Chapter 15
The coffee was already on his desk when Gabe got back from the harbor.
Maggie, his indispensable desk sergeant, had a gift for this—leaving things without making a production of it.
It sat on a napkin next to a stack of incident reports he hadn’t asked for and didn’t need, because Maggie had already sorted them.
The woman ran the station the way a good sergeant ran a platoon—quietly, completely, and with an air of mild disappointment in the commanding officer that kept him honest.
He sat down and pulled up the Elena Whitfield file. The unofficial one—the browser tab he kept minimized behind the permanent chief application, which itself stayed minimized behind the incident reports,
He ran the searches he ran every morning.
Missing persons. Incident reports within a hundred-mile radius of the facility.
Vehicle registrations connected to Pirelli, to Pacific Crest, to the Whitfield name.
All through official channels, all within his authority, all producing exactly nothing new—which was its own kind of data.
The silence around Elena Whitfield was maintained, deliberate, and expensive.
You didn’t get this kind of clean without someone making calls.
Ellie Torres appeared in his doorway.
“You’ve been running the same searches for three days,” she said.
“They’re different searches.”
“They’re the same searches with different keywords.” She leaned against the door frame. “Whatever this is, Gabe—don’t carry it alone.”
She left before he could answer, which was her way of saying she didn’t need one.
He stared at the screen. The cursor blinked. The rain did its thing against the windows. Haven Cove in January was a town built for patience, and Gabe was running out of it.
At ten o’clock he closed his office door, pulled up the secure video link Tom had configured, and waited for the team to appear on his screen.
It materialized in pieces—a kitchen table covered in laptops and coffee cups, the remains of what looked like takeout, and four people who’d been awake longer than they should have been.
Cara sat closest to the camera, her face composed.
He eyed her critically, noting her tight posture, and the lack of sparkle in her eyes.
“Morning,” Gabe said.
“We need to talk about Derek Voss,” Cara said.
She laid it out. Voss had called that morning—early, before coffee, which Gabe took as a sign of either aggression or poor manners. Probably both. Demanding to know if they’d take him on as client. Cara told him no.
“He said, ‘If you’re thinking you’re gonna grab Elena for yourself, beware. Graham will bury you. And if he doesn’t, I will.’” Cara’s voice was even. Her eyes were not.
Tom stopped typing and looked up. “My turn.” He turned his laptop to face the camera. “I’ve been looking at Dr. Pirelli’s phone activity.”
He paused. Tom was deciding how much to tell an acting chief of police about how he’d obtained information that no civilian should have access to.
“Publicly available metadata,” Tom announced, with the careful enunciation of a man constructing a legal fiction in real time.
“Of course,” Gabe said.
“Cell tower records. Aggregated. Anonymized.” Tom’s fingers were still moving on the keyboard, which meant the careful enunciation was for Gabe’s benefit and the real work was happening underneath.
“The kind of thing anyone with a reasonable understanding of publicly available telecommunications data could access.”
“Tom. Relax. You’re currently out of my jurisdiction. Just tell me what you found.”
Tom pulled up a map on the shared screen.
A scatter of red dots along the Oregon coast, clustered between Pacific Crest and the crash site.
“Pirelli’s been in contact with an unidentified number.
A burner. Multiple calls a day—sometimes six, seven—since the night Elena disappeared.
The call patterns are erratic, middle of the night, early morning. ”
Reagan leaned over Tom’s shoulder to point at something on the map—a cluster of dots near the coast road.
Her hair brushed his cheek. Neither of them moved.
Neither of them seemed to notice, which told Gabe everything he needed to know about what was happening there.
He filed it in the same mental drawer where he kept Cara’s invisible past and Wade’s too-casual references to classified training.
“Could the burner be Graham Whitfield’s?” Gabe asked.
“I don’t think so.” Wade interjected, arms still folded. “Whitfield uses lawyers. Security firms. I guarantee you the man’s never touched a burner phone in his life.”
Gabe agreed. Graham Whitfield was the kind of man who paid other people to have conversations he didn’t want traced.
A burner phone was too direct. Too desperate.
This was someone operating outside Graham’s structure—which meant either someone acting on their own or someone Graham didn’t know about.
Both bad options.
“Could be Voss,” Cara said. “He’s already demonstrated he has his own agenda.”
"Could be someone we haven't identified yet," Tom said. He pulled up a second overlay on the map — a timeline. "I'll keep monitoring. If they set up a meet, we'll know."
Gabe studied the map. The red dots made a corridor — a search pattern, he realized. Someone was methodically working the coast road between Pacific Crest and the crash site. The same ground the team was covering, from the other direction.
Two groups looking for the same woman.
“Do it,” Gabe said. “Monitor the next exchange. Get what you can.” He paused. The cop in him wanted to add caveats—legal ones, procedural ones, the kind of guardrails he’d spent twenty years building and maintaining. Instead, he said: “And be careful. All of you.”
The call ended. The screen went dark. Gabe sat in the empty station with his cold coffee and the knowledge that somewhere up the coast, five people were doing the work he couldn’t do, using methods he couldn’t sanction, chasing a woman the system refused to acknowledge was missing.
He pulled up the permanent chief application. The cursor blinked at the first field. He stared at it the way he stared at it every day—not with reluctance, exactly. More like the feeling you got standing at the edge of a high dive. The water was fine. The fall was the problem.
He minimized it.
Outside, the rain fell on Haven Cove with the steady, indifferent patience of a coast that would outlast every decision he made or didn’t make. He picked up his coffee. Stone cold, with faint, oily streaks curving across the top. He drank it anyway.