18. Penny
PENNY
Five days.
That’s how long Addison Miller’s been gone, and I know the exact number because I’ve been counting it in hours too, which passed a hundred and twenty this afternoon.
Thunder’s curled under my desk with his chin on my boot, patient in the way only a dog who’s used to twelve-hour shifts can be.
I brought him in on day three when Chief Morris stopped pretending he didn’t notice I was sleeping in the break room, and nobody’s said a word about it since.
Small-town perks. Nobody writes you up for a Rottweiler in the bullpen when a six-year-old’s still missing.
The bullpen’s empty this time of night except for me and the hum of the fluorescents, and somewhere down the hall a fax machine chokes on something it doesn’t like. I’ve got three case files spread across my desk. I keep going back through them, hoping I’ve missed something.
It doesn’t.
The Miller file sits on top, thickest of the three now, statements and canvass notes and a growing folder of tip-line calls that go nowhere—somebody’s neighbor saw a van, somebody’s cousin heard a girl crying in a basement, somebody’s just lonely and wants a cop to talk to at midnight.
I’ve run down every one of them. None of it sticks.
My phone buzzes against the desk. Morris, this time of night, which means it’s not good news.
FBI field office called again. Giving us till Monday before they take the lead. Come by my office later.
I set the phone down harder than I meant to, and Thunder lifts his head at the sound before deciding it’s not worth getting up for.
Monday. Two days. If the Bureau takes this, Addison Miller becomes a case number in Knoxville instead of a six-year-old girl whose mother still leaves the porch light on every night in case she wanders home on her own.
I rub my eyes until they ache and go back to the file, because doing that feels marginally better than sitting here doing nothing, and somewhere in the last twenty minutes of staring at the same twelve interview summaries, something snags.
Girl, six. Gone four days. Returned to family’s porch wearing a new dress, hair braided, holding a stuffed rabbit nobody in the household had ever seen before.
That’s not Addison’s file. That’s a case from three years back I pulled at random, half out of desperation, half out of a hunch I can’t name yet. I flip back to the front page.
Emily Doss, age 6. Reported missing June 14th. Located June 18th, no physical injuries reported.
I didn’t work this one. I wasn’t even in Briar Fork yet. But the shape of it snags something loose in my brain, the same way the ring did, the same way twelve pages on Erik Halvorsen’s murder never sat right no matter how many times I read them.
I open my laptop and start pulling records the department keeps digitized going back a decade, typing search terms I half expect to come up empty. Missing female, age five to seven, Briar Fork or Graves County.
Four results.
Addison Miller, current. Emily Doss, three years back. A girl named Callie Whitfield, five years back. And one more, older, faded enough in the system that half the file’s still on paper somewhere in a box I’d have to physically dig through—Maren Pruitt, seven years back.
I read all three of the closed ones twice each, and by the second pass my stomach’s gone cold enough that I have to get up and pour myself coffee I don’t actually want, just to have something to do with my hands.
Every single one follows the same shape.
Girls between five and seven. Gone for four to seven days.
Found alive, always described in the same clinical way in the file—returned to family, no signs of physical trauma—and always, always wearing something new.
New dress. New shoes once. A stuffed animal the parents said they hadn’t bought.
And every single one of them was closed inside forty-eight hours of the child being found, official explanation vague enough to mean nothing. Misunderstanding regarding custody arrangement. Child had been staying with a family friend. Matter resolved, no charges pursued.
Nobody asks where the child actually was. Nobody follows up on who the family friend even is.
I dig deeper into the parent interviews, the ones actually attached instead of just summarized, and the pattern gets worse the closer I look.
Every set of parents sounds relieved on paper.
But the interview notes tell a different story.
Mrs. Doss appeared reluctant to elaborate further and stated she wished to put the matter behind her.
Mr. Whitfield became agitated when pressed for details and asked that the interview be concluded.
That’s not relief. That’s fear. At least, that’s how it reads to me.
And Morris signed off on all three.
