Saint follows up on the recent sabotage lead with Himes and learns that the construction worker who cut the power, Owen Williams, insists it was an easy mistake. When Himes gives the name, Saint immediately recognizes a familiar pattern and guesses he has a daughter named Lucy, suggesting the lead fits the same troubling web she has been uncovering.

Saint then calls James Connor Correctional Facility and asks Warden Thompson whether Joseph Macauley formed any important relationship while imprisoned there. Thompson remembers only one notable connection: a guard named Darnell Richardson who looked out for Macauley. Saint files the name away, still searching for any old link that might explain Macauley’s later path.

Driven by that question, Saint climbs into the attic and opens the Macauley abduction file for the first time in twelve years. She studies the old evidence in detail, replaying interviews, reviewing reports from the Tooms farm, and pinning notes and maps around her office. As she works through the afternoon, her investigation becomes both professional and personal, shaped by memories of Grace and of her grandmother.

By early evening Saint reaches Marty Tooms’s interview and listens again to his explanation that he had been in the woods looking for a stray dog he called Scout. Hearing Tooms say the dog came from the woodland behind his land, Saint checks the property lines on her old map and realizes that route leads directly to her grandmother’s land, through growth too dense for a person to pass. She retrieves the gold tag she had found, cleans it carefully, and reveals the faint name on it: Scout.