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“Linda, can you get Hart’s location? I’ll take my cruiser and see if he stopped at home.” The detective spoke calmly, smiled at the woman behind the desk. She gave no outward signs of distress or worry, but Jack could read it on her all the same.

Because this was out of the norm, and he knew he didn’t like it, and he wasn’t even Hart’s partner.

“What can we do?” he asked her.

“Go home, Sheriff,” Laurel said sharply, but when she turned to walk back into the station, Jack followed and so did Chloe.

“You’ve got two Sunrise deputies right here. Let us help.”

“Sheriff, you know as well as I do you’re both too involved in whatever this is to help in a professional capacity.”

“I actually don’t know that,” Jack replied.

“Besides, I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation for all this,” she continued, clearly ignoring him. But she didn’t stop them from following her out the back exit of the station into the parking lot, which had personal cars and cruisers littered throughout.

Laurel strode toward some point only she knew, but then she came to an abrupt halt. In the dark, under the parking lot lights, one cruiser sat with its driver’s-side door wide open. For a strange moment, they all stood there in stunned silence, looking at it.

“One of you go inside and tell Linda to get security footage of the parking lot up,” Laurel said, her voice dead calm though she’d gone a little pale.

Chloe immediately turned and jogged back inside. Jack stayed with Laurel.

“How long would that have been like that without anyone noticing? Not long, right?”

Laurel shook her head as she approached the car. “Hard to say. Hart told me he was leaving about an hour ago. There hasn’t been a shift change, so it’s possible no one’s been out here, but it’s also possible he didn’t leave right after he told me.”

Jack peered into the open door of the car. There didn’t seem to be signs of a struggle, but it was shadowy and dark in the car. Jack pulled out his phone and switched on the flashlight mode at the same time Laurel did.

Nothing appeared amiss, really, aside from the wide-open door. “Maybe he just forgot something?” It seemed like a leap—but then again, so did immediately jumping to conclusions about an open car door.

“No reason to leave the door open and kill the battery. Unless it was some kind of emergency.” Laurel did a slow turn, eyeing the entire parking lot illuminated only by a few light towers. “It was still light out when he told me he was leaving. He’s not... Whatever this is, it’s not like him. Something happened.”

Jack did his own looking around the parking lot. Bent County was hardly a bustling metropolis. Even though there was a police station right there, it wouldn’t be impossible for something to happen out here and no one would see. Even if it was light out.

“He didn’t get taken out of the police station’s parking lot in broad daylight without someone seeing,” Laurel said disgustedly, clearly more to herself than to Jack. “Without some kind of struggle. I don’t know what this is, but it’s not that.”

Jack could hear what she was really doing: trying to talk herself out of thinking the worst. All while the worst was sitting right there in front of them.

“The footage is going to give us the answers we need. Let’s go watch it.”

“I don’t like this,” she muttered. “I told him we should have kept that scrapbook. It’s all part of the Brink case. Not that I should be telling you this. Why are you even here?”

“Chloe might be a deputy at my department, but—”

“Come on, Sheriff. She’s a lot more than your deputy. Anyone with eyes can see that.”

Before Jack could react to that , Laurel was striding inside. Chloe met them halfway down the hall. “Linda says they’re getting the footage up on the second floor.”

Laurel looked at Chloe, then at Jack, then sighed. “All right, follow me.” She took them up a set of stairs and then into a larger room clearly used for meetings. A man Jack recognized, though couldn’t quite come up with a name, sat at a laptop.

He eyed Chloe and Jack, then Laurel. “Want me to put it up on the screen?”

Laurel nodded. In a few seconds, security footage of the police station parking lot showed up on the screen.

“What time you want?” he asked Laurel.

“Let’s start at six. That’s a little before when he told me he was leaving.”

The footage sped up, people coming and going in quick time. When the man hit Play, the parking lot was empty aside from cars. Then Hart appeared. He had a box tucked under his arm.

“That’s the scrapbook,” Laurel explained, pointing to the box.

Hart opened his cruiser door, leaned in and put the box down, presumably on the passenger seat, though that wasn’t fully visible from the camera angle. Then, before he slid into the driver’s seat, he stopped, straightened and looked off into the distance with a puzzled frown.

Everyone held their breath as he turned and immediately began to jog off to the right—and quickly off-screen.

“We need footage of that side of the building,” Laurel instructed the man at the computer.

“That side’s a dead zone, Detective. We’ve only got cameras at entrances and exits—there aren’t any in that corner.”

Laurel swore.

“Does he see something, or does someone call out to him?” Chloe said, pointing to the screen. “Because he was getting in, but something stopped him. So someone had to have seen him. Something had to have gotten his attention.”

“It’s got to be a noise, right?” Jack returned. “He’s getting ready to get in the car. Head down, then he looks over.”

“But he leaves the scrapbook,” Laurel added. “Keep rolling the footage,” she told the man. “Because that scrapbook isn’t there anymore.”

Which meant sometime between when Hart went out of the parking lot and Jack and Laurel went out to the car, someone took it.

They watched. No one suggested they fast-forward the footage. They’d all investigated too many cases to let impatience get in the way of good police work. Seconds seemed to drag by, and tension settled into the air like a lead weight, wrapping around each of them as nothing happened on the screen. Minutes of just the trees blowing in the breeze and the sun slowly setting.

And then, finally , something showed up on the screen. A small figure, shrouded in a dark hoodie, moved quietly and stealthily up to the car, scooped up the scrapbook, and walked off the opposite side of the screen.

Laurel swore again. “I knew we should have kept it.” She glared at Chloe. “What’s in it?”

“How the hell should I know? I didn’t even know it was in that chest.”

“It’s been in her garage, undisturbed for years. Anyone who wanted it could have gotten it easily. For years.”

