The Vanishing on Nicola Street

November 1, 2021, Kamloops, BC

Her Jeep was still running when they arrived. It sat skewed on Nicola Street, nose curbside. The engine idled with a low, steady hum—keys still in the ignition. The driver’s door had been left ajar and on the passenger seat, her purse lay unzipped, contents untouched: wallet, phone, loose bills, a tube of lipstick. The owner had disappeared.

Neighbors gathered on the sidewalk hugging themselves against a chill that wasn’t from weather. They whispered, peered in as if she might be hiding in the back. No one had seen or heard anything. By the time patrol officers showed up, to onlookers, it felt like the ground itself had opened and swallowed Brooke Halden whole.

***

Homicide Detective Sakina Jules ducked under the tape in plain clothes before anyone could stop her. Twenty-nine, sharp-eyed, Indigenous, and long done being underestimated, she flashed her badge without breaking stride. Patrol constable on scene opened his mouth to object, then snapped it shut when he saw her expression.

The Jeep still idled, coughing exhaust into the cold morning. She reached in and killed the engine. The sudden quiet felt eerie. Purse untouched. Wallet and phone still inside. No forced entry. No sign of a struggle. She crouched by the driver’s side and studied the asphalt. Fresh tire marks—two narrow arcs—curved tight to the curb, like another vehicle had pulled alongside or forced hers inward. A scrape along the left front fender confirmed it. She lifted flecks of robin’s egg blue paint with her Leatherman and touched the mark through a glove.

“Probably just a ding from parking,” Detective Desmond Clarke shrugged.

She didn’t look up. “Lot bumps don’t leave directional skid marks.”

She stood, scanning the street again. The neighborhood felt staged. Too quiet. Like someone had excised the driver from the world with surgical care. She circled the Jeep once, then twice, noting each anomaly. A cold thread pulled through her memory—old files, unresolved missing persons cold cases now whispered about in hushed tones by families who never got calls back.

Not this time.

She closed the Jeep door gently, sealing in the silence. Then she turned toward the waiting families and uniforms and said only,

“Get me the last 48 hours of her phone records and traffic cam pulls from this block.”

She was already walking back to her unmarked SUV with stones in her gut. Someone had snatched Brooke Halden in plain sight—and expected no one would notice.

They had been right.

***

She faded in and out—a small strangled sound escaped through the duct tape. In the rearview, he watched as her head lolled against the window, eyes fluttering. The sedative was already wearing off. The road he’d taken wasn’t on any map—an old logging route abandoned after the fires. Washed out in two places; only someone familiarized could drive it without shredding a tire. No lights. No cars. No service. He’d tied her hands in front— to make her think there was still a chance to bargain.

There never was.

The truck dipped into ruts so deep the frame groaned as he turned off the access road. She stirred again—confusion, not fear yet. The zip-ties on her ankles clicked when she tested them. The beginning of understanding.

He parked between two burned-out Douglas fir stumps. Moonlight flashed off the hood. Nothing else around here caught light anymore. He sat for a moment, hands on the wheel, letting silence fill his head. No engines. No wind. No sirens. The kind of quiet his father said could slice through bone. He opened the truck’s rear door. Cold air jolted her awake and her eyes widened. She tried to speak, then stopped. Her breath hitched when she saw there was no road, no house, no help—just the scorched earth. Her dull, blue eyes met his rapacious stare. He cut the ties at her ankles but left her muzzled. She kicked weakly when he lifted her from the truck, limbs dulled by the drugs.

The old fruit cellar sat ten yards west. The cabin had burned to frame and rubble, but the cellar had survived—damp, lightless, perfect. He ducked under the collapsed overhang, shifted the corrugated tin he’d dragged there months ago, and exposed the blackened wooden door in the floor. He popped the lock pin with his boot and nudged it open. Damp earth and rot boiled up: clay, mildew, apples long rotted. He descended the narrow dirt steps with her slung over his shoulder and dumped her on the stained, army cot in the corner. Her eyes tracked him now, muzzy. She tried to push herself up; her arms folded uselessly.

