Chapter 2: The Pattern

The Ashwood Police Department occupied a single-story brick building that smelled of burnt coffee and floor wax. Chief Dale Hobson was a heavyset man in his sixties who had held the position for as long as anyone could remember. He greeted Nora with performative warmth and answered her questions with the practiced vagueness of someone who had been briefed by a lawyer. David Chen had been well-liked. There were no known conflicts. The investigation was ongoing. He would not comment further. Nora had expected this. Small-town law enforcement rarely welcomed outside scrutiny, especially from someone with a microphone. She shifted her focus to public records. The county courthouse yielded a thin file on Ruth Emory's disappearance. The original detective, a man named Parsons who had since retired to Florida, conducted twelve interviews and followed up on three tips, all of which led nowhere. The file contained one detail that had not appeared in any news coverage. On the night Ruth vanished, the library's security system logged a door access at eleven forty-seven in the evening, more than four hours after Ruth typically locked up. The alarm code used was Ruth's own. Either she returned to the library that night, or someone who knew her code did. Nora pulled David Chen's school records next. His key card showed he badged into the building at seven fifteen on the morning of his disappearance and never badged out. The school's exterior cameras were offline that day due to a firmware update. Nora sat in her car outside the courthouse and compared the two cases side by side. Both victims disappeared on a Friday. Both left behind their belongings. Both were connected to public institutions with after-hours access systems. Both vanished without a trace in a town of fewer than three thousand people. This was not coincidence. This was repetition. Someone in Ashwood had done this before and had waited twenty years to do it again.