Chapter 3

chapter

three

The drive upRedwood Road was a familiar one. He drove on autopilot as the road went from paved and well-maintained, to gravel, to a barely there pitted path flanked by towering ancient trees. Morning fog wound around the trucks like fingers and thickened the farther up the mountain he went.

As he pulled up to the old general store, it struck him how desolate it was. The windows were grimy with a layer of dust that had accumulated over years of neglect, and the red paint was peeling off in large patches, revealing the weathered wooden slats underneath. The payphone was right where Ash had said it would be— attached to a wooden pillar by the entrance.

Cal approached the phone, his hands shoved deep into his pockets to ward off the damp cold of the fog. It looked like it hadn't been used in years, and yet someone had called him from it just hours ago. He picked up the receiver, half expecting it to be dead. There was a dial tone. Faint and crackly but present all the same.

He hung up and took a moment to look around. Something caught his eye, something out of place in the dreary, neglected setting—a small security camera was tucked up under the eaves of the store, shiny and new.

Who the hell would put a security camera here?

He squinted, not entirely sure he wasn't imagining things. But no, it was there, a small speck of modernity among the weathered wood. The uneasy feeling that had been nagging him since the anonymous call now bloomed into full-blown concern. He pulled out his phone, glad to see he had a signal, and dialed Ash.

"This is getting weird."

Ash grumbled. "Now what?"

"There's a security camera here next to the payphone. Brand new, and it looks top of the line."

"Why the fuck would there be?—"

"Like I said, getting weird."

"You shouldn't have fucking gone out there by your fucking self. Don't touch anything. I'm on my way."

Despite the creeping unease, Cal had to chuckle at Ash's predictable response. The sheriff was a gruff, no-nonsense man, but underneath all that tough exterior was a soft heart that cared deeply about his town and the people in it.

As he waited for Ash to arrive, he wandered around the perimeter of the old store. Dew-damp leaves crunched under his boots, and the sharp earthy scent of damp wood filled the air. The sun was just starting to peek over the treetops, casting long shadows on the ground.

His gaze landed on something nestled in a patch of daisies near the side door of the store. It shimmered slightly against the green leaves and white petals. Curiosity piqued, he stepped closer and bent down to examine it— a small hair clip shaped like outstretched wings. Tiny faux gemstones caught the weak rays of sunlight, making it gleam. He went back to his car and found the stack of police evidence bags he kept in his glove box for just such an occasion. He picked up the barrette with the bag, then sealed it inside. He turned it over in his hand, examining the details. It was old but well-kept, the silver still shiny and the gemstones still securely in place. This wasn't a piece of junk someone would lose and not care about.

And it looked familiar.

He'd definitely seen this somewhere before and searched through his memory for the when and where.

Hope.

He sucked in a sharp breath in surprise.

There was a picture of Hope Summers taken a few months before her disappearance. It was the one used on all the missing posters, and she wore a similar hair clip, the wings sparkling against her curly brown hair. Ellie once told him that giving the barrette to Hope was one of her earliest memories. She'd only been six at the time and had so looked up to her big sister, carefully choosing the hair clip from a department store for Hope's eighteenth birthday. Hope wore it every day from then on.

Could it really be the same one?

Ash's Tahoe skidded to a stop beside his car. The sheriff jumped out, his face a storm cloud.

"Holden," he barked, striding over. "What did I say about touching anything?"

"I didn't touch it." Cal held up the bagged hair clip. "I bagged it."

A frown furrowed his brow as Ash took the bag and examined it. "Jesus. This looks like..."

Cal nodded. "The hair clip from Hope Summers' missing poster."

Ash looked up, his eyes grave. "You sure about that?"

"I'm certain, but you could ask Ellie to be sure. She bought it for Hope."

Silence fell between them as they both stared at the small piece of jewelry.

"Jesus," Ash finally muttered. "Okay, I'll get it to the state lab for testing. Maybe we'll find some DNA." He put the evidence bag in his car then came back. "Where's the camera?"

Cal pointed to the left side of the store. Together, they crossed the dew-soaked ground, their breath misting in the chilly morning air.

The lines deepened around Ash's mouth as he studied the camera. "Nobody owes this piece of shit store anymore. The last owner died some fifteen years ago, and his children wanted nothing to do with it. They've been trying to sell it ever since." He nodded to the faded FOR SALE sign in the grimy window, then pulled a pair of latex gloves out of his jeans pocket and snapped them on. He pulled himself up on the window ledge to get a better look at the camera. "No reason for this to be here. Wireless. Someone is transmitting the footage directly to a remote server somewhere."