He crouched and peeled the tape from her mouth slowly, stretching the skin at the corners like an accordion. She gasped for air as though surfacing from deep water. He pressed two fingers to her throat, feeling the hammering pulse there.

“Don’t scream,” he said—flat, unthreatening. She only stared, dazed. Down here, she would learn what he already knew. Noise was temporary.

It was the silence that had teeth.

***

Kamloops RCMP detachment, St. Paul Street

Detective Sakina Jules stood at the edge of the incident board, coffee cooling in her hand, eyes fixed on the map pinned across the corkboard. A red circle marked the spot where Brooke’s Jeep had been found. Another circle drawn sixty kilometres north. Two more dotted the fringe of the highway leading west.

Four disappearances in as many years. Two white women — different ages, different provinces. A young man from Sun Peaks. And an Indigenous woman. Ages and backgrounds didn’t form a neat profile; what linked them was the vanishing – without witnesses, without a cry, without a trace. The higher-ups called it unrelated incidents spanning jurisdictions. The phrase lingered on her tongue like expired milk.

“This is going upstairs,” came a voice behind her.

Sakina didn’t turn. Staff Sergeant Donna Hughes stepped into her periphery, blond hair pulled back severely, framing the symmetry of her face. She was one of the few department heads who didn’t treat Sakina like a diversity hire.

“We’re not losing this to E-Division,” Sakina said, finally dragging her gaze to Hughes. “We sit on it, she goes cold before the ink dries.”

“You think I’m unaware?” Hughes said quietly. Her tone wasn’t unkind, but it edged on warning. “You want this case, you follow channels. You don’t grandstand.”

Sakina took a slow breath. “Someone snatched a 180lb, thirty-two year old woman in broad daylight off a residential street in a small BC town. And you’re worried about me?”

“You’ll get your time with the file. But don’t turn this into another crusade.”

Sakina stared at the file spread open on her desk. “She had a 13 year old dog at home, Serg. Who just takes off and leaves an old dog behind unfed.”

Both women thought the same thing. No one.

Hughes sighed through her nose, then walked away. Sakina waited until the door clicked shut. The Halden file was still warm from the copier. She closed the folder and reached for her coat. Whoever was snatching the victims thought silence made him untouchable. If it was the last thing she did, she was going to prove him wrong.

***

He always took their voices first. Not with violence or tape—that came after. Silence had to be taught, earned, respected. He’d learned very young that terror didn’t start with touch. It started with the moment you realized your screams wouldn’t save you.

Brooke Halden lay in the fetal position on the dirty, army cot, wrists cinched with plastic restraints that cut flesh each time she shifted. Duct tape kept her quiet, after the rag—sharp and chemical—had been held over her mouth and nose. He sat, now, on a wooden crate across from her, elbows on his knees, watching. The lighter rolled in his palm, metal clicking softly against calloused skin. He held it the way other men held rosaries.

Brooke’s breathing quickened when she realized he was there. She made a sound against the tape, a strangled whimper that died in her throat. He liked that—the moment she tested her own helplessness and understood it. The ones before her had screamed until their voices failed. Some had begged. Others had gone mad. None had valued the quiet like Brooke did. He loved it too. He leaned forward so she could see the flicker of metal in his hand. Her horrified eyes followed it, wide and wet. Outside, daylight had begun to thin. The highway lay miles off—its noise too faint to matter.

He let the silence grow.

When her breathing slowed to shallow, measured pulls, he rose. The crate scraped the dirt floor. She flinched. He crouched, inspected the purple welt lines rising on her wrists. When he finally spoke, his voice barely moved the air.

“You understand you are going to burn.”

Not a question. Just truth. He rose, ascended the stairs and left her there to think over what he had said. The lock clicked into place under his boot. Alone In the darkness, a thick blanket of despair settled over Brooke like loosely shovelled earth.

