Page 27 of In Her Sights

“Maybe,” Jenna replied, pulling herself back to the present. In her dream, Mark had spoken those words with a sense of urgency, as though he was trying to impart a critical message from beyond. “There could be a cycle to these abductions.”

Her fingers hesitated over the keyboard, her gaze fixed on the sea of names that swam before her eyes. Each one bore a weight, a silent plea for discovery, but she sought patterns within the chaos, markers that would lead them to answers.

“We should start by searching through names over intervals of five years,” she said, without looking at her deputy. “We can start by searching through names of people that went missing five years ago. And then …”

“And then what?”

Jenna shook her head with frustration.

“I wish I could give you something more concrete, but all I’ve got are instincts.” The words felt inadequate even as they hung in the air.

Jake leaned against the edge of Jenna’s cluttered desk, his arms folded across his chest. Bafflement etched his features as he watched her struggle with the enormity of their task.

“Alright then, every five years…” Jake echoed, mulling over the concept. He might not see the same visions or dream the same dreams, but he did trust both her intelligence and her intuition.

The room fell quiet, save for the hum of the aging air conditioner and the faint tap-tap of keys as Jenna resumed her methodical search while Jake watched on. She filtered the list by dates, setting parameters around every fifth year, hoping patterns would emerge like stars in the night sky.

As she worked, a gnawing seed of self-doubt sprouted within her. Jenna knew her intuition had led her down the right paths before, yet the ambiguity of her dreams left her grappling with uncertainty.

Jake didn’t question her; he simply trusted her. But as they delved into the depths of the list, Jenna couldn’t help but wonder—how could she expect him to trust her when she wrestled with trusting herself? She sometimes questioned the rationale of chasing specters when tangible evidence should be her guide. How much could she rely on these visitations from the departed? And how much could she burden Jake with this inexplicable sense of knowing that defied logic?

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. Their absence would be a ghost note, unheard amidst the cacophony of local disappearances.

She glanced at Jake, his silhouette framed by the dim light. His patience was a silent anchor in the chaos of Jenna’s thoughts.

“Jake,” said, “I appreciate you sticking with me through this.”

He turned, offering her a nod that conveyed understanding. “We’ll find something if it’s here to be found.”

Her gaze lingered on the digital clock in the corner of the computer monitor. The numbers mocked her, each minute slipping by without progress.

“Okay, Jake, let’s take a breather,” she suggested, pushing back her chair and rubbing her temples.

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