Chapter 19
The dryer was making a sound—rhythmic, percussive, the thump-thump-thump of something unbalanced—that Gabe ignored for twenty minutes because fixing it would require bending down, and bending down would require committing to the idea that this was how he spent his Sunday morning.
Laundry. In a house that smelled like dryer sheets and the coffee he’d made two hours ago and forgotten to drink.
The station was closed. Cho and Burkhardt were on call for emergencies, which in Haven Cove on a January Sunday meant Harold Bianchi’s rooster or Mrs. Sanderson’s wind chimes or, if the coast truly outdid itself, a fender bender at the harbor.
Gabe had the day off. It stretched in front of him like a jail sentence.
On the kitchen table, next to the cold coffee: the permanent chief application.
He’d printed it thinking the physical paper might make it feel more real, more like a thing you could pick up and do rather than a cursor blinking on a screen.
It hadn’t worked. The paper sat there with the same patient blankness as the screen version, waiting for him to become the kind of man who filled things out.
He opened the dryer instead. Pulled out the towels. Started folding.
This was his life now. A small house on a quiet street in a town where the most dangerous thing was the weather. Two bedrooms—one he didn’t need. A kitchen he kept clean and a living room he kept spare and a garage where he’d been meaning to build shelves for six months.
He folded a towel. Folded another.
His phone buzzed.
Wade: Six words: We’re okay. Call when you can.
The towel in his hands went still.
We’re okay was what you said when the alternative had been on the table. And the text was from Wade—not Cara, not Tom, not the group chat. Wade, who communicated in complete sentences approximately twice a year.
He called Cara. She picked up on the second ring.
She gave him the debrief.
Gabe listened. Didn’t interrupt.
When she finished, he said: “When did this happen?”
“Last night. Around eight.”
He looked at Wade’s text. The math was simple. And unacceptable.
“Fourteen hours, Cara.”
Silence stretched. He could feel her choosing her words, which made it worse.
“We needed to regroup. Assess. I wasn’t going to call you at midnight with half the story and have you drive four hours on adrenaline and—”
“And what?”
“Get yourself involved past what your badge can survive.”
That stopped him. Because she was right.
And because the reason she hadn’t called wasn’t carelessness or oversight—it was protection.
She was protecting him. The same way he’d been trying to protect her from two hundred miles south.
He recognized his own logic coming out of her mouth—weaponized and precise and completely reasonable—and hated every word of it.
He walked to the front door. Opened it. Stepped onto the porch with the phone still pressed to his ear and nothing useful to say.
Across the road, the tree line was a wall of green and gray, mist threading through the Douglas firs.
"Gabe?" Her voice. Careful.
"Yeah."
"Say something."
"I'm trying to figure out which part to be angry about first."
He walked back inside. A cop in his kitchen. Warm towels in a basket. A job application he couldn't fill out. And the woman he—
He stopped that thought. Rerouted.
"I should have been there," he said.
A beat. She knew it.
Silence stretched. Not the awkward kind. The kind that had weight—the accumulated mass of months of morning coffee and conversations that went to the edge and stopped.
He breathed into the phone. “You’re sure you’re okay?”
“I’m okay.”
They sat in the silence a second too long. Then she disconnected. He stood in his kitchen holding the phone and the ache of a conversation that had ended before the important part.
He pushed the application aside, opened his laptop, and went to work.
The trailhead. Mile marker 47. He ran it through every system he had access to—incident reports, traffic cameras, anything flagged within five miles.
Nothing. No reports filed. No cameras. No record that anything had happened in that parking lot last night.
The spot had been chosen precisely because it was a dead zone.
But he cross-referenced the location with the vehicle data from Pirelli’s crashed car, and a pattern emerged.
Multiple vehicles had been running the coast road corridor between Pacific Crest and the crash site over the past week.
Different makes, different plates, but the same stretch of road, the same hours.
A systematic search. Whoever held the burner phone wasn’t just calling Pirelli.
They were running their own parallel hunt for Elena.
Two groups searching the same coast for the same woman.
His phone buzzed again.
Piper: Need you at the bakery. NOW.
Gabe’s hand tightened on the phone. He texted back.
Is Diane with you?
Three dots. The longest three dots of his life.
Piper: Yes.
On my way.
He drove too fast. Six minutes. Sugar & Salt’s front window glowed warm against the gray day—the display case lit, the OPEN sign glowing, the bakery empty this late on a Sunday. He parked crooked and took the steps two at a time.
Piper waited behind the counter, arms crossed, face white. Not crying—past that, into something harder and more frightening.
Diane stood beside her, one hand on Piper’s shoulder. Her other hand gripped the edge of the counter hard enough to blanch her knuckles.
They were both staring at something on the marble counter, next to the big ceramic bowl of flour Diane used for the morning prep. An envelope. Plain. White. No stamp. No return address. It looked clean and ordinary and wrong.
Neither of them spoke as he crossed the floor and opened it.
Four photographs. Glossy. Shot with a telephoto lens from across streets and through windows, the kind of distance that said professional equipment and patient positioning.
Piper walking to school. Backpack over one shoulder, head tilted down at her phone, the crosswalk on Main Street.
Piper at the harbor. Sitting on the bench where she did her homework when the weather allowed, her face caught mid-laugh at something on her screen.
Piper through the bakery window. Behind the counter, backlit by the display case, handing a bag to a customer. Close enough to count the buttons on her jacket.
Piper from across the street. Walking. Alone. The angle was low, taken from a parked car, and the focus was sharp enough to read the logo on her sneakers.
No note. No demand. No signature.
“It was just here,” Piper said. “I came up from the basement, and it was just…here.”
He met Diane’s eyes over Piper’s head and nodded almost imperceptibly. Whatever it took, Piper would be safe.
He pulled out his cell. “First thing to do is tell your dad.”