Into the Fading Twilight (Starlight Grove, #2) (20)
Me:
So high-maintenance.
Maverick:
I know my worth.
I waited for a moment, hoping Orion would jump in on his own, but he’d been quieter lately. Especially after everything that had happened with Nova and Brae. Having a monster in our midst yet again had reminded him too much of our past. Of our monster. The one he’d killed to save us all.
Me:
Orion? You in?
Maverick:
He’s too busy brooding. Planning booby traps should anyone dare to approach his house. Scowling at puppies.
Mav’s way of dealing, through and through. Needling Orion into a response.
Orion:
I’m working.
He was always working. Orion had turned his talent for mapmaking into a true art, creating pieces that often went for over six figures. But he used his skills for our brother venture for free. He was the one who mapped out the locations we searched for missing persons, and over time, he’d become skilled at geographical profiling as well.
Dex:
Take a break so you don’t get carpal tunnel.
Wylder:
You know if you hit the two-week mark, one of us is coming over for proof of life.
We all waited for a moment.
Nothing.
Maverick:
Okay, change of plans. Family dinner at Orion’s. Invite Little Badass and Supernova.
Dex:
Don’t call my fiancée Little Badass.
Maverick:
What? I didn’t say HOT Little Badass like I wanted to.
Dex:
Mav, I will empty your bank accounts, post photos of you dressed up as a fairy for Sky’s birthday all over your social media, and change your ringtone to “Baby One More Time.”
Maverick:
Those fairy wings make my biceps look huge. I’m down with it. And I love a little Britney Spears.
I shook my head.
Me:
Stop trying to use my kid to get laid.
Orion:
If you all shut up, I’ll come for an hour.
Victory was ours. It just worried me how hard it had been to make it happen.
Sliding my phone into the dock on my desk, I got back to work. Clicking on the file that read Travis Moore, I took in all the subfiles: Confirmed Victims. Suspected Victims. Evidence Results. Photographs. Maps.
It went on and on. We had nine confirmed victims, all of them deceased—except for Nova.
My back molars ground together at the reminder of how close she’d come to not making it. “Let me go.” Her voice was the barest whisper in my memory.
Because Travis had become obsessed with keeping one of his victims alive. He wanted the high of knowing she was still out there, right under everyone’s noses. And he’d used that life to mess with Brae, leaving a bloody locket on her door, recording Nova screaming. It had been a study in different kinds of torture.
I shoved that down and clicked on the Suspected Victims file. I had dossiers on about a dozen possibles—ones I had found while working in my official capacity here at the Forest Service and others my brothers were helping me gather on our less-than-official mission with the Hourglass Network.
The work I did for both was fairly similar; it was just that the Hourglass Network had far fewer rules and paperwork. While Dex was more than happy to walk the morally gray line of hacking into any databases we might need, I never crossed that line. I had access to countless law enforcement registries, but I never used them for any unofficial means. I could ignore how Dex happened upon certain information, but that was as far as I was willing to go.
That didn’t mean I didn’t contribute. I brought a law enforcement eye to the cases, along with my tracking abilities. And when it came to this particular case, I also knew what avenues had already been explored so we didn’t have to cover them twice.
Of the nine confirmed victims, seven had been buried across Travis’s property or nearby, nestled in the national forest outside of Starlight Grove. He’d lived in one of the handful of properties grandfathered into having land rights, and the fact that there were only about five cabins within a hundred-mile radius had given him the privacy he needed to create a house of horrors.
But we’d found one farther away—a solo camper, backpacking through an area we thought might’ve crossed with Travis’s hunting grounds. My brothers and I had combined our skills, using geographic profiling, victim profiling, computer history, and my on-the-ground tracking to find a burial site. It had been so off the beaten path that I was sure Travis had thought no one would find it. So he’d left more than a little DNA behind.
And that victim told me we could have more.
A knock sounded on my open office door, and I swiveled to take in my boss. Sherri Goodwin was a take-no-shit leader who cut right to the heart of things. And it didn’t hurt that she had the kind of intelligence that brought about more case closures than any other officer in the Forest Service’s history.
“Morning,” she said, greeting me while cupping a mug in her hands and looking just a little tired.
One corner of my mouth pulled up. “Still on the herbal tea kick?”
Sherri scowled at me, her brown eyes narrowing. Her features hinted at her Karuk ancestry, one of the tribes indigenous to our Northern California area. “Don’t remind me. I’m trying to convince myself that this is black coffee with all the caffeine in the world.”