Page 5 of Quiet

”What?”

”There’s one more thing,” he said, so softly I almost couldn’t hear him.

”What is it?”

”It’s so weird, boss,” Grayson replied.

I stood up and looked right at him. I could read him as well as he could read me, and he looked sick to his stomach. We saw a lot of shit in our line of work, so for something to disturb him, it had to be really bad. I cocked my head, waiting for him to finish his sentence. ”Whatisit?” I asked, after it was clear that he wasn’t going to tell me without prompting.

”He’d stuffed a flower in her mouth,” he said. ”Left her head tilted back so we could see it. It was fucked up.”

”A flower?”

”Yeah,” he said. ”I don’t know much about flowers, but I think that was a white orchid.”

Chapter Two: Sofia

Thewordsonmyscreen blurred into each other.

The smell of Chinese takeout filled my apartment, the sound of a Hallmark movie droning somewhere in the background. I always did my best work when there was noise in the room, but this was brutal, and I hadn’t expected to fall asleep while looking through my files. Again.

I looked at my phone. There was nothing but the unanswered text message Sam had sent me.

I really wish you’d give this a rest. You should get some sleep.

I rolled my eyes. He wasn’t there to see me do it, but I was convinced that, somehow, my brother would know the exact response his text would get from me. He was on track to be a detective. How could he expect me to give this up so easily?

I sighed as I looked at the unanswered message on my screen. I wasn’t surprised that none of the victims’ families or friends wanted to talk to me. The police hadn’t taken them seriously, that was, if they had even reported a missing person. By my count, that was twenty-four in just the last year alone.

Math had never been my strong suit, but by my count, that amounted to four missing people a month, which meant approximately one a week. If this was a serial offender--and I had no reason to believe it wasn’t–then it was a prolific one. There were no signs that he was going to let up any time soon, but I had no leads, no clues and few discernable patterns.

I knew one thing for certain, and that was it. This predator liked targeting people who they believed wouldn’t be missed, anyone who might slip through the cracks, anyone who wouldn’t want the police alerted.

It was alarming, because even with that, the authorities had to know something was up. But I wasn’t the authorities. I was just a reporter with an article due in less than a month, a pretty bad first draft and dwindling job security. I’d tried to impress my editor-in-chief, but Alayna was headstrong and I couldn’t help but think that there was part of her that wanted me to fail.

Of course she’d finally given me this assignment–she didn’t think I had anything real.

I didn’t even dislike the pop culture beat. I just thought that it was important that someone cover this, and no one was. When I tried to pitch it to the rest of the newsroom, they all said that there was nothing newsworthy there.

Homeless indigents, prostitutes and mentally ill people disappeared all the time. A tragedy, yes, but not at all newsworthy.

I told my brother about it and Sam said he would look into it. But after I’d looped him in, the official investigation was completely out of my hands.

I typed up another message to send to the girlfriend of the man whose disappearance I was looking into. She had seen the first one but had yet to reply, and I didn’t think following up would do much to prompt her to get in touch with me.

”Hi,” I said, reciting the message I’d written so many times already. ”I don’t know if you saw my message, but I’m Sofia Reyes. I would love to speak to you about…shit, what was his name? Brady. I know he’s been missing for a bit, and I just wanted to talk to you about it. If you want to give me a call, my number is…fuck, why bother? She isn’t going to call.”

Still, I dutifully finished the message, sent it off, and closed my laptop. It was already eleven o’clock at night, almost too late to be sending social media messages, but no one had cracked the etiquette code for that one yet and I wasn’t sure when or even if she was going to see it.

I told myself I’d quickly shower and then get some sleep when my phone vibrated on the table next to my laptop.

When I saw it was a blocked number, I rushed to pick it up. ”Hello?”

”Stop,” a distorted voice said.

”Haha,” I said, no humor in my voice. ”Very funny, pal. If–”

”Stop searching,” the voice said. I couldn’t tell whether it was a man or a woman. The distortion on the voice made it sound weird and robotic. ”Stop sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, bitch.”

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