Page 57 of Mountain Challenge

Ry straightened his spine. He forced his voice to come out slow and steady. “What did the car look like?”

Alain shrugged. “I don’t know. It was raining, and I was running to lunch. But gray. It was gray.”

“What kind?” Beau interjected.

Alain looked dazed and unsure. “I don’t know anything about cars.”

“Was it an SUV, a sedan, a?—“

“A sedan. Old, I think. Or at least, that’s the impression I got. I’m not sure. I’m sorry.”

A gray sedan. Okay. That was something Alex would be able to work with. Ry forced himself to keep a tight rein on his hope. Because this could turn out to be nothing. Just someone who’d left the lights of their car on.Right outside Isla’s studio. Around the time she disappeared.

Beau looked up from his phone, and when he spoke again, there was an urgency to his tone that hadn’t been there before. “We have to go. Thank you, Alain.”

“Wait. That’s it?” Alain stuttered. “What do I do?”

“Go home. Wait. We will call you when we hear something.”

When. Notif. Ry was grateful for that.

“What’s going on, Beau?”

“We have to go back to the office.” Beau paused, his expression softening. “We haven’t found them yet, Ry. But Alex has some news for us.”

It was ten p.m. by the time they got back to the office. When Beau had offered to drive Ry’s car, Ry had accepted gladly. He was no stranger to adrenaline, but this mixture of fear and adrenaline was new. He felt drunk, almost. Like he shouldn’t be behind the wheel of a car.

As they stepped out of the elevator, Ry expected to be met by a dark, quiet office, the way it usually was during night-shifts. But tonight, the lights were on and there were as many people at their desks as if it had been nine in the morning. His whole team was there, as well as people from other teams.

Several colleagues stopped what they were doing to look at him and Beau, then quickly went back to their tasks.

Ry’s throat worked double-time as he swallowed. “Everybody’s here.”

“Of course everybody’s here,” Beau said. “We’re going to find them, Ry.”

He knew how much it cost Beau to make such a promise. He was the one who’d taught Ry never to make promises during a rescue that he couldn’t keep—because, despite their best efforts,things could go south, and when that happened, a broken promise only made things worse.

“Come on, Alex is already in the meeting room.”

Ry followed Beau inside, followed closely by the rest of the team. Alex was sitting at the head of the conference table, two laptops and two cell phones in front of him. Tristan took a seat across from Beau and Ry, while Lorenz leaned against the side of the low cabinets lining the back wall. Hugo was the last to walk inside. He dropped a steaming mug in front of Ry.

“Drink,” he said, sitting down next to Tristan.

Ry thanked him but left the drink on the table. He didn’t think he’d be able to swallow anything.

“The phones were a dead end,” Alex began. He spoke quickly, before Ry had a chance to get his hopes up. “I managed to get into Laura’s phone and went through messages from the last two weeks. Vincent’s team is going further back now, looking at both Isla and Laura’s phones. But I don’t think we’re going to find anything there.”

“We need to go back to the beginning and look at everything we know,” Beau said. He left the obvious unsaid—that there was a team of gendarmes at Isla’s apartment, people who’d been tasked with this case. The six of them in this room had taken a different career path. Their expertise lay in search and rescue. Not missing person investigations. And yet, Ry had the feeling that they were the ones who knew Isla best—the ones who’d have the best chance of finding the women. So he couldn’t stop his friends. He was so fucking grateful, he wanted to weep.

“Thank you,” Ry said simply, staring at his team. He got hard stares in return, which he’d expected. Because his friends didn’t want to be thanked. They wanted Isla and Laura back. Just like he did.

Beau looked straight at Ry. “Anything we find out, we will share with Vincent’s team. To do otherwise would be a disservice to Isla and Laura.”

Ry nodded, letting his boss know he understood, and Beau went on, quickly getting them all up to speed on the interview with Alain, summing it up with, “I think he was telling the truth.” He turned questioningly to Ry.

“I agree,” Ry said. He knew people could lie, but the young man’s anguish had seemed real enough to him. And Isla respected and trusted Alain.

“Vincent and his team will look into Alain’s background further, but I don’t think that’s the right avenue of investigation.”

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