Callum Vanishes

The newsroom loft looks staged when we get there. Not ransacked. curated. Drawers open the same amount. photographs removed from some frames and left in others. Callum's coffee still warm on the desk. His chair tipped just enough to imply haste rather than struggle. Professionals do that: they arrange panic into ambiguity.

On the conference table sits the broken laptop from the photo and one disposable phone. Nico gloves up. I don't wait and hit play on the voicemail queued on speaker.

Callum's voice comes through rough, breathing hard, trying to sound more irritated than frightened. "Sloane, if this got to you, they moved me before I could burn the box. Roman wasn't here. Different crew. Preacher haircut, yes, and someone who knows newsroom mirrors. They want the Nina tapes more than the donor names. That means the voices hurt someone currently breathing in office."

The recording cuts into static, then a second voice enters, male and smooth. "Enough journalism."

Silence after that.

Tessa goes still in a way I now recognize as danger, not shock. "Preacher haircut," she says. "Bishop Hale's fixer. Name's Curtis Bell. He handled three Harbor House donor families the year Nina started copying files."

Nico is already on the phone pulling surveillance. "If Bell is active, this just crossed from local conspiracy into interstate coercion."

My eyes catch on the warm coffee again. Callum was grabbed in the window between certainty and action. That is what this machine does best. It waits until someone believes momentum is theirs, then reminds them momentum still rents from power.

On the whiteboard behind the desk, barely visible under the fluorescent glare, Callum left one thing uncapped in haste: a handwritten note circled three times.

Rally = live trap.