“I’m just saying. You look tired.”
He was tired.
But. But. How did you stop being the sheepdog? There were sheep in this life. And there were wolves. He’d heard it in a movie, and it struck him as true. And then there were the men and women on the job—the ones in the squad cars and the ambulances, the firetrucks, those fighting on the front lines at home and overseas. They were guarding the perimeter between bad and good. The sheepdogs, on the lookout for the predators, and bringing the lost lambs back into the fold.
Andrew climbed out of the car, rubbed shyly at his balding head. “Call me if you ever want company again.”
Hunter drove home, through the quiet of Andrew’s middle-class neighborhood, up a rural road to his own house. Claire was always the high earner working in medical sales; that’s why they could afford the big house they had, set back on five acres of land—idyllic with big trees and a stream at the edge of the property. He parked in the garage and killed the engine, checked the mail—all catalogs and fliers—walked inside.
He expected to find his wife at home, in the kitchen with the television on, cooking something or another. Instead there was a note reminding him that she had book club and that there were leftovers in the fridge. He was guiltily glad for it.
He wanted to pull out his old files on the Behr case and didn’t want to do it under the disapproving stare of his wife.
Some of this stuff, Hunt, you just have to let go.
Everyone was all about letting go these days. But, in this world, it seemed to Hunter that way too much was just let go. Pearl—there was no one to hold on to her. And she—a teenage girl, flesh and bone, heart and soul, just disappeared. Hunter prided himself on being the only one holding on to her.
Missing people. Missing children. There was always a big fuss at first. A media feeding frenzy, search parties and helpful volunteers, endless news loops, press conferences with tearful parents. Then, as the days and weeks wore on, leads ran cold, people went back to their lives. They had to. Because the ugly truth was that some things—even people—got lost and were never found. There was a special kind of hell to that for folks. An always waiting, always wondering, end to life as they knew it.
In the spotlessly clean kitchen, he nuked the lasagna Claire had left for him and ate way more than he would have if she’d been there. After he’d finished, going back for seconds and even thirds—Claire would have called him out on his stress eating. He always had a huge appetite after a bad day. After the lasagna, he inhaled a half a box of Girl Scout cookies—Tagalongs—then cleaned up the mess like a good husband.
Upstairs in his office, he climbed the shaky stepladder to reach the high shelf where he kept cold case files and reached for the heavy box, nearly losing his balance. That would be all he needed, to take a fall. That was always the beginning of the end for old guys, wasn’t it? Not that he was so old.
He put the box on the desk that had belonged to his father, a career cop who’d gone all the way to chief before he retired. Hunter was never into politics. He liked the work, wanted to do the job, not sit behind the desk in a fancy uniform, sending other people out into the streets. He and his dad, they didn’t see eye to eye on most things, never really had the chemistry that Hunter had effortlessly with his own children. That was the way of it sometimes. He knew the old man did his best.
The box, beige and sagging, was covered in a thin layer of dust. The particles lifted into the light as he removed the lid, causing him to sneeze. He hadn’t put any attention on Pearl and Stella in a while. He sat in his leather chair and started sifting through the files.
A photo, grainy and fading, of a strawberry-blonde woman smiling tentatively at the camera. High cheekbones, a full mouth, inviting eyes.
Stella Behr, single mother, bookstore owner, was thirty-five years old when she was strangled in her own bed. Hunter didn’t love how, in death, a few details came to define you. But so it was. Young, a bombshell beauty with a string of boyfriends, on the brink of financial ruin. Several of the men in her life questioned and released.
Another photo, a girl with Stella’s eyes but dark, a stillness to her face, a sadness there. Her smile seemed strained. There was a cool prettiness, something reserved.
Stella’s daughter, Pearl, was fifteen. A very smart young woman, according to teachers, grades and test scores. A loner, though. Odd, said more than one of her instructors. A flat affect to her, unemotional. Quiet. Never in trouble, but no teacher’s pet. There was no information about who Pearl’s father might be—nothing in the public records or in the house.
The neighbor, an older woman who was nearly a recluse, saw Pearl leave with Charles Finch, the bookstore manager, the night Stella was murdered. It appeared that she left of her own free will, quietly, neither of them appearing rushed or upset.
Charles Finch was a ghost. That was not his real name; all his employment records had been falsified. Even the car he’d been driving, a restored GTO, was registered to a man who’d been dead for ten years. Stella had apparently been paying him in cash. All her bank accounts were empty. She had a pile of personal debt, owed taxes on the store and on the house. She was months from losing everything.
When the department called in Hunter as part of an initiative to clear cold cases, there was very little—nothing really—to go on. They had a DNA sample and some prints that did not match anything in the system. The neighbor who saw Charles Finch and Pearl leave that night, she couldn’t provide many details, except that Finch was a regular at the house. That he was one of a string of men who came and went. That Pearl was a nice girl, who took out the trash, didn’t run around, and could be seen at her desk doing her homework most nights.
In the movies, there is always one thing that leads the detective to the truth. Even the documentaries and podcasts usually focus on crimes that were somehow, against all odds, solved. A witness comes forward. Technology catches up with evidence left behind. The DNA sample finally hits a match in the system because of another crime.
But the real world was impossibly vast with lots of back alleys and unexplored places. Some crimes went unsolved forever; some people disappeared without a trace.
Almost.
Hunter found the file he was looking for and opened it.
About two years after Stella was killed, and Pearl went missing, another woman was murdered, her teenage daughter disappeared. This was about fifty miles from the Behr home.
Maggie Stevenson, thirty-six, a nurse and a single mother, was strangled in her home, her teenage daughter disappearing the same night. An ex-boyfriend was questioned and released. Very little physical evidence at the scene. A coworker said there was a new man in her life, someone she was excited about. She’d been using a dating site, but there was no evidence that she’d ever met with anyone.
There was a single text on her phone, from a number that was traced to a burner phone.
Can’t wait to finally meet you.
He stared at the pictures in the file. Maggie was another bombshell beauty—same thick, wavy hair and bedroom eyes, darker than Stella but with the same wild vulnerability to her gaze. Her daughter, Grace, cool and slim, long tresses of golden hair, a doll-like sweetness to her face. Another hardworking single mother, murdered, her child disappearing. Maggie had no family, loose friend connections. She had, on the day of her murder, cashed out the meager contents of her accounts—a grand total of about $5000. There were several large unusual charges on her credit card—from Best Buy. From Macy’s. Their case went colder faster than even Stella and Pearl’s.