10. Miles
Ten
Miles
I think this is the first time the house has been so quiet. There’s no TV or music on. The three of us are so focused on what we’re doing.
The only noise in the house is the low hum of laptops and the occasional sound of someone shifting in their chair or setting a drink down on the table. We've been at it since nine. It's nearly one in the morning now, and nobody has suggested stopping.
Mason is on the sofa with his laptop open across his knees, physical copies of three reports spread on the cushion beside him, highlighted in the color system I set up when I first divided the files between us.
Yellow for confirmed facts. Green for witness statements.
Red for anomalies, the things that don't fit.
Declan has the dining table. He works better with space, always has, he needs to be able to lay things out physically and move between them, his mind mapping things in three dimensions rather than on a screen.
He's got a legal pad covered in handwriting I can barely read from here and a cold cup of coffee he keeps picking up and putting back down without drinking.
I'm at my desk in the corner. I have two monitors: the encrypted partition open on the left, my mapping software running on the right.
Every note I make goes straight into the system.
Tagged, time-stamped, and cross-referenced against the existing data points automatically.
It's the setup that took me two years to build properly and which I’ll never fully explain to anyone, including Cain.
There are seven girls on the board. Seven cities. Fourteen months.
"Okay," Mason says without looking up. "Walk me through the Phoenix one again."
"Amber Reyes. Twenty-two. Last seen leaving a bar at eleven forty-seven, confirmed by an external camera.
There was a card transaction twenty-six minutes earlier, she paid her tab, which means she wasn't planning to stay.
The car was found two blocks away, keys in the console," I say, looking through her notes I made.
"Keys in the console," Mason repeats.
"Yeah."
He's quiet for a moment. "She wasn't running."
"No. The camera has her walking out alone. No one follows her out on the footage." I pull the relevant clip up on my screen, scrub to the timestamp. "She turns left out of the door. The camera loses her twelve seconds later at the edge of the frame."
"Where does the left take you?" Mason asks.
"Toward the car park. Which is where her car was found." I tag the note and add it to the route mapping overlay.
Mason exhales through his nose. He picks up the next file.
Declan looks up from the table. "The Colorado girl had the same thing. She made it to the library, login confirms that but never made it out the front."
"She went in the back," I say. "Staff exit. The camera was down."
"Maintenance," Declan says.
"Scheduled three weeks prior. Logged in the system."
"Someone who knew the schedule."
"Or someone who checked." I make another note. Connect it to the Phoenix route. "Either way, they knew the gap was there before she arrived."
Declan writes something on his legal pad and underlines it twice.
Mason leans back against the sofa cushions and looks at the ceiling briefly, which is his thinking position.
"So, we're looking at pre-surveillance," he says.
"We're looking at pre-surveillance," I confirm. "Whoever is doing this walks the locations first, then finds the gaps and waits."
"They’re patient," Declan says.
"Extremely. But finding where they will go next is impossible. They’re hitting all the states, and random cities.” I look at the map with the lights on where girls have been going missing already.
I pull up the geographic overlay and turn my second monitor outward slightly so they can both see it from where they are. Seven cities plotted. The distances between them are mapped. No cluster, no corridor, nothing that says these places were chosen for proximity or convenience.
"There's no pattern in the geography," I say. "Phoenix, Denver, Austin, Nashville, Portland, Charlotte, Minneapolis. Random distribution across six time zones."
Mason turns his head to look at the screen. "Too random?"
"That's what I think."
"Someone is choosing to avoid a pattern, and the police pinpointing anything to look into it,” Declan adds.
"Someone who knows that patterns are what get you caught.
" I tag the overlay and add a note. Geographic randomness appears deliberate, suggesting an awareness of investigative methodology.
And cross-reference it against the camera gap data.
"These aren't crimes of opportunity. Every single one of these was planned.
It seems like the girls were chosen before, then it has been executed with enough care that fourteen months in, and seven separate jurisdictions haven't connected them. "
"But Cain did," Declan says.
