Chapter 7
The station was too quiet. Nothing happened on most days, if Gabe was honest, but Fridays had a quality of stillness that made the clock on the wall sound like it was making a point.
He sat at his desk with a coffee that had gone lukewarm and the permanent chief position application open on his screen.
The cursor blinked at the top of the first field.
It had been blinking there for three weeks.
He minimized it and opened the Elena Whitfield file instead, which was not an improvement in terms of his blood pressure but was at least interesting.
He checked his phone. Nothing from Cara.
They’d left early—Cara, Wade, Tom, Reagan—coast highway north, Portland first, then the facility.
By now they’d be past Salem. Maybe farther.
Driving toward a private wellness center on the Oregon coast where a woman had vanished into a January storm, and he was sitting here watching a cursor blink.
He picked up the phone, put it down, and picked it up again. Nothing.
Cara was good at reading people. But being good at reading people didn’t make you bulletproof. And something about this case had edges he couldn’t see yet.
She was driving toward those edges right now. Without him. Because the badge on his desk meant he couldn’t get in that car.
Ellie Torres appeared in his doorway without knocking.
She leaned against the frame with her arms crossed and studied him.
Ellie was too talented for a five-officer station in a coastal town, and they both knew it.
She’d come to Haven Cove after her mother’s death, and she’d stayed because the town had a way of doing that to people—getting its hooks in gently, one potluck and one borrowed cup of sugar at a time, until you looked up and realized you’d stopped looking for the exit.
“Are you putting in for the permanent position?”
No preamble. No warm-up. That was Ellie.
“Still thinking about it,” he said.
She scoffed—with her whole face, an event that involved her eyebrows, her mouth, and a slight tilt of her head that communicated an entire paragraph of opinion. “It’s yours if you want it. And I want you to want it, to be clear.”
He looked at her. She looked back with the patience of someone who could outwait a glacier.
“You’re carrying something,” she said. Quieter now. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s been sitting on you all week. If you need to talk, I’m here.”
He didn’t. Couldn’t—couldn’t tell his best officer that the reason he was checking his phone every five minutes was because a team of civilians was driving toward a potentially dangerous situation on the Oregon coast, and the woman leading them was someone he had feelings about that he hadn’t named.
Feelings that had started as professional curiosity and become something considerably less professional, and he was a man who’d built his career on the line between personal and professional, and that line was getting harder to find.
“I appreciate that,” he said. And meant it.
Ellie shifted gears with the ease of someone who knew when to push and when to leave a door open.
“Charity potluck at the church Saturday night. Hendersons are organizing. Whole town.” She paused.
“I’m bringing my grandmother’s empanadas.
They took second at the Tillamook County Fair, which was a travesty, but I’m not bitter. ”
“You sound a little bitter.”
“The woman who won used store-bought pastry dough, Gabe. Store. Bought.” She shook her head with the gravity of someone describing a federal crime. “Anyway. Saturday. You should come.”
The potluck. The Hendersons. Ellie’s empanadas and her righteous indignation about pastry dough. This town kept offering him a life, and he kept standing at the threshold with his hand on the doorknob, unable to decide whether he was coming or going.
“I’ll think about it,” he said.
“You should,” she said. And left.
The station settled back into its Friday quiet. Gabe looked at the minimized application. Looked at the Elena file. Looked at his phone.
Still nothing from Cara.
He grabbed his jacket.
The official justification was the patrol route.
The actual justification was that he’d lose his mind if he sat at that desk for one more minute listening to the clock make its point.
He drove the harbor loop, which took twelve minutes and produced nothing of law enforcement interest, and was heading back toward Main Street when he spotted Voss’s car—a silver Audi, because of course—parked near the waterfront.
Gabe pulled into the lot two rows back and cut the engine.
No official reason to be here. No probable cause, no warrant, no active investigation he could point to on paper.
Just instinct and a slow Friday and years of fieldwork that had taught him to trust the itch at the back of his neck when something didn’t sit right.
The Bureau had drilled the patience into him—the ability to sit in a vehicle for hours and watch a door and think about nothing.
He sat. He waited. He was good at that. Hunting fellow cops for the Bureau, he had to be.
He’d been good at it in Philadelphia, sitting outside a row house in Kensington for fourteen hours while a suspect decided whether or not to come home.
He’d been good at it in that parking garage in Baltimore, three days before his last big case broke open.
Patience wasn’t a virtue for Gabe. It was a professional skill, and right now it was the only one he was allowed to use.
Voss appeared near the harbor railing. Checking his phone.
Shifting his weight, adjusting his collar, glancing at the parking lot entrance—the restless energy of a man waiting for someone he didn’t want to see.
He hadn’t shown this at the bakery or the diner.
Whatever was coming, Voss knew it wasn’t friendly.
A black limo pulled into the lot. Tinted windows, recent model, the kind of vehicle that cost more than Gabe’s annual salary and was designed to communicate exactly that. It parked twenty yards from Voss. The driver stayed behind the wheel, engine running.
The rear door opened.
Older man. Silver-haired, mid-sixties, expensive overcoat that had never been near a rack.
He moved with the authority of someone accustomed to controlling rooms before he entered them—unhurried, deliberate, each step landing with the weight of a man who hadn’t opened his own door in years.
Gabe didn’t recognize him. But he recognized the type.
Money. Power. The composure that came from decades of people stepping aside.
The two men faced each other near the railing.
Gabe couldn’t hear words from this distance, but he’d spent his career reading body language.
Voss started defensive—arms crossed, weight on his back foot, chin up.
The older man was controlled at first. Gestures clipped.
Posture rigid. The body language of two people with history, and none of it good.
Then something Voss said broke through.
The older man’s composure didn’t crack—it detonated. He lunged forward, both hands closing around Voss’s throat, and Derek Voss went backward into the harbor railing with a sound Gabe could hear from fifty yards away.
Gabe was already out of his car. Badge in his hand.