Page 14 of Carry on Wayward Son

Satisfied with his performance, I gave him the signal to release, and he tipped his head back, tossing the cookie in the air and snapping it between his jaws. The whole thing was gone in seconds, and he looked at me for more.

“I mean, you could do something radical and chew.”

Deeply unimpressed with that suggestion, he huffed and lay back down at my feet.

I dug my own pastry out, inhaling the cinnamon spice mix before taking a bite and moaning. Damn, that was a good cinnamon roll. For a few minutes, I focused only on the food and the truly excellent coffee. Then I finally let my mind wander.

The thing that always struck me, working cold cases, was how quickly the missing faded from the conversation of the people left behind. A year, sometimes two, and then the name shifted from present tense to past tense, the posters came down, and what had been a person became a cautionary tale or a statistic or silence. It happened faster than anyone who hadn’t watched it up close would believe.

But Gwen was still present tense here, in a way. Even from the woman who’d gotten her story wrong, who’d sat in a warm bakery and implied that Rios Carrera’s proximity made it reasonable to judge him guilty. Even so, her name was still in the room, still attached to something unresolved rather than filed away. That was more than I could say for a lot of cases.

I finished my breakfast and the coffee and resumed walking, camera in hand this time. I snapped the Christmas lights against the gray sky. The garlands on the lampposts. The Missing poster in the bistro window and the one on the market’s community board, even the one in the window of Home Port. All of them recently replaced, the colors still true.

The village took about forty minutes to cover properly on foot, Koa ranging at the end of the lead. I’d be back with more intention once I knew what I was actually looking for. Today was just for looking and absorbing.

My phone buzzed with the reminder I’d set. Forty-five minutes until the meeting, and Sutter House sat at the far end of the island.

Time to start the real work.

I called Koa to heel and turned back toward Marsh Street at something close to a jog.

Seven

JACE

I’d done my research on Devon Washington and Unaccounted the same way I did research on everything—thoroughly and without announcing it. Seven seasons of the podcast, a documented solve rate that would make most law enforcement agencies uncomfortable, and a methodology rigorous enough that the cases they’d worked had held up in court. Madden had good instincts about people, and she thought highly of Devon. That was enough for me to take this seriously.

But I hadn’t been able to find out who he was sending. Devon kept his team’s personal information off the public-facing side of the operation, which I respected even as it frustrated me. I’d spent two days trying to run down a name and come up empty, which didn’t happen often enough to be comfortable. I had ways of finding out, but I tried not to use them unless I had a good reason.

The knock came at ten past ten. Sawyer answered the door, and I listened to the murmur of voices in the entryway from where I’d taken up a spot on the hearth, and then she walked in.

The malamute came first, in a service harness now—working animal rather than pet, the shift in his presentation immediately obvious—and she came a step behind him with her dark red hair braided back from her face in a looser style than last night, a camera bag over one shoulder. She did a fast and thorough sweep of the room, noting faces and positions and exits and the geometry of the space, all of it processed before she’d fully crossed the threshold. She made it look like someone taking in a new place for the first time. Most people in the room wouldn’t have noticed it.

I wasn’t most people.

Roy rose from Willa’s feet, thick tail wagging at the prospect of a new friend. The malamute looked at him, ears pivoting forward, nose twitching. Some negotiation happened between them that neither of their people was consulted on, and then Roy lay back down, tail still ticking like a metronome.

The malamute shifted slightly in front of his owner as he turned his attention to assessing the rest of the room.

“Sorry, I’m a bit late. The drive up was longer than I’d budgeted.” The faintest hint of Pacific Northwest flatness underscored her even, unhurried voice. “I’m Layla Murphy.”

Madden stood to handle the introductions, working around the room. Willa. Sawyer. Gabi, who sat on the floor with her back against the sofa, Daniel beside her. Ford in the armchair nearest the window, Bree on the arm of it. Rios. Layla tracked each name, obviously filing things away rather than pretending social ease. As Madden steered her around the room, I couldn’t help but admire the way she moved through space—fluid and contained at once, every step placed with a precision most people didn’t have and didn’t develop without putting in serious time. She knew exactly where her body was in relation to everything around it, and the knowledge had become so habitual it had gone invisible, the way it did after years. Dance or martial arts? I couldn’t place it yet. Both produced that quality of ease, but differently, and something about her made me want to figure out which.

When Madden got to me, Layla looked over. Something moved across her face, there and gone before most people in the room would have registered it.

“Jace Hollingsworth,” Madden said.

Layla looked at me for a beat, those dark brown eyes assessing. “You clean up well.”

That surprised a laugh out of me. “You too.”

The corner of her mouth moved. Behind her, Gabi watched us with undisguised interest, and I made a point of not looking at her.

My sister wasn’t so circumspect. “Y’all know each other?”

“No. We just ran into each other on the beach last night,” Layla explained.

“Oh, so you saw the Grizzly Adams beard.”