"Can they see us?" Cal asked.

"Probably."

"Can we get the footage?"

Ash shook his head. "Not without a warrant."

"What?"

"C'mon, Cal. You know this." He dropped back down to the ground, pulling off his gloves. "There's no evidence of a crime."

"Someone called me about a twenty-year-old missing person case. That camera might be our only lead."

Ash held out his arms. "But where's the crime here? Point me toward it, and I'll apply for the warrant."

"Fuck," Cal muttered and ran a hand over his head. Ash was right. No judge in their right mind would give them a warrant with what they had now.

Ash sighed and dropped his arms back to his sides. "Okay, listen. I'll try to get in touch with the realtor and see if the previous owner's kids will give us permission to take it down."

Cal scowled up at the camera. "By then, whoever installed it will have it removed or wiped."

"You know better than anyone my hands are tied by the law." Ash went back to his Tahoe but paused with his hand on the door and glanced back. A small smile curved the corner of his hard mouth. "But, you know, if a private citizen were to wander up here and the camera disappeared, I doubt whoever put it there will report it."

"Why, Sheriff Rawlings…" Cal grinned at him. "Are you telling me to steal it?"

"I said no such thing." Dante, Ash's big black German Shepherd, poked his head out the window with a sloppy grin. Ash grunted a soft laugh and nudged him back before sliding into the car. "Whatever you do, Holden, I don't want to know about it."

Cal watched the Tahoe until it disappeared in a cloud of dirt on the unpaved road, then turned back to the store. "Didn't plan to start my day with petty larceny, but… okay."

He returned to his car and rummaged through the trunk until he found the old toolbox that his uncle, a mechanic, had given him when he graduated high school.

"This is for your car," Uncle Rob had said firmly. "You keep this in the trunk. Never know when you'll need to fix something."

He could count on one finger the number of times he'd actually used the toolbox, but he'd dutifully kept it in his trunk all these years to make his uncle happy.

The box was well-stocked. He found a pair of wire cutters and a screwdriver and grinned. This probably wasn't what his uncle had in mind.

He made his way back to the old store and climbed up on the window ledge. With a bit of effort and a couple of scraped knuckles, he managed to pry the camera from its perch. Jumping down, he studied the thing, turning it over in his hand. It was compact, sleek, and looked expensive. Whoever had installed it wasn"t using some cheap surveillance tech. They meant business.

Was there also some kind of encryption on the video?

He had no idea, but he knew exactly who to ask.

"Can you hack it?"

In Redwood Coast Rescue's command center, Sawyer Murphy sat back from his computer, his blind eyes staring straight ahead as he ran his hands over the camera. "Yeah, but…"

Cal groaned. "Oh, c'mon, don't give me a but."

"But," Sawyer said again, stressing the word, and hit a button on the side of the camera. A compartment on the back popped open, and he pulled out a small chip. "I don't need to hack it because it has local storage."

Cal blinked, then grinned at the sudden wave of relief. "And here I was thinking you'd have to do some Hollywood-level hacking to get into it."

"I never get to do Hollywood-level hacking," Sawyer said somewhat glumly and turned the chip over in his hand, tracing its contours with his fingers. "It's most likely a redundancy in case the live feed gets interrupted, or there's a problem with the server."

"Do you think my mystery caller is on there?"

"How long ago did you get the call?"

"Early. Before dawn."

"These cameras can hold up to a few days' worth of footage locally, so unless someone already erased it, she should be." Sawyer shrugged and slid the chip into a card reader connected to his computer. "Let's find out."

A series of clicks later, Sawyer was sifting through files, his nimble fingers flying over the Braille keyboard. The room filled with the rapid-fire babble of his screen reader and the occasional snore from Zelda, his seeing-eye dog, who lay curled up on his feet under the desk.

"Uh oh," Sawyer finally said, breaking the silence.

"Uh oh?" Cal echoed, alarm prickling at the back of his neck. "What ‘uh oh'?"

"There's a lot of encrypted data in these files. Whoever installed this camera really didn't want anyone peeking at the footage." Sawyer frowned, resting his fingers on the keyboard. The reader's fast-paced voice fell silent as he stopped his exploration.

"Can you get in?"

Sawyer hit one last key and let out a low chuckle, leaning back in his chair and folding his hands behind his head. His grin was feral in the dim light of the command center. "Already have. They'd be so pissed to know a blind man cracked it in less than five minutes."

