Page 26 of In Her Sights

“Of course,” Spelling conceded after a moment. “It may take a little while to compile, but you’ll have it. But Jenna, what are you looking for?”

“Patterns,” she answered succinctly, her gaze drifting to the spot where Sarah had vanished, now cordoned off by the diligent deputies. “Connections that might have been overlooked.” Her mind already began sifting through potential correlations, her analysis as instinctual as breathing.

“Patterns…” Spelling repeated, the word sounding like a puzzle yet to be solved. “Alright, I’ll get my people on it. You’ll have your list.”

“Thank you, Colonel. This could be critical.” Jenna ended the call, her thumb lingering on the disconnect button as she felt the magnitude of what she’d just set into motion. Twenty years ofnames, lives interrupted, families waiting for closure—she was about to dive into a sea of lost souls.

She took a moment, standing alone by her patrol car, feeling the vastness of the task ahead. The air was thick with heat and the scent of pine needles baking on the forest floor. Jenna could feel the beginnings of an ache at the back of her skull, a reminder that lucid dreams often left her more exhausted than rested.

Her drive back to headquarters in Trentville was a blur of green foliage and dusty roads, the hum of the tires a monotonous drone beneath the turmoil of her thoughts. When Jenna pushed through the door of the building, the cool blast of air from the struggling AC unit was a momentary reprieve from the June afternoon.

The front area was empty except for a lone receptionist who greeted her cheerfully and then went back to whatever she was reading on her cell phone.

In her office, Jenna found Jake seated beside her desk. His cheeseburger was half eaten, and another one was waiting there for her, along with a shake. Even though she’d had a big breakfast, Jenna realized she was hungry, and she started eating before she fired up her computer and clicked on her inbox.

She was surprised to see that Colonel Spelling had already sent her a list. When she loaded it onto her screen, rows upon rows of names filled the monitor, names cascading down like a waterfall. She scrolled through the entries, her eyes catching dates and locations, but it was the sheer volume that staggered her—tens of thousands of names.

“What’s this?” Jake asked.

“It’s a list of people who’ve gone missing in Missouri during the last twenty years,” Jenna said. “Colonel Spelling sent it at my request. I think there might be something here.”

“How are we supposed to work with this?” Jake muttered from over her shoulder. “Where do we even start?”

Jenna leaned back in her chair. “We look for patterns, connections, anything that ties back to Trentville.”

“Patterns?” Jake echoed, skepticism laced with concern. “That’s like finding a needle in a dozen haystacks, Jenna. Even with the entire department on it, it could take—”

“We don’t need the whole department,” she interrupted. “Just us.”

Jenna’s fingers hovered over the keyboard as she considered how much to tell him. Her dreams were hers alone, a private counsel that she had never shared with anyone except Frank, certainly not with Jake. But how could they work with each other as a team without him knowing the full truth?

Her hands moved of their own accord, opening a new document and beginning to type criteria for sorting the list.

“We’ll start narrowing our focus,” Jenna said, her tone more assured than she felt. “First, we’ll look for a pattern based on periods of time. Ten years ago, a writer—Mark Reeves—visited Trentville. He wasn’t a local, but he disappeared here. I think… it’s possible he met the same fate as Sarah.”

“Same perpetrator?” Jake asked, skepticism evident in his eyes.

“Perhaps,” Jenna replied, her intuition screaming silently about the connection. “It’s a lead worth following. We need to look for similar patterns of disappearances.”

She could feel Jake’s eyes on her as she fell silent again.

“Well, how can we narrow down the names?” Jake’s question was both practical and daunting.

“Focus on outsiders, individuals who came to Trentville and never left—at least not willingly.” She decided to once again omit mentioning how her dreams guided her thoughts; some things were better kept close until she could make sense of them herself.

“Okay,” Jake said after a moment. “Outsiders.” He ran a hand through his sandy hair. “You realize this could take us hours, right? Maybe days.”

Jenna bit her lip, wrestling with the urge to divulge the full extent of her suspicions—suspicions born from dreams and the hints of intuition. Instead, she leaned into her analytical side, the side that had earned the trust of her peers. Despite his initial astonishment, she knew Jake would follow her lead, just as he always did. Jenna was grateful for that—it meant she didn’t have to navigate the murky waters of this investigation alone.

But Jake was right about the overwhelming magnitude of their task. She simply had to figure out how to narrow down their search even further.

Then, as if in reply to her unspoken query, she remembered something that Mark Reeves had said to her in her dream—something that hadn’t made sense, at least maybe until now.

“Five years,” Mark had said to her. “It’s always five years.”

“Five years,” she said. It was at least an anchor point in the sea of names and dates that threatened to drag her down.

Jake folded his arms, looking over at her. “You think there’s something about five years we should be considering?”

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