He walked, unhurried, back to the truck in the fading light. He sat for a moment, hands on the wheel. The scent of oil and old leather rose from the cracked upholstery. In the glovebox lay what he called his ledger—a weathered notebook with thin, curling pages. The more recent entries were only initials and scrawled dates. Brooke would take her place there as soon as he felt the time was right. He snapped the book shut, slid it away, and turned the key. The Ford coughed twice before settling into a gravelly idle. He glanced down the dirt road for headlights, though no one ever came this way after dark. They said the land was cursed.

He liked that people believed in superstition. It was better for him when monsters were to blame.

***

Homicide Detective Sakina Jules didn’t ask for permission, or bank on forgiveness. By dusk she’d pulled four loose-matching missing-person files from the last five years: unexplained disappearances, abandoned vehicles, odd details that had been shrugged off. Names she’d remembered that had drifted through the Kamloops’ precinct over the years like pulp mill smoke.

Cody Halverson, 19, Caucasian male — listed as “misadventure suspected.” No remains/belongings ever recovered. Last seen walking the Sun Peaks ski hill road alone in the early hours of February 17th, 2017.

Gwen Arnett, 54, Caucasian female — vanished in 2018 after finishing a late shift at the casino. Her Toyota Corolla was found idling near Inks Lake service road, door ajar, groceries still in the boot.

Margaret “Maggie” Loughlin, 18, Caucasian female — went missing Spring 2019 near Logan Lake. Her Volkswagen van was discovered broken down on the shoulder of Highway 1, hazard lights blinking. An Ontario girl who had left a Merritt yoga retreat before disappearing without a trace. The report confirmed suicide although the family insisted she was not depressed and had no prior history of mental illness.

In 2020, Nell James, 32, Indigenous female — with a history of mental health and addiction issues was reported missing from the North Shore by her aunt, who said police never filed the paperwork because there was, “no proof she didn’t just pick up and move to Vancouver.”

She spread the photos across the briefing-room table. No one had ever cross-checked them. The Halverson file had been cold for three and a half years; the log read: “Presumed deceased — extensive terrain search exhausted.” Sakina drew a red line under each vehicle recovery. Different roads, different years — but the same odd pulse beat beneath them: all victims had vanished without a trace. Sakina pinned aerial maps to the board and stepped back. The “kill zone” was taking the shape of a warped triangle.

A throat cleared in the doorway. Homicide Detective Desmond “Dez” Clarke leaned on the frame, arms folded, watching her work. Late thirties, lean, Métis, sharp-eyed. One of the few in the detachment who didn’t treat her like a kid who’d wandered onto the wrong playground.

“You planning to tell Donnelly before or after you break it?” he asked.

She didn’t look up. “After. Think of the paperwork it'll save him.”

He stepped inside, gaze skating over the files. “That’s four unsolved MPs, not counting Brooke. You trying to write them into the same story?”

She nodded.

He moved toward the table, picked up the Halverson file. “That the kid from Sun Peaks? Thought he froze or fell off a cliff?”

“The body never turned up.”

“Lots of bodies don’t turn up in those mountains. Apex predators, snow pack.”

She shook her head. “We keep after it until they do.”

Dez watched her for a moment, jaw shifting. “You want backup on this? Or is this one of your I’ll-handle-it-alone things?”

“You’re here, aren’t you?”

He snorted. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

They combed over the files in companionable silence. One missing person was an anomaly. Four was a pattern. Five was a hunt.

***

The Halverson house sat at the edge of Heffley Creek, where the pavement thinned into dirt and the pine trees leaned close, like they were listening. A faded, floral wreath still hung on the door, the ribbon bleached to the color of old blood.

Sakina had barely knocked once when the door opened. Marla Halverson looked hollowed-out—hair unbrushed, eyes raw.