As video clips flashed onto the screen, Cal gave Sawyer's shoulders a grateful squeeze. "You are a fucking genius, Murph."

Sawyer waved him off. "Tell me something I don't know. Now…" He pushed back from his desk, and Zelda raised her head, her eyes filled with longing. Sawyer stood and motioned for Cal to take the chair. "You're on your own for this part. Look at this footage and find your mystery girl while I take my girl out for a potty break."

Zelda scrambled out from under the desk, her feet tippy tapping with excitement.

Sawyer grabbed her harness, and they slipped out the door, leaving Cal alone with a flickering monitor and files upon files of surveillance footage. He settled into the vacated chair and took a deep breath, his hands hovering over the keyboard apprehensively. He wasn't a tech wizard like Sawyer, but he was confident he could handle at least this much.

A list of video files, each labeled with a date and time stamp, spread out before him. He clicked on the first one, and the screen filled with a color image of the old store. No grainy black-and-white images here. Whoever had installed the camera wanted to make sure they saw everything clearly.

He fast-forwarded through hours of nothing until, finally, a figure appeared in the long shadows of evening—a very thin woman, her face and hair obscured by a baseball cap. There was something ghostly about her as she approached the old store. Like she wasn't quite real. Like she didn't fully belong to this world. She paused and looked back in the direction she'd come from and then disappeared from view. She never went near the pay phone. He froze the video and stared at the shadowed figure, tilting his head slightly in an attempt to make out any distinguishable features. She was not just slender but gaunt, her body cloaked in ill-fitting clothes from the early 2000s that kids today would call "vintage." But that was all he could see. It was too dark, and she'd done a good job keeping her face turned away. She'd known the camera was there and hadn't wanted whoever was at the other end to see her.

Was this woman his mystery caller?

But he would've sworn from his caller's voice that she was young. This woman carried herself with a sense of purpose and grace that only came from age.

And, besides, the timestamp was wrong. He'd received the call around four in the morning. This woman appeared more than a day before that, so unless she came back…

He clicked on the next file and sat back as the screen filled with the familiar image of the old store. This file was timestamped just hours before he received the call. He fast-forwarded through it, the on-screen time ticking away in the corner.

Nothing.

The woman didn't come back.

He blinked and pressed his fingers to his tired eyes. What if there was nothing here? What if whoever installed the camera already deleted the footage of his mystery caller?

He clicked on another file.

And there she was.

She appeared at the edge of the frame, flitting nervously around the old store like a hummingbird. She paused near the payphone, glancing around uneasily before picking up the receiver. She wore a robe with a rope belt similar to what he used to wear as an altar boy during Sunday mass, but her belt was gold, and the robe was made of a gauzy, see-through material. He watched her pull a card out of the folds of her robe and study it. The cardstock was creased and battered, but he could clearly see his own name printed on it.

So that was how she'd gotten his number. She'd found one of his old business cards. They wouldn't be difficult to come by. When he first went into private practice, he'd thrown his cards at people around town like confetti and had left a stack at every local establishment that would allow it.

She picked up the receiver, dialed his number, and put the receiver to her ear.

His heart stopped as she turned fully toward the camera.

Hope.

But that wasn't possible.

He blinked at the screen, unable to understand what his eyes were telling him. The girl was no older than fifteen, but she looked exactly like the pictures he'd seen of Hope—the same dark hair, the same nose, and the same eyes.

In the video, she quickly hung up the phone and spun as headlights whited out the screen.

And then she was gone.

He rewound the footage and watched it again and again until Sawyer returned.

"You found something," Sawyer said before he could even open his mouth to tell him.

Cal turned in his chair to stare at the guy. "How the hell did you know that?"

"I can feel it. Your energy changed, charged the room."

"Is that another of your superpowers?"

"Yep. It's called the power of observation."

Cal opened his mouth but closed it without asking exactly how a blind man could observe anything.

"I don't need eyes," Sawyer added as if he'd asked. "I have four other senses. Five, if you believe in all that woo-woo sixth sense shit."

"Do you believe in all that woo-woo?"

He just grinned and put a hand on Zelda's harness, letting her guide him across the room him towards Cal. "So, what did you find?"

"This is one thing you'd have to see to believe." Cal returned his attention to the frozen image of the girl on screen. "Do you have a printer?"

"Not in here, but you can send it to the printer in Anna's office."

He did just that and then pushed out of the chair. "Thanks."

Anna wasn't in her office, but her husband was. Zak lounged back in the desk chair with the lights off. His boots were propped up on the edge of the desk, and his eyes were closed until the printer started humming. He sat up just as Cal opened the door.

