“So you’re in on it too?” I asked, brow arched in question.
He just grinned. “You’re a stubborn woman, Mabel McCoy. I don’t know why I look forward to these moments.”
Twenty minutes later, I stood in my own back room feeling like a stranger at my own party. The space had been transformed into something that looked like a cross between a war room and a particularly organized craft fair. The murder board now occupied the entire back wall, photographs and documents arranged with the kind of precision that suggested Walt had used a level and possibly a protractor. Tommy Wheeler’s files spread across the folding table in neat stacks, each labeled with color-coded tabs. Even the lighting had been adjusted—a clip-on lamp now illuminated the center of the workspace with the intensity of an interrogation room.
Chowder had claimed the one armchair as his command post, wearing the yellow hoodie I’d dressed him in this morning—a casual choice that suggested he wasn’t particularly invested in today’s investigation. He watched the proceedings with half-lidded eyes.
“Dottie called from the hospital,” Bea announced, consulting her phone. “Hank’s children arrived about an hour ago. They’ll stay with him through lunch, which gives Dottie time to work with us this morning.”
“How is he?” I asked.
Walt’s expression tightened in a way that said more than words. “Awake. Alert. Can’t remember a blasted thing about Tuesday afternoon. The neurologist says the trauma wiped out everything from when he dropped you at the hardware store to when he woke up in the hospital. It’s just gone.”
“Convenient,” Dash muttered, pouring himself coffee from the French press with the concentration of someone performing surgery. “For whoever hit him while he was looking for parking.”
“Medically sound, though,” Deidre added, pulling out her reading glasses. “Head trauma affects memory consolidation. It’s not unusual for patients to lose hours or even days around the time of injury. Sometimes it comes back, sometimes it doesn’t.”
“We need to go through everything systematically,” Walt said, tapping the murder board with a pointer he’d produced from somewhere. “No more reactive investigation. We’re getting strategic.”
Dash leaned against the wall, coffee cup in hand, that intense focus I was beginning to recognize settling over his features. “Agreed. The attack on Hank could be coincidence, but nothing was stolen from him. The car wasn’t taken. If it’s connected to the case, and I think it is, then someone’s escalating. Which means we need to be smarter about how we move forward.”
He pulled out his phone, scrolling through messages. “I heard back from the Beaufort investigators this morning. They pulled footage from every business with cameras in the area around the municipal parking lot where we found Hank.”
“And?” Walt leaned forward, his coffee forgotten.
“Not much.” Dash’s frustration bled through each word. “The parking lot itself doesn’t have cameras—budget cuts from two years ago. The restaurants along Bay Street have security, but their cameras face their own entrances and registers, not the street or parking areas. Best they got was footage from the bank on the corner—shows Hank’s Buick driving past toward the lot around 2:47 p.m. yesterday, but the angle doesn’t capture the lot itself.”
“How convenient,” Bea said, her voice sharp as glass. “The one afternoon someone gets beaten half to death in broad daylight, there’s no footage of the actual attack.”
“There’s more,” Dash continued, his jaw tight. “A clothing boutique two blocks over had a camera that captures part of the sidewalk. Around 3:10 p.m.—which fits our timeline for when the attack likely occurred—they picked up someone walking quickly away from the direction of the parking lot. Dark clothing, average height, but the angle’s wrong and the image quality is poor. Can’t make out features or even determine gender with certainty.”
“So we’ve got nothing,” Deidre said flatly.
“We’ve got timing,” Dash replied. “Hank dropped you off at the hardware store around 2:45. You were inside with Frank for roughly twenty-five minutes. That gives us a window between 2:50 and 3:10 when someone attacked him in broad daylight in a public parking lot on a Tuesday afternoon.”
“It was crowded too,” I said, remembering the packed streets, the tourists, the families strolling Bay Street. “That’s why he had to drop us off in the first place—there wasn’t any street parking available.”
“Which means someone either got very lucky,” Walt said slowly, “or they knew exactly when and where to find him. Knew he’d be alone in that parking lot while you two were busy talking to Frank.”
The implication hung in the air like smoke. Someone had been watching. Waiting.
“The Beaufort PD is treating it as assault with intent,” Dash said. “They’re canvassing businesses, interviewing anyone who might have been in or near the lot during that time frame. But so far, no witnesses have come forward. The lunch crowd had thinned out by then, and most people were either inside shops or along the waterfront where the weather was nicer.”
“Whoever did this picked their moment carefully,” Deidre observed, her voice quiet but firm. “Knew when to strike, where the cameras weren’t, how to make sure they couldn’t be identified.”
“And made absolutely certain Hank couldn’t identify them,” I added, thinking of his blank expression in the hospital, the way he kept repeating “the dates don’t match” without remembering what dates or why it mattered. “The memory was stolen from him as efficiently as if someone had reached into his skull and plucked it out.”
Walt’s pointer tapped against his clipboard with sharp, staccato beats. “Then we operate under the assumption that whoever attacked Hank is connected to this case. And that means we’re dealing with someone who’s willing to hurt people to keep their secrets buried.”
“Which means we need to be systematic,” I said, moving to stand beside the board. The faces from the church picnic photograph stared back at me—dozens of people frozen in time on a July afternoon that was supposed to be about celebration, not murder. “Let’s go through what we know for certain.”
“Excellent idea,” Walt said. “The facts don’t lie. Victims—Reverend George Pickering and Ruby Bailey. Both killed September 15, 1985, at Turtle Point. Both shot. .38 caliber weapon never recovered.”
“Both having an affair that was public knowledge by summer of ’85,” Deidre added, consulting her notes. “Though the affair itself started at least a year earlier, possibly longer, from witness accounts.”
“So by the time that church photograph was taken at the July 4 picnic, the knowledge of their affair was well known,” I said, shaking my head. “And everyone looks so happy in the photograph.”
“The longer you live in life,” Walt said, “the more you’ll find that people don’t like to upset the apple cart. Doing the right thing takes work. And there are a lot of people who think they want to do the right thing, but they don’t want to put in the work. Work takes a toll on you, and your family.”