“You found him?”

“No, Ma’am,” Sakina said gently, “I need to ask you some questions about Cody.”

Marla stepped back and ushered her inside. The living room smelled like woodsmoke and lemon cleaner, like someone had tried to scrub grief out of the walls. A coffee mug sat on the table, half-full, cold.

“You’re the first to show up since they gave up on looking,” Marla said, voice flat. “Why now?”

Sakina reached into her coat and set a photo on the table — Brooke Halden’s Jeep, driver’s door open, keys still in the ignition.

Marla stared.

“We let Cody’s case go cold,” Sakina said. “Now there’s a young woman out there. I intend to find her and bring her home.”

Marla’s gaze hardened. “Then you need to hear what they wouldn’t.” Sakina leaned in.

“Listen. A couple days before he disappeared, Cody told me about a truck driving slow by the switchback — old, blue, tailgate rattling. Passed him twice the night before. Close enough he felt the wind off it.”

Sakina’s pulse skipped. Her eyes never wavered. Blue truck. No trace. No sign of a struggle.

“Do you think your son knew the driver?”

Marla shook her head. “He said the man waved at him. Like he knew him. But he didn’t.”

There it was — the outline of a predator nobody had bothered to see. As she stood to leave, Marla caught her sleeve.

“Find him,” she said, staring at Sakina with haunted eyes.

“I will do my absolute best.”

***

She didn’t scream like the others. He’d expected panic when she awoke. The usual thrashing that made the first hour tedious. But Brooke Halden had gone quiet now—shock could do that — seal a person up from the inside. He could still smell the faint scent of rotted apples. The only sounds were the hum of the small Honda generator and the drip of meltwater somewhere behind the foundation. He liked the air down here. Heavy and padded. Every breath they took was felt by the dark. She’d been a good girl, so he had removed the duct tape. She finally spoke, voice raw.

“Why—why are you doing this?”

He said nothing. Her gaze wandered to the moth-eaten wingback in the corner, to the shelf of tools. Someone’s grandmother probably sat there once to pit cherries. He liked rooms with memories; they softened disbelief. Eyes tearing, a small, strangled sound died in her throat. He liked that, too—the instant her hope fizzled. It was like letting go of a Dollar Store balloon full of stale air.

“You think someone’s coming?” he said at last.

Her eyes lit foolishly. “They’ll never stop looking for me.”

“You’ll never be found,” he replied. He crouched to meet her eyes. “You left your engine running,” he said, soft as dust on a moth’s wing. “Sure looks like you walked away all on your own.”

The silence shifted—hope curdled into understanding. He stood, satisfied, and locked the door behind him, leaving her terrified and alone.

***

By the time the sun slipped behind the cutbanks over Kamloops Lake, the air had turned sharp. Sakina had the Halden file spread across her cruiser’s hood, pages held down by a radio and a half-empty coffee mug. Streetlamps along St. Paul clicked on, throwing long, amber shadows. She scanned the notes again, though she could recite them from memory. If you looked at Brooke Halsten alone, it was an outlier—too neat for panic. But line it up with the other files? That’s when the picture sharpened. Each disappearance had been shuffled through a different detachment, logged by different officers, rubber-stamped with different excuses across different jurisdictional borders. Weather. Burnout. Bad breakup. Voluntary absence.

“Adults are allowed to leave town.”

Sakina thumbed through crime‑scene photos: the scuffed fender —the paint had to have been from an ‘80 to ’86 Ford Bullnose. She was running that through ICBC already. She dug into other files until a line snagged: at a party the night Cody Halverson vanished someone nearly got sideswiped by an old, squared-nosed, blue Ford; no plate noted, no follow‑up. In another file a constable had scribbled that a neighbor heard an idling, rattling of a truck engine late at night near Little Heffley and thought someone might’ve gotten stuck. Until now, nobody had compared notes.

Footsteps scraped the pavement. “Jules?”

