Guilty by Proximity

Chapter 13— The Missing Cruiser

The state investigators treated Dana's disappearance as its own case now, separate from Holloway's murder but tangled up in it all the same. Hazel and Liam spent the better part of two days in and out of the barracks, giving statements, answering the same questions in slightly different orders, watching detectives try to make sense of a sheriff who'd vanished instead of answering for what she'd done.

"She could still turn up on her own," Ruiz said, the second time Hazel came in, not quite meeting her eyes. "People panic. They come back once the panic wears off."

"Does that happen often? Sheriffs disappearing?" Hazel asked.

He didn't have an answer for that one either.

Back at the local department, the mood was worse. Hazel drove past it on her way home from school and saw two news vans parked outside, a chief deputy she barely recognized fielding questions on the front steps like a man who'd never once been trained for it. Deputies who'd worked under Dana for years were splitting, from what Hazel could tell, into two camps — the ones who refused to believe any of it, and the ones who'd apparently always had a bad feeling they'd never said out loud.

"It's not just her," Liam said, watching the same scene from the passenger seat."It's the whole office. Everyone who'd worked with her for the last however many years either missed it completely or knew and said nothing. That's not a great choice to have to make in public."

"Which explains why nobody there seems especially eager to help us prove anything." Hazel let out a tired breath and looked down at the papers on the console.

"Exactly." Liam leaned back on the seat, rubbing a hand over his face, looking more tired than Hazel had seen him in days.

* * *

Ethan didn't say much about any of it, though Hazel noticed he'd started keeping the local news on longer than usual in the evenings, watching the coverage with the specific, tight stillness of someone bracing for his own sister's face to appear on screen. He never asked her directly what she and Liam were doing about it. He didn't have to. She could tell, by the way he left the porch light on every single night now without her having to say a word, that he already knew this wasn't over.

Over the following week, the investigation seemed to move backward instead of forward. A request Hazel filed for the original dispatch logs — the ones that had first tipped her off to the gap in Dana's timeline — came back marked "under review," no explanation attached. A follow-up email went unanswered for days. When Hazel called to ask why, the woman on the phone told her, not unkindly, that with an active internal investigation underway, certain records were temporarily restricted "for everyone's protection," and hung up before Hazel could ask whose protection she meant.

Case notes started going missing too — not hers this time, since she'd learned that lesson the hard way, but small procedural things that should have been simple to access. A duty roster from the week of the murder. A visitor log for the evidence room. Nothing that screamed cover-up on its own. Everything, together, screaming exactly that.

"Maybe it's just bureaucracy," Hazel said, not quite believing it herself. "Small department, everyone scrambling, paperwork falls through the cracks."

"Every single piece of paperwork we specifically need? All at once?" Liam raised an eyebrow. "You don't believe that any more than I do."

"I don't believe it at all. I just wanted to hear what it sounded like out loud."

"They're not trying to catch her," Hazel said, sitting across from Liam at the diner, the two of them surrounded by printouts that felt increasingly useless. "They're trying to make sure this doesn't come back on the department. Those aren't the same goal."

"So we stop asking them for anything," Liam said simply, like the decision had already made itself somewhere in the last few days without either of them noticing. "We've been treating this like something we hand off once we've done enough digging. Maybe that's the wrong way to think about it."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning nobody's coming to finish this for us." Liam tapped one of the printouts between them. "If the truth's going to actually come out, we're the ones who have to dig it up. All the way. Not just enough to make her a person of interest."

Hazel sat with that for a moment. It should have felt daunting — two teenagers picking up a case an entire sheriff's department seemed unable or unwilling to close. Instead it felt, oddly, like relief. At least it was something she could actually do something about.

"Okay," she said. "Then we stop waiting."

"Just like that?"

"You've been telling me for weeks I don't know how to sit still and let someone else handle things. Don't act surprised when I finally agree with you."

That got a real laugh out of him, short and startled, like she'd caught him off guard with it. "Fair enough."

"There's still a problem, though," Hazel said, sobering. "Everything we've found so far runs through Dana somehow — the initials, the timeline gap, the locked door. If we can't rely on the department, we need something that doesn't depend on any of that. Something independent."

"Something that would still be true even if she never turns up at all."

"Exactly."

That evening, Milo found her at the kitchen table, laptop open, a fresh legal pad already half-filled with names and arrows connecting things that didn't yet connect to anything.

"You're rebuilding the whole case from scratch, aren't you," he said, not really a question.

"Somebody has to."

"I thought that was the state police's job now."

"Apparently the state police's job is asking me the same four questions in different orders and hoping I get bored and stop showing up." Hazel didn't look up from the screen. "So, yes. I'm rebuilding the case from scratch."

Milo was quiet for a second, which was rare enough that Hazel actually glanced up.

"Des asked about Aunt Dana today," he said. "At breakfast. Wanted to know if she was in trouble."

Hazel's stomach dropped. "What did you tell her?"

"That grown-ups get in trouble sometimes too, and it's not something she has to worry about." He shrugged, like it hadn't cost him anything to say, though Hazel suspected it had. "She seemed fine with that. Went back to eating her cereal like it was nothing."

"Thank you. For handling that."

"Somebody has to," he said, echoing her own words back at her, deadpan enough that it took her a second to catch it. Then he grabbed a handful of crackers from the pantry and disappeared upstairs, leaving her alone with the case again.

A little later, the phone rang. A reporter from the county paper called, a woman named Delgado who introduced herself quickly and got straight to business, the way people did when they knew hesitation could cost them a story.

"I'm working on a piece about Sheriff Reyes's disappearance," Delgado said. "I understand you were the one who found the evidence that started all this. I'd like your comment, on or off record, whichever you're more comfortable with."

Hazel hesitated, phone pressed hard to her ear, standing in the kitchen where anyone could walk in and overhear. "I don't think I'm supposed to talk to the press about an active investigation."

"That's fair. For what it's worth, you're not the only one who feels that way." Something in Delgado's voice shifted, careful now, like she was deciding how much to share. "I'll say this much — I called the department for comment three days ago, and somebody there strongly suggested I hold off running anything until 'the situation resolves itself.' Which is an interesting thing to say about a missing sheriff, don't you think?"

"Who told you that?"

"I'm not going to say. But it wasn't a suggestion I felt great about taking." A pause. "You should know you're not the only one they're trying to manage. I've heard the same kind of language used about the Ashworth family's involvement, too — suggestions to wait, to be patient, to let things resolve quietly. It's not usually how a department behaves when it actually wants the truth out fast." Another pause, shorter this time. "If you change your mind about talking, you have my number now."

Hazel hung up and stood very still in the kitchen, turning it over. Someone inside the department — not just avoiding scrutiny, but actively working the press, actively trying to control the timeline of a story about a woman who'd locked her own niece inside a building.

She texted Liam a single line before she'd even finished thinking it through.

Delgado just told me someone at the department tried to bury her story.

This isn't just about Dana anymore. Someone's still protecting her.

His reply came back almost instantly, three words that felt less like a question than a decision already made.

Then we go around them.

Hazel set the phone down and looked at the printouts spread across the kitchen table, at her own handwriting circling names that still didn't connect to anything solid. Somewhere out there, whoever had told Delgado to sit on her story was still working to keep this contained. That meant whatever came next had to be something they couldn't quietly bury the way they'd buried everything else so far — not a rumor, not a suspicion, not one more thing that lived or died on whether people believed a seventeen-year-old over a badge. It had to be something that stood on its own, with or without Dana ever turning up to answer for any of it.

She pulled the legal pad back toward her and started a new page.