.”
“Mr. Davis, this is Detective Cross from the Hunter Harbor Police Department. I’m returning your call.”
“Detective. Thank you for calling. I want to know what’s being done about my son.” The guy sounds angry.
I let out a calming breath before I answer. “I understand you spoke with Officer Hernandez several times over the last week and she’s already informed you his whereabouts match his social media posts.”
“I did. But he went to that bar over a week ago now. Since then, his posts have been tagged in San Jose, San Francisco, and Santa Cruz. Why would he go there when he just landed a big client at work? What’s being done to find my son?
Has anyone even spoken to the young woman he left the party with? ”
No way. I am not bringing Sage into this.
“Mr. Davis, I want to be straight with you. While we understand that this feels out of character for your son, as of right now, there’s no evidence of foul play.
Brock’s social media accounts are active.
He’s posted from multiple locations in a way that’s consistent with a man traveling. Officially, your son is on vacation.”
“He wouldn’t—”
“I hear you, sir. And off the record, I take you at your word. But on the record, the standard for an active missing persons investigation is a person who appears to be missing. Your son doesn’t appear to be missing.
He appears to be a man on a road trip who isn’t returning his parents’ phone calls.
And, unfortunately, he’s an adult, which means outside of a general welfare check—which our officers did when they confirmed his whereabouts when he was last in town—my hands are tied. ”
Silence echoes down the line. I can hear him breathing through his nose. I wait. I have all morning.
I’m not even sure what he expects us to do. If Brock were alive and well and they needed a welfare check, they should be talking to a precinct in Santa Cruz. Not Hunter Harbor. We can’t welfare check a guy who’s out of our jurisdiction.
I obviously don’t tell him that since I’d rather control the narrative here. Still . . . Get a clue, people.
“His friends don’t believe it either,” he says, finally.
The hairs on the back of my neck prickle, and all I can think about is Sage.
“His friends?”
“His mother and I have had—well. People have been calling. Friends of Brock’s. They don’t believe he just left. There’s been one in particular who told us to make the police take it seriously. To make sure you go and question the girl.”
There it is.
I take a slow inhale.
Any of you go anywhere near my wildcat and I’ll skin you all alive.
Don’t think I wouldn’t enjoy every second of it.
I keep my voice exactly the same.
“That’s understandable, Mr. Davis. People who care about Brock are going to want answers.
But I’d encourage you to be cautious about whose pressure you take on.
Sometimes when a person goes no contact, the people who were closest to them have their own reasons for wanting an investigation, and those reasons aren’t always about what’s best for that person. ”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that maybe your son had a falling out with his friends. Maybe he just wants a break and is setting boundaries about how much everyone can contact him. There are lots of reasons why people leave town without telling the people around them. I’m not making any accusations.
I’m just saying—your son’s social media presence suggests he’s on a beach with some girl named Jessica.
It’s all in the captions. Maybe give him some space to figure things out for himself. He’ll call when he’s ready.”
I’ve just planted a seed in the head of a worried father. I’m not entirely proud of it, but it’s the most useful seed I could plant from where I am sitting. And honestly, all I care about is keeping them away from Sage. Brock was a piece of shit.
“Okay. I’ll take that on board,” he says.
“Please do. And Mr. Davis—I’m going to keep the file active on my end. I’ll be in touch if anything material changes. In the meantime, if you find yourself wanting to talk through anything, you have my number now. Use it.”
“Thank you, Detective Cross.”
“You’re welcome, sir.”
I hang up and keep flipping through the file. Personal details. Known associates. Last known address. Employment history.
Brock Davis worked in marketing—freelance consultant, mostly corporate clients, according to the file. Before that, college at Pacific Ridge. Fraternity. Lacrosse team.
Honestly, in my line of work you get used to profiling people, and his screams spoiled rich little white boy. I have a feeling no one ever told Brock no in his life—or if they did, he felt entitled enough to not listen.
Wildcat sure as fuck made him listen.
The photo Hernandez has attached is from his driver’s license. Square jaw. Even teeth. He’s tanned and full of life.
Not anymore.
I close the file.
My phone buzzes. Group chat.
Eli
Morning check. Status?
Knox
Clear.
Micah
Clear.
Milo
I’m on babysitting duties again and our girl is looking hot as fuck today, but she’s clear.
Heat tightens my chest as I read over his words.
I’ve been on late-night shifts all week.
I’m in a mood because I haven’t slept, and because the only time I ever see Sage is when she crosses the street in front of my car and doesn’t notice.
The others drool and hover and insert themselves everywhere, part of the furniture of her new weird life.
I do what I’m supposed to. I stay back. I leave her alone.
The agreement was that I read her in on day one, and then we were supposed to keep tabs on her. From afar. Professionally. Without further interaction.
I’m as turned on by her as the rest of them, and I sure as fuck want to make sure she gets out of this mess clean, but nowhere in our daily briefs did it say approach. But all those motherfuckers just couldn’t help themselves.
And honestly—what for? What the fuck is the goal here? Are we starting that bowling league as a prelude to forming The Brotherhood of the Shared Pussy?