She didn’t look up. “Chen.”

Constable Riley Chen stepped into the light, breath steaming. “You still here?”

She tapped the photos. “You ever notice how many of the vics left their engines running?”

He gave her a skeptical look. “Is that even a stat?”

“It is now.”

“Alright,” he said, “tell me what you need.”

“Pull every MP, collision, near‑miss, erratic‑driving, and abandoned‑vehicle report from Cache Creek to Sun Peaks over the past five years. Anything mentioning a 1980 to 1986 Bullnose F-Seris Ford—presumably pale blue.”

Chen let out a slow breath. “You think he’s trolling the roads?”

“He’s been using our borders, and their trust,” Sakina corrected. “Different jurisdictions, different detachments, different paperwork, different workloads. We aren’t connected. He exploits that.”

“You bringing this to Donnelly?”

“Not until it’s more than a theory.”

“And how exactly are you planning to make it more than theory?”

She turned, peering toward the highway where the lights of the city thinned into dark. The sky beyond the river was already swallowed by black—empty and open as a maw.

“By driving it,” she said. “Until I see him—or he sees me.”

Chen’s posture shifted, like he wasn’t sure whether to argue or follow. “You can’t bait something you can’t identify.”

“I can narrow down the routes. Might see the truck,” she said. “That’s a start.”

He hesitated. “Jules… This isn’t sanctioned.”

“Neither is ignoring it,” she said.

She gathered the stack of files into a neat stack, sliding them onto the seat of her cruiser. Brooke was out there. Somewhere beyond the glow of the streetlamps

And Sakina wasn’t going to rest until she found her.

***

The task force huddled in a former storage room, chairs mismatched, a whiteboard that had seen better days, and the smell of burnt coffee and photocopier ozone thick in the air. Sakina stood at the far end, arms crossed, eyes on the wall of maps.

Five missing. No bodies. No blood. No witnesses.

Donnelly tapped a pen. “We’re not calling it a serial. Media will have three provinces crawling up our—”

“It’s one perp,” Sakina said.

Heads shifted. Most didn’t care. She pointed at the map: red dots for the missing women, a blue dot for Cody. No neat circle. No DNA evidence or DBs, but it didn’t feel random.

“Look at the retrieval zones,” she said. “He’s not dumping. He’s taking.”

“He?” Dez said, leaning back, chewing a thumbnail.

“Yeah,” Sakina said. “This isn’t opportunistic. He plans. They go missing clean. That’s not two or three offenders. That’s one routine.”

Donnelly sighed like she’d asked him for his pension. “We don’t have a plate, we don’t have camera footage, we don’t have bodies. What we’ve got is whispers and bad timing.”

“And 5 MPs,” Sakina frowned.

“And no witnesses,” Chen added.

“Focus on family, partners, friends,” Donnelly said, closing his folder. “Stats, not fantasies, people. Not one word of this ‘Kamloops Triangle’ shit leaks. You hear me?”

Sakina’s teeth bit the inside of her cheek. “Four women from town. One man from Sun Peaks. All went missing from within the same geographic triangle. It’s not a coincidence.”

After the meeting concluded, Dez caught up. “I didn’t say you’re wrong, Sakina. Just… don’t give him a reason to sideline you.”

“He already has,” she said. “I’m deciding whether to work around him—or go through him.”

Outside, the air was crisp, sky the color of steel. Sakina paused and looked toward the hills beyond the river — burned ridges black against the pink, setting sky. She couldn’t have said why, but that was the direction she kept coming back to. Not town. Not alleyways or backroads near houses.

Where things didn’t echo—that’s where he’d be.

***

Morning found Sakina at her desk at the detachment by 6:00 a.m. Chen nudged the office door open with his hip, a USB in one hand and a paper cup of coffee in the other.

“7-Eleven on 6th and Victoria finally sent the footage,” he said, dropping the stick on the desk.