We all sit with that for a moment. Cain doesn't explain how he finds things and we’ve learned not to ask.
Mason picks up the Nashville file: Renee Park, twenty-one, nursing student, last seen leaving a restaurant shift. He's had it for the last hour, and I've watched him read it three times, which means something in it keeps pulling him back. "The exit," he says.
"A side street with no camera on that exit."
"Was there ever a camera on that exit?"
I pull the location data. Cross-check against the restaurant's own records, which I accessed through their management software two days ago via a gap in their point-of-sale system. "Originally yes, but it was removed during a renovation eight months before she disappeared."
Mason looks up at me. "Eight months?"
"Eight months."
"So, whoever took her either knew the renovation history or…"
"Or checked before they chose her." I'm already making the note, pulling the thread, connecting it to the Phoenix car park, which had a blind spot created by a new building that went up six months before Amber Reyes disappeared.
"Two locations. Two gaps that were created by construction or renovation before the girls were taken.
They are not natural architectural blind spots; they were changes to the environment that someone factored in. "
Declan is writing fast now, his pen moving in the way it does when something is forming in his mind. "They're watching the locations evolve," he says. "They're not finding existing gaps. They're waiting for gaps to appear."
The room goes quiet.
That's it. That's the thing I've been circling for since I got the file without quite landing on it, the face in the static. Hearing Declan say it out loud makes it lock into place with the satisfaction of a correct answer that cost something to find.
I pull up the timeline overlay. Then I map the construction and renovation dates against the disappearance dates for each city. It takes eleven minutes. When it’s finished, I turn both monitors fully outward.
"Look at the gap between each environmental change and each disappearance," I say.
Mason leans forward, Declan stands up from the table and comes around to see it properly.
There’s a gap of three to five months every time. The gap is created, whether by a new construction, camera removal, renovation, or maintenance schedule, and then three to five months later, a girl disappears from that location.
There are three to five months of watching, waiting, and planning.
"That's not one person," Mason says quietly.
"No," I agree. "One person doesn't have the bandwidth to watch seven different cities simultaneously."
"So, we're looking at…"
"An operation," Declan says. The word lands flat and heavy.
I make a note. Tag it. Cross-reference it against every data point in the partition and let the system run its connections while I sit back and think about what we've just confirmed.
A network of people who are patient enough to watch locations for months before they move. Careful enough to keep seven separate jurisdictions from connecting the cases.
"Miles." Mason's voice has a different quality now. "These girls, where do you think they are?"
I look at the seven photographs on the board. I still have to add the other girls' images but thought I would work on these seven first to get a pattern, a clue and then I can see if the other girls fit the same pattern.
"I don't know yet," I say, which is true. The other answer, the one that's been sitting underneath all of this since the first time I read the files properly, I keep to myself because saying it out loud doesn't help anyone tonight. What helps is staying on the research and the cases.
Mason nods once, then he goes back to the file in his hand.
Declan returns to the table. Picks up his pen. Looks at his legal pad and then starts writing again.
I turn back to my screens.
The partition is running the new connection data we just found.
The construction timelines mapped against the disappearance dates.
The system is building a visual model of what Declan named as an operation.
They are patient, organized and careful, moving across the country in a way that doesn’t look like a pattern.
I watch it build and make notes where the model needs human judgment rather than just data, and the places where the system flags a connection but can't weigh it correctly without context.
Forty minutes pass.
Then my passive alert pings.
It's quiet, just a small indicator light on the bottom right of my left monitor, it’s an unobtrusive notification I've set up because it goes off at unpredictable hours and I don't want it pulling Mason's attention. It’s Sadie's university portal, and she's logged on.
I glance at it, then look back at the case files.
The construction timeline is sitting there, half-built, and the most significant development in three weeks of working this case. I'm in the middle of something that matters, something that Cain told me to take it seriously and I am taking it seriously.
I glance at the alert again.
"You've got that look," Mason says, without looking up from the Nashville file.