Page 21 of Hunted in the Silence

She thought about one second past the natural end of an exchange, and what it meant or didn’t mean, and how long she was going to be able to keep treating it as something simple and casual when it didn’t feel that way at all.

She turned the kitchen light on.

There was work to do tomorrow. That was what mattered.

That was the only thing that mattered.

She almost believed it.

Chapter 8

Ruth Marsh lived on Carver Street in a small yellow house with a concrete porch and a wind chime that had lost most of its chimes, leaving three aluminum tubes to knock quietly against each other in the morning cold. The yard was tidy, making it clear she took pride in things even without having much time to spare for them. A ceramic pot beside the front steps held the dried stalks of summer flowers that hadn’t been cleared yet. A mat that said WELCOME in faded letters, worn pale at the center from use.

Cole sat in the car for a moment after he parked. Brynn was already there, her own car at the curb ahead of his. She was standing on the sidewalk in a dark coat with her hands in her pockets, watching him pull up with patient stillness. Her dark auburn hair was down, and the morning had put color in her face, two points of rosy-red along her cheekbones, and she looked less tired than he had any right to expect given what he knew her night had probably looked like.

He got out, and she fell into step beside him without preamble.

“How do you want to handle this?” he asked quietly, the two of them moving up the front walk.

“Let me take the lead on the personal side,” she said. “You handle the case information. Between us we can make sure she gets the whole picture without it hitting her all at once.”

He nodded. He’d been thinking the same thing and was glad she’d said it first, because it meant they were working from the same idea on what Ruth Marsh was going to need.

He knocked.

The woman who opened the door was in her late sixties, small and upright, with Caitlin’s bone structure in her face and the tired alertness of someone who hadn’t slept properly in days. She was dressed, hair combed, a dish towel over one shoulder that she’d clearly forgotten was there. Her eyes moved from Cole to Brynn and back rapidly, as if expecting either very bad news or nothing, and wasn’t certain which of those she preferred.

“Mrs. Marsh,” Cole said. “I’m Special Agent Cole Maddox with the FBI. This is Brynn Holt from the Blackridge Victim Advocacy Center. May we come in?”

At the word FBI, all the color went out of her face in the same way Cole had watched happen in doorways before, that immediate and total physical response to the thing you’d been dreading becoming real.

“You found her,” she said. Not a question. Her voice was very steady, which was its own kind of breaking.

“We have information about Caitlin,” Cole said. “We’d like to share it with you inside. There are things we need to talk about, and we’d like to do that somewhere you can sit down.”

Ruth stepped back and let them in.

The living room was small and warm and smelled of coffee and the faint lavender of something cleaned recently. Photographs covered one wall in an arrangement that had been added to over time, the frames slightly mismatched, the photographs spanning decades. Cole saw Caitlin in several of them, charting her from infancy to a school photograph that looked recent, a girl with dark eyes and a sideways smile that held a private joke in it.

He looked away from the photographs.

Brynn had already moved to sit beside Ruth on the sofa rather than across from her, a choice so natural it looked unrehearsed, though Cole understood it was neither but rather something built from years of knowing what a person needed before they knew it themselves. She angled her body toward the older woman, not crowding her but present, in the way that said I am not leaving this couch until you are ready for me to.

Ruth was gripping the ends of the dish towel in both hands that was still draped over her shoulder.

Cole dived in, telling her what they knew. He did it carefully, giving her time to absorb each piece before delivering the next one. Caitlin had been identified as part of an ongoing federal investigation into human trafficking. She was alive. They had confirmed visual contact within the past thirty-six hours. She had not been abandoned or harmed beyond what they could account for, as far as they could determine. They were actively working to locate her.

Ruth absorbed each sentence with a stillness that was more frightening than tears would have been. The dish towel twisted in her hands.

When he finished, she was quiet for a long moment. Cole waited, because rushing this would cost more than the time.

“She’s alive,” Ruth said finally, a heavy sense of relief in that small detail evidence in her voice.

“Yes,” Cole said. “We’re confident of that.”

Ruth closed her eyes. Something moved across her face, something that was part grief and relief and fury all moving through her at the same time. Then she opened her eyes and looked at Brynn as if she were the fixed point.

“How could this happen?” Ruth’s voice cracked for the first time, a fault line opening. “She was safe. I kept her safe. Her mother was gone by the time Caitlin was five, and I have spent nine years keeping that girl safe, and I did everything right, I—” She stopped. The towel twisted tighter.