Sakina smiled and plugged it into her computer. The video was broken into timestamped chunks—daylight sharp, windshields reflecting, pedestrians drifting past. Cars moved lazily through the lot.

“Watch the window right of the pumps,” Chen said.

A blue, square‑nosed Ford rolled into frame. It pulled into the far pump. The driver’s face was obscured. Ballcap, sunglasses, collar up, gloves despite the mild weather. He fueled up like someone used to going unnoticed. He went inside, paid cash, barely spoke. The clerk didn’t remember him. It was time stamped: 12:19 p.m. Brooke’s Jeep appeared ten minutes later, heading toward Nicola Street.

“He could’ve followed,” Chen said quietly.

“Or just waited,” Sakina replied.

They reviewed footage from two more angles. In one, the blue Ford exited northbound. Not fast. Not lurking. Just passing through. But the timing wrapped around Brooke’s disappearance like barbed wire. By late afternoon, they were combing earlier footage tied to past disappearances. Most angles were useless—blind spots, overexposure—but then: three months before Gwen Arnett vanished, a nearly identical square-nosed, blue Ford fueled up at Petro Pass on Rogers Way, early afternoon. Same driver’s build. Same habit of hiding his face. Two weeks before Cody Halverson disappeared, a dash cam at Heffley Creek had caught the same truck around 2 p.m. Driver paid cash again. Head down.

Always daytime. Always ordinary.

“He doesn’t hide in darkness,” she said quietly. “He hides by blending in.”

Chen exhaled. “And no one looks twice at a man buying gas.”

For the first time since Brooke vanished, the thread felt solid. Now she just had to pull—and make sure she was in the right place when it unraveled.

***

He liked her more than the others. Not because she was special—none of them were—but because Brooke Halden understood something most did not: sound was useless here. Some fought. Some prayed. Some filled the dark with tears and questions. But Brooke had embraced stillness. Watching. Listening. Conserving.

He enjoyed her.

The cellar was cold enough that her breath fogged faintly when she exhaled through her nose. A single bulb hung from the joist above, its pull chain swaying just slightly from where he’d brushed it earlier. He sat on the bottom step, elbows on his knees, watching her through the slats of shadow. He didn’t speak. Words were tools for people who needed to explain themselves.

He didn’t.

She had tried to mark time in the beginning—blinking deliberately, shifting, counting her breaths—but down here, time lost its bones. She flinched only once when he’d returned earlier with the red jerry can. He set it down on the far workbench beside the neat rows of tapes and twine. He didn’t collect souvenirs. Rather, he prized the memory of their quiet time together.

Brooke watched him now with the wary patience of a cornered mouse. Outside, the world went on—traffic, search teams, mothers pacing kitchens—but down in the cellar he controlled the seasons.

Eventually, she would speak. They always did. Beg, bargain, name fathers and husbands who might come. And when she realized no one was coming that was when the silence shifted— when it tasted right. The others had burned too fast, leaving only ash and the hollow ache. She was different. She hadn’t screamed when he took her. She hadn’t struggled when he’d carried her like a helpless child. She had saved herself without knowing.

He respected that.

Slowly, he peeled the duct tape from her mouth. The soft tearing sound vanished into the dark. A smile stretched over teeth.

He waited. She said nothing.

Good. Now his rules were understood.

***

The camera footage they’d uncovered changed everything. Sakina leaned over Dez and Chen, arms crossed, eyes locked on the grainy feed as cars ghosted past in timestamped silence. Dez pulled all the city traffic cams. Gas stations in Heffley Creek, Logan Lake, Merritt, Cache Creek, Kamloops.

“What do we got?” Chen asked after three days of looking at video footage.

“Three women. One young man. One grandmother. Blue Ford. All within the same geographic perimeter —- the so-called Kamloops Triangle.,” Sakina summarized.

Dez rubbed his jaw, squinting. “Could be nothing,” he said. Not convinced.

