Besides, it wasn’t like Ilse didn’t have oddities of her own.

“So?” she pressed, when he volunteered nothing further. “Any more leads?”

“Three more,” he said. “Fifties. Red truck. Twenty years local.”

“Only three?”

“In the area. Three.”

“Those last two weren’t great,” she said, and then wished she hadn’t. Words for the sake of words. Somehow, it felt like Agent Sawyer dragged it out of her, as if she were trying to compensate for his own apparent bankruptcy of vocabulary.

Still, the last two houses they’d stopped at had been duds. First one, the man had died of a heart attack the previous year, but it hadn’t been reported. The second, the man had been in a wheelchair, and no longer owned a red truck. His license had been revoked on top of it all, and he’d yelled them off his property at such an early hour.

Not an ideal start.

Ilse puffed a little breath and she could feel Agent Sawyer’s eyes on her, watching her in the rearview mirror. She brushed her loose hair past her ear and settled in, watching the road beneath the dark as Sawyer maneuvered them outside Seattle once more, along old mountain roads.

Dawn hinted itself across the horizon now, and the overcast skies had cleared a bit. Exhaustion weighed on Ilse’s limbs, on her eyes. She winced against a jolting headache, but swallowed, inhaling for a moment and staring at the sky to gather herself. A tinge of gray still made itself known on the horizon, wreathing the distant mountains, but at least the rain had stopped, though the roads were still darkened from damp.

“So three left?” Ilse said, doing that thing again where she filled in words for silence.

“Not great leads,” he countered. “One of them lives in a nursing home now, just owns the property but doesn’t live there.”

“What about the other two?”

“One doesn’t own a red truck. Blue, but not red.”

“Did he used to own a red truck?”

“Wasn’t clear,” Sawyer replied, and added nothing further.

“And this third lead? What about him?” Ilse felt her own anxiety mounting.

In answer, though, Sawyer pulled off the road all of a sudden, onto an old dirt trail, leading past a mailbox shaped like a beehive with a little green flag.

“Is this it?” Ilse said.

“Third lead. Hang on—road’s washed.”

Even as he said it, Ilse’s teeth jarred, and she winced as they bumped over the road. She rubbed at her neck, leaning back in the seat and peering up the road in the direction of an old house on a hill. “Is this it?” she said.

Sawyer’s eyes narrowed, staring ahead, swallowing softly. “This is it,” he said. “Yeah. Last chance.”

“What about those other two leads?”

“Nah,” he said, simply.

She frowned at the back of his head. “What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “They don’t feel right.”

“Hang on, feel right?” Ilse said, shaking her head. “No, look, just because someone owns a blue truck now, doesn’t mean they didn’t used to…”