In Her Sights by Blake Pierce

Author:Blake Pierce [Pierce, Blake]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UNKNOWN
Published: 2024-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“Anything?” Jenna’s voice broke the silence, more out of habit than hope, as her tired eyes scanned line after line of text on the screen. The digital records that Colonel Spelling had sent still seemed to stretch into infinity.

“Nothing,” Jake replied, his tone flat. “It seems to me that we’ve cross-referenced every possible angle.”

Jenna’s fingers paused on the keyboard, her eyes scanning endless rows of names that flickered across the screen. Each line represented a life, a story, a tragedy, but she and Jake had found nothing that connected their fates to any single cause or place.

Hours had folded into each other, and it was well into the night now. Outside her closed office door, the building sat silent and still. All the staff had left hours ago, leaving Jenna and her deputy alone. Any incoming emergency calls would now be forwarded to the receiver designated for the long night ahead.

Jenna appreciated Jake’s quiet perseverance, though it did little to ease the growing sense of futility that gnawed at her. Each name they discounted felt like a step backward, away from the answers she sought. The reality that their efforts might yield nothing was a bitter pill, one she wasn’t ready to swallow just yet. But the worry that they were looking in all the wrong places lingered.

Jake leaned back in his chair, “Jenna, this isn’t getting us anywhere.”

“I know,” she admitted. She couldn’t shake the nagging sensation that they were missing something crucial. She rubbed her weary eyes. They had tried different years, different demographics, anything that could point them toward the pattern she was sure must be there. But the search felt like following mirages, each one dissipating upon contact.

“Could be right under our noses,” Jake mused, his voice low.

“Or it could be nowhere at all,” Jenna added quietly. The silence that followed was heavy, filled with the unspoken thoughts that haunted both their minds.

Her eyes scanned a list of names they had pulled out of the mass. Each of those was linked to Trentville by some distant thread—a cousin who once attended the local high school, a friend of a friend who frequented the annual county fair. Every lead seemed to dissolve under scrutiny.

“We’ve found connections, but nothing really leading back here to Trentville,” Jenna said, her frustration mounting. “Friends, family in Trentville, but these people vanished in other places.” Their exhaustive search had yielded no one who had disappeared within the town limits.

She considered again the common ties that bound the victims she knew—Sarah Thompson, Mark Reeves, and her sister Piper. Their sometime presence in Trentville was the only tangible link, yet they had found nothing beyond that fact. And Mark Reeves’s name didn’t even appear on the colonel’s computerized list.

Mark Reeves wasn’t from Missouri, she reminded herself. Someone like Mark, who wasn’t from Missouri but was taken while passing through Trentville, maybe their disappearance went entirely unnoticed—the same as Mark’s disappearance had gone unnoticed except in her own lucid dream. Someone like that wouldn’t be on the Missouri state missing persons list.

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