“Not if the person who wanted it was in prison,” Laurel returned.

“If my father wanted it, he knew where it was and how to get to it. He could have sent Ry, and I wouldn’t have thought twice about my brother hanging around my place. Detective, you can look into my father for anything you want, but it doesn’t make sense to bark up that tree right now.”

Laurel was still scowling, but she didn’t argue with Chloe. “Here’s what’s going to happen: you’re going to go back home and let me do my job.”

“Who else is briefed on the case besides you?” Jack demanded.

Laurel’s expression was stern. “I’ll catch them up.”

“We’re going to look for him, Detective. With or without your permission or cooperation.”

“I could have you arrested for tampering with an ongoing investigation.”

Jack didn’t take offense to the threat. He understood all too well what it was like to have no answers and someone you cared about in the middle of confusing danger. But he didn’t bend either. “Or you could just let us help.”

T HEY WERE GIVEN the grunt job. They had trailed after Laurel as she’d gone from department to department, barking out orders. Then, when she’d finally stopped and turned to them, she’d told them to go search Hart’s house.

Which was the grunt job because clearly Hart wasn’t likely to have been there since before his shift today. Still, it was a necessary job, and Chloe and Jack drove from the police station over to Bent proper.

She couldn’t blame the detective for keeping her out of most of it. Someone was going to call that parole officer in Texas and see where her father was, and if he wasn’t verifiably in Texas tonight, he would be a top suspect.

But it didn’t add up. Not to Chloe. Her father was shady as all get out, but he could have gotten that scrapbook whenever he wanted.

“There’s something off here, Jack,” she said, scanning the quiet street where Thomas Hart lived. She didn’t know much about Thomas Hart’s personal life, but according to Laurel, he lived alone in the little house they pulled up to.

A neat yard with no frills. A well-kept house with a porch light on in the dark.

Jack stopped the truck, and they both got out and studied the house from the front in what little light the porch and streetlamp offered.

“There’s a lot of things off here, I think,” Jack replied. “You don’t have your gun on you. I want you to—”

“Follow behind. I know,” she muttered, following him up to the porch. They’d knock on the front, then check around back. But Chloe didn’t think they’d find anything here.

“The only person who knew about that scrapbook, far as I know, is my father. Nothing happened to it when it was only my father knowing. So what happened? Who got wind of it being with the cops?”

“Maybe that was the problem,” Jack replied, rapping on the door. “Your father didn’t want it with the police.”

“I am the police.”

Jack just shook his head as they waited. Chloe peered in the sidelight while Jack studied the front window, looking for a glimpse of anything. No one answered the door, no flicker of light or movement of curtains. Just stillness and silence.

Jack jerked his head, and Chloe nodded. They’d move around the east side of the house now. The street was quiet, the night heavy. As they moved around the side of the house, Chloe’s nerves began to hum. In the front, the quiet had seemed like a comfortable small-town evening, but things were darker around back. Chloe kept even closer to Jack.

There were no lights on back here, so the postage stamp backyards all ran together like one big shadow. Some houses had lights on inside, shining in little cracks around curtains, but not many.

Jack pulled out a flashlight he must have grabbed from his truck. The beam shone across the grass, to a nice patio equipped with a ridiculously complicated-looking grill and then to a sliding glass door on the back of the house. Another curtain pulled tight. No lights here either.

“He’s not here,” Chloe said in a whisper. Not because they really needed to whisper, but because the night seemed to call for it.

“No.”

But before they could discuss it further, something beeped, and it was so incongruous to the quiet night around them that Chloe nearly screamed.

Funny how she could almost always put her cop hat on, put the fear of danger to the side, but something about this case involving her father in any way made her feel more like the little girl who’d been terrified of him and less like the woman she’d built herself into.

He wasn’t even here .

Jack pulled his phone out of his pocket. Someone was calling him, because little pinging noises were hardly her father jumping out of the shadows to be her own personal bogeyman.

Jack answered, and Chloe could hear the faint hum of a female voice on the other line but not the actual words. And still, something about the way Jack held himself told her it was bad news.

“Thanks, Mary. Keep me updated.”

He turned to her in the dark. She couldn’t make out the expression on his face, but he touched her shoulder.

Bad, bad news.

“Ry’s missing.”

She didn’t know what she’d been expecting. But not that. She should have expected it, but somehow it took the wind right out of her. “But...” No but s. That’s what Ry did.

She always screwed it all up, no matter how hard she tried.

“I’m sorry, Chloe.”

She shook her head, not that he could see it in the dark. Maybe it took her off guard in this moment, but she’d also been ready for this in the long run. “I can track his phone. Maybe.” She pulled her own phone out of her pocket, ignoring the way her hand shook. “I wasn’t about to leave it up to chance. It’s something I used to do when he was in high school, and I was trying to keep him in school. I haven’t done it for years, so I was hoping he wouldn’t notice and turn it off.” She clicked the screen on her phone, brought up the location tracker and hoped.

The map moved around, zooming into a spot. Chloe would have felt immense relief, but he was in the middle of a campground by the mountains.

Not just any campground.

“That’s where my parents were camping the night they disappeared,” Jack said, his voice devoid of any and all emotion.

Chloe felt like her chest was caving in, but she didn’t let it show. Couldn’t. “If you don’t want to go there, we can—”

“I’m going,” Jack said sharply. But his voice softened on the next words. “This might connect, Chloe. Ry. The scrapbook. Hart missing. We can let someone else lead this. One of our guys. One of theirs. I can take you back to the ranch, but—”

Chloe shook her head. She had always protected her brother, would always want to, but now, in this moment, she realized if he was really involved in this... She wouldn’t be able to stomach getting him out of it.

She took Jack’s arm and pulled him back toward the truck. “Let’s go.”