Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 103027 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 515(@200wpm)___ 412(@250wpm)___ 343(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103027 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 515(@200wpm)___ 412(@250wpm)___ 343(@300wpm)
Sylvie laughed and followed him down the hall. I turned to see Maddox and Wren watching me, Wren’s arms crossed over her chest, one eyebrow raised.
“Hey,” I said. “How was your time off? You and Shade get into any trouble?”
“None we’re telling you about,” she said with a smirk. She let the teasing expression fade, her mouth curving into a genuine smile. “Actually, I called Quinn Sawyer to ask if she could recommend a good overnight hike, and she ended up inviting us out her way.”
“Did she go with you?” I asked. I’d met Quinn, along with the rest of the Sawyers, a few months ago when we’d helped stop the killer who’d targeted them after their father’s murder. They weren’t what I’d expected for a family of billionaires. The head of the family used to be on Cooper’s team at Sinclair Security, and Quinn’s husband Hawk had worked here with him. I’d noticed Wren and Quinn in conversation when they ran into each other when we were there.
“She did,” Wren said. “She brought Ginger, her Malinois, but made Hawk stay home. Said it was a girls’ trip.”
“I bet he liked that,” I said, remembering that Hawk had watched over his very capable wife as acutely as his namesake animal.
Wren shoved her hands in her back pockets. “He was pretty cool, though that was probably because she was going with Shade and me. He knows me from before and said that, given the three of us that he knows, he could guess that Shade was a lot deadlier than she looked. Shade busted out laughing.”
My eyebrows shot up. Shade was not known for her laughter. “She laughed? Like out loud?”
“For a whole three seconds,” Wren confirmed. “We had a good time. It was relaxing.”
“Dude,” Maddox said, shaking his head at Wren, “it was fifty degrees and drizzling the whole time you were in the mountains. I checked the weather. I don’t get how hiking up a mountain all day carrying a pack and then camping in the rain is relaxing.”
Wren sent him a sneer that shouted younger sister. “That’s because you consider it camping if your sheets have less than a five-hundred-thread-count.”
“Exactly,” Maddox said. “I can sleep anywhere, but when I have the option, I appreciate civilization. Like a normal human.”
“Nothing about you is normal,” Wren teased. Turning to me, she said, “I went through the bin you brought back from the post office.”
Maddox and I followed her to the cubicle where she’d left the mail bin. Inside, the junk mail was neatly stacked, the envelope Silas had left on the top.
“Other than the envelope, there’s nothing in here,” she said. “We’ll save everything just in case, but I’m 99.9 percent confident the letter was the only thing he needed you to see. And he had to know you were going to find it. Soon.”
“Because,” Maddox added, “the postmistress told you she’d been about to contact you to re-up the rental fee, so you would have known the box existed within a few weeks, even if you hadn’t gone down there.”
“He must want you to track down the clue,” Wren said.
She picked up the envelope and pulled out the sheet of paper inside. “It says internal, missing persons. But these numbers, which look to me like they could be a birth date, and these letters, which could be part of a name, don’t exist in any of our missing persons files. They don’t exist, as far as I can tell, in any of our case files from Creed Global at all.”
“Well, fuck,” I said. “I guess it was too much to hope it would be easy.”
“Right?” Wren said, lifting an eyebrow. She tucked back a piece of blonde hair that had slipped from her stubby ponytail. “I searched every way I could think. Nothing.”
“I wonder,” I said, looking at the letters in the code. “Delsh. I think we can agree that’s not a name.”
“Part of a name, maybe,” Maddox said. “But yeah, it’s nothing on its own.”
“I wonder what—” Wren asked, squinting down at the paper.
I tapped the letters. “S H as in Shaw?”
“Doesn’t say Emily or M,” Wren said. “No. And the Sh doesn’t mean Shaw necessarily. It’s just— We have a case, someone linked to Silas, with a last name that starts with Sh, and then this code. It could be related. It’d be easier to know if we could figure out what the numbers mean.”
“True,” I said. “I don’t understand why Silas would make it this difficult.”
“He disappeared,” Maddox said, rolling his neck as if aggravated. “He’s making everything difficult.”
“You don’t know that,” Wren snapped. “Silas has never—” She cut off as I jolted and craned my neck to see if Sylvie was coming back.
That was the second time Wren had said Silas’s name too loudly.
“What?” she asked, and then, as if she put the pieces together, she scowled up at me. “Eli, have you not told her?”