The group chat pings again.
Eli
Holden? Status.
Me:
MP report filed by parents. I’ve got it. Low priority. Under control.
Eli
Milo, see if you can blow him off. Voice clone message or something??
Holden, keep an eye on it.
“No shit, Sherlock.” I lock my phone. I don’t need Eli to tell me to keep an eye on it.
I was keeping eyes on things long before Eli was running around acting like the boss of hangings.
No one appointed him leader. He kind of just took it and has been a broody pain in my ass ever since.
But, I don’t fight it because the alternative is five men with no coordination, and I’ve seen how that goes.
The shift changes and the precinct fills up around me.
Detectives trickling in, desk phones ringing, the coffee machine gurgling its last death rattle before someone has to refill it.
I watch them all without looking at them directly.
They file reports, study for the sergeant’s exam, lie to their spouses that tonight will be the night they make it home by six.
These are decent people. Most of them became cops for the right reasons—or at least reasons that weren’t entirely wrong—and they go home every night believing they did something that mattered.
I used to believe that. Before I learned the system I swore to protect is a machine that processes evil into paperwork and calls it justice—handing known rapists suspended sentences because a victim couldn’t stop crying long enough to testify clearly, as though trauma should present itself in a court-admissible format.
Before I learned what it meant to watch a man walk free and know—down to the marrow—that he’ll hurt again, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it except go home and break your own furniture.
I arrested and released so many of them they started to blur. Then I caught the case that broke me. Reya.
Three years into uniform, I took her statement in a fluorescent box of a room while she described the worst night of her life in words a prosecutor could use—and apologized the whole way through. For crying. For not remembering the exact time. For the skirt she’d worn, like the fabric had a vote.
The evidence was solid. I made sure of it. The defense took her apart on the stand anyway, because that’s the job—find the crack, drive the wedge. Not guilty.
I carried her file down to storage myself. Stamped it. Shoved the box onto a shelf in a room nobody ever walks into.
Before she signed, she’d asked me, do you think we’ll get a retrial?
I told her yes. That’s the job—to lie with conviction. I wrote my resignation that afternoon and never handed it in. Still don’t know why.
A week later, the man who’d walked out of that courtroom smiling and adjusting his cufflinks washed up on the rocks at Carrum Point.
Hands and feet bound. A 9mm hole in the side of his head.
Whoever did it hadn’t bothered to dress it up as anything other than what it was—they’d just dumped him light, and the tide gave him back.
I stood over him in the gray light and felt none of the things I was supposed to feel. I was annoyed someone had gotten to him before me. That there was another person out there willing to do the thing I didn’t have the balls to.
I wanted to be the man pulling the trigger.
More than I ever wanted anything in my life.
Two days later a man sat down across from me at the diner I ate at before every shift. Lean. Expensive. Calm in a way that doesn’t come from a badge. He knew about the floater. He knew about the slug the M.E. had bagged. He knew about the box with Reya’s name on it.
“That bullet’s going to be a problem for somebody,” he said. “Be a shame if it got logged wrong. Lost between intake and the locker. Happens more than people think.”
I should have arrested him. Instead I thought about Reya apologizing for her skirt, and every victim still flinching at shadows while the man who made them that way walked around adjusting his cufflinks.
“Chain of custody’s a mess on that one,” I said. “These things happen.”
He left a card on the table. I’d learn his name later—Loki—and the rest of it later still. For now there was just cream cardstock, a gold snake coiled through two letters, and a date a week out.
The slug went missing. Gang-adjacent, the file said. Nobody pushed. Nobody ever pushes on men the system’s already decided not to mourn.
A week later I walked into a club with no sign and let two men talk to me for two hours about everything I’d known for years and never once heard said out loud. I said yes before the drink they poured got warm.
For a while that was all it was—the man on the inside. A name flagged before it reached the right desk. A report a little duller than the truth. I told myself I wasn’t doing the thing, only making room for it.
Then they called me to a parking structure where a kindergarten teacher sat against the wall beside a body he’d beaten out of this world with his bare hands, shaking, while a silent giant stood watch over him like a dog guarding a downed soldier.
That was the night I met Knox. And Eli.
We framed it as a mugging. I handled the paper. And parked outside Eli’s place in the small hours—because none of us trusted him alone—Knox and I got to talking. Two of us doing it clean, one doing it with his fists, all three wanting the same thing. So why were we doing it apart?
We pitched Odin a unit. Dedicated. Built for one kind of man and nothing else. He said yes. Eli looked at us like we’d handed him a reason to keep breathing.
Almost five years of ropes and clean exits. It lets me sleep. Most nights.
And now there’s a dark-haired girl with a kill of her own, and for the first time in years the thing I can’t stop turning over isn’t whether I did the right thing.
It’s whether I can keep her out of the box.
A call comes in on my desk phone.
“Detective Cross speaking.”
“Detective, we’ve got a potential homicide down in Salinas. Think you can handle it?”
I glance at my pile of cases. “Sure. Send me the details.”