"Oh. Sorry, man. I didn't think anyone was in here."

"It's okay. I was just trying to catch a few Z's. Poppy has been having nightmares, and she's keeping us all awake." Zak yawned wide enough that his jaw cracked, then swiveled in the chair to grab the printout. He started to hand it over but stopped short, his brow furrowing as he studied the picture. "This is your mystery caller?"

Of course he already knew about that. It was impossible to keep anything a secret in this town.

"I think so."

"That looks like?—"

"Yeah."

"But—"

"Yeah," Cal said again and took the print from him.

"Jesus." Zak ran a hand over his face in disbelief. "What are you going to tell Alexis and Ellie?"

"I don't know that there's anything to tell yet. It could be a coincidence."

"Your face says otherwise."

"Yeah, well, sometimes, faces can be misleading and right now, all I have is a face in a picture that looks like a younger version of Hope. I'm not going to tell them anything that might give them… uh, well, hope."

"You think that's Hope's daughter." It was a statement, not a question.

His gaze fell back to the image of the girl. He hadn't wanted to voice that thought out loud until he had more information.

"Zak, I need you to keep this quiet for now," he said finally instead of answering.

Zak leaned back in the chair and studied him. "Why did she call you? Why wouldn't she call Alexis or Ellie or, hell, Ash?"

"I don't know," Cal admitted again, frustration crawling up his spine to curl around his shoulders. "All I know is that she got my number from one of my old business cards."

"Are you sure it's not a setup of some kind? Have you pissed off anyone lately?"

"Oh, I specialize in pissing people off. But none have threatened me if that's what you're asking."

"Alexis and Ellie offered that reward money for information about their sister. Maybe it's someone after that?" Even as Zak asked the question, he shook his head. "But that doesn't make sense either. If the money's the goal, why call you?"

"I don't know," Cal said for the third time, letting out an exasperated sigh. All these questions were the same ones circling in his mind like relentless vultures. But he had no answers, only speculation and a gut feeling that told him this was far from a coincidence. This was something big. "Maybe she thinks she needs a lawyer."

Zak studied him for a moment longer. "Does Ash know about this?"

"He does, but he can't do anything until I have proof a crime was committed. And, right now, I don't even know if one was."

Zak nodded to the printout. "Girl could be a runaway."

"I got that sense, but from where? There's no report of a fourteen or fifteen-year-old girl matching her description missing from anywhere in the county. If there were, Ash would've been able to do something to help."

Zak lifted a shoulder. "Mountain people. I bet a lot of kids up there have no formal records—no birth certificates or social security cards. She could be one of them."

If that were the case, she'd be nearly impossible to find, but Cal had never met a challenge he couldn't conquer. This was another puzzle to be solved—a complex and urgent one, but a puzzle, nonetheless.

"Could be," Cal murmured, turning the printout this way and that, as if that might help him make sense of the girl's story. "Guess I'll need to start knocking on some doors up in the hills."

Zak grunted. "Be careful. They're not exactly welcoming to outsiders. First time I went up there asking questions, I got shot at."

"Wasn't it Shane that shot at you?"

"The bastard. I've mostly forgiven him." Zak sat up again, the chair creaking under him as he straightened. "You coming to the wedding this weekend?"

Shit, he'd nearly forgotten Shane and Alexis were getting married this weekend and, for a moment, he considered begging off. After all, he was the last person Ellie wanted to see, and she'd be there, standing at her sister's side as maid of honor. No doubt in a dress that would hug her curves and drive him mad all night with the urge to peel her out of it. He could easily make up an excuse—work was always a convenient one since his job required he be on call twenty-four/seven. But he'd already sent in his RSVP. And maybe it made him a masochist, but he really wanted to see Ellie in that dress.

"Wouldn't miss it," he said finally, tucking the photograph into his jacket pocket. But he was already thinking beyond the wedding, his wheels turning with ways he might gain the trust of the mountain people. He was a lawyer, after all. Convincing people was part of his job description.

He made a move toward the door. Just as his hand touched the knob, Zak's voice stopped him in his tracks. "One more thing..."

He turned back. "Yeah?"

Zak's eyes bore into him, serious and intent. "Before you go stirring up a hornet's nest, being a white knight and all... Remember, you're not just risking your neck. There are other people who'd be affected if something happened to you." He cracked a smile. "And for some reason, we like you around here, Holden. So stay safe, and if you need anything, you let us know."