I sit back in my chair hard enough that it creaks, and Thunder lifts his head again, ears up this time, picking up on whatever’s shifted in me even if he doesn’t know what it is.
“Okay,” I say out loud, to nobody, to the empty bullpen. “Okay.”
I start pulling threads. Employment records.
Property filings. Court dockets, because in a town this small, financial trouble tends to leave paper somewhere even when people are careful.
It takes me two hours and four cups of coffee that have long since gone cold, but the same name turns up in all three families’ records.
Douglas Pemberton III.
Owns the building the Doss family rents.
Employs Mr. Whitfield’s brother at the lumber yard he owns sixty percent of.
Held a private note on the Pruitt family’s house back when the bank wouldn’t touch them, the kind of arrangement that looks generous on paper and reads different once you notice the interest rate.
I pull up everything the county’s got on file about him.
Owns sixty percent of downtown, give or take.
A seat on three different boards that decide things like school funding and hospital budgets.
A mansion out past the old quarry road that I’ve driven past exactly twice in my life, both times slowing down without meaning to because the gate alone looks like something out of a different state entirely.
Wife rarely seen in town. Adult children who live somewhere else and don’t visit, according to two separate mentions in old society-page clippings the county historical society scanned for some anniversary project nobody remembers commissioning.
Described, more than once, by the local paper, as a quiet, generous man, if a bit of a lonely figure since his children moved on.
Lonely.
The paper makes his loneliness sound like something the town ought to fix for him.
I don’t have proof of anything. I know that. I know exactly how thin this is—four cases, a pattern that could be coincidence, financial ties that half this town shares with Pemberton because he owns half of it. A defense attorney would eat this alive in about four minutes.
But it’s the same feeling I had standing over Erik Halvorsen’s body. The same feeling I had staring at a ring in an evidence bag on County Road 9. A hunch won’t hold up in court. It ought to be enough to justify asking a few more questions.
I photograph the school photo clipped to Addison’s file with my phone before I know why I’m doing it—round face, missing a front tooth, hair in two uneven pigtails her mother probably did herself that morning without knowing what the afternoon would bring. I look at it a long time.
Then I go find Morris.
His office light’s still on, which doesn’t surprise me. Man hasn’t slept a full night since this case broke either, and it shows in the gray under his eyes when he waves me in without looking up from whatever he’s signing.
“Got something,” I say, and I don’t waste time working up to it, because I’ve learned that’s not how Morris likes his bad news delivered. “I think it’s worth pulling Douglas Pemberton in for questioning.”
The pen stops moving.
For a second, he doesn’t say anything at all. Just sits there with his hand still on the page, not looking at me, and the silence stretches long enough that I keep talking to fill it, which I realize soon is a mistake.
“Not as a suspect,” I say. “Just as someone who might have information. He’s connected to at least three other cases over the past several years, all girls the same age as Addison, all missing four to seven days, all—”
“Stop.”
He says it quietly. That’s what makes it land harder than if he’d shouted it. Morris usually raises his voice when he’s angry. This is worse.
“Chief—”
“I said stop.” He sets the pen down, finally looks up, and whatever’s behind his eyes isn’t the folksy, patient man who’s been handing me wisdom off the corner of my desk for a year.
It’s something colder. “You are not going anywhere near Douglas Pemberton. Not for questioning, not for a friendly chat, not for anything. That’s a direct order, Officer Carpenter. ”
“I’m not accusing him of anything. I just think—”
“I don’t care what you think.” His voice climbs now, filling the small office, loud enough that I glance instinctively toward the door even though there’s nobody left in the building to hear it.
“You don’t understand how this town works.
You’ve been back, what, a year? You think you know this county better than I do after thirty-eight years wearing this badge? ”
“I think four little girls and a pattern nobody’s looked at—”
“That man’s lawyers will tie this department up in litigation so fast we won’t be able to afford paperclips by the time they’re done, and you know what happens then?
We lose funding. We lose the grant that pays for the new cruisers, the one that pays half your salary.
You want to explain to this town why the police department went under because Officer Carpenter had a hunch? ”
“This isn’t about funding.”