“Hold on, girl. We’re coming for you,” Sakina murmured.

***

The call came in from Search and Rescue. A hunter west of Savona had spotted a thin column of smoke snaking from a ravine called the Burn out past Savona— charred trees, gutted cars, soil still black from the wildfire years ago. Nobody camped out there. Nothing alive grew back.

Assuming some fool was about to spark another disaster, the hunter radioed it in. The report landed with Dez, already on-call for fire liaison. He barely looked until the coordinates loaded. The pin fell dead center on Sakina’s triangle map — a place no one lived, no one hiked, no one stumbled across.

Dez stared at the map, then at her. “Tell me that’s nothing.”

Sakina didn’t answer. She was already pulling on her vest.

***

They went in daylight — Sakina, Dez, Chen, and two auxiliaries — bouncing along the deserted fire road in marked police cruisers. The deeper they pushed into the Burn, the weaker the radios grew, as if the place swallowed signal and sound. Smoke curled from a smoldering pit among the skeletons of burned-out vehicles. The stench hit first: scorched meat, old fuel, upturned earth.

Engines off, they moved in on foot. Sakina led, heart thudding. Boots crunched lightly over cinder. Weapons drawn, they found the trapdoor open. Using military hand signals, Sakina thundered down the stairs into the blackness below, while Dex covered her, gun trained.

The cellar smelled of smoke and rot. Brooke lay inside — wrists bruised, face sunken, barely conscious but breathing.

“Brooke Halden! RCMP! Stay calm! We’re getting you out!” Sakina called, heart pounding, eyes adjusting to the dim light. Then she saw him. Emerging from shadow, soot-streaked, eyes colder than fear. He didn’t run. He didn’t speak. Just watched, still as a hunter’s scope.

“RCMP! GET YOUR HANDS WHERE I CAN SEE THEM!” Sakina shouted, her gun shaking.

He tilted his head, calculating. Then a flash—a hooked blade from his belt. He lunged at Brooke in a slashing motion. Sakina fired two rounds, right shoulder, left knee. He jerked midair—lips twisted in a painful grimace—then crumpled to the ground. Sakina was on him before he could rise, knee between his shoulder blades, twisting his wrist behind his back, blood pooling in the loose dirt. Only when the metal clicked around his wrists did he whisper,

“You finally found me.”

“That’s the name of the game, Pal,” Sakina huffed. “You have the right to remain silent.”

***

Headlines bloomed: Brooke Halden found. Serial suspect in custody. While Brooke recovered under RCMP guard at Royal Inland Hospital. The province congratulated itself. Sakina didn’t.

Elias Strand, pale and bandaged, barely spoke. Shackled to the bed in his downtown Kamloops, city holding cell, repugnant eyes measured the attractive, young detective. On the third silent night, she sat across from him, recorder idle.

“Where’s Cody Halverson?” She leaned in. Something tightened in his face — recognition. He stared past her to floodlit walls.

“You think you’ve stopped me,” he murmured. “Some things don’t stop. They simply change.”

A nurse and guard entered. Sakina was forced into the hallway during his bandage change. Two hours later, Elias Strand bled out on his holding cell floor, having palmed a sliver of metal to reopen the yawning wounds beneath his bandages. His face was serene. His right hand curled faintly, as if still clutching something unseen.

A week later, a conservation officer discovered a half-collapsed bunker north of Heffley Creek. Inside: a metal bedframe bolted to dirt, a crude map marking Highway 5, Paul Lake Road, and mill access trails, several ghost assault rifles and a cell phone that had belonged to Cody Halverson. The battery was long dead. Screen cracked. Mud ground into the speaker mesh. No human remains were recovered.

A second triangle drawn, and unfinished.

In 2023, British Columbia had the highest rate of missing-adult reports per capita in Canada — 269 missing adults per 100,000 people. To date, Shannon White and Ryan Shtuka have not been found. To this day, their families and communities continue the search.