“I suppose, but I can barely move across the dance floor without tripping over my own feet.” Decker pocketed his keys. “Got a meeting—redevelopment project for the old theater on Main. Whole place smells like mold and nostalgia, but we’ll make something out of it. Calusa Cove needs a little more hope.”
Buddy nodded once. “We all do.”
Decker pointed at the box in Buddy’s arms. “Looks heavy. You building your own theater?”
“Just rattling some old skeletons,” Buddy said.
Decker laughed like he hadn’t heard the truth in it. “Well, if you ever decide to trade security work for construction, I’ll put you on payroll.”
“Not my skill set.” Buddy shifted the box. “I break things. I don’t build them.”
Decker clapped him on the shoulder and headed out into the sunlight. “I see the beauty in broken things. And then I like to take the cracks and fill them with sunshine.”
Buddy tossed his head back and laughed. Hard.
“Yeah, I heard how corny that was.”
Buddy turned down the hallway, past an insurance agency that smelled like cheap aftershave and printer toner, until he reached his office. The frosted glass bore no name—kind of the point.
He pushed through the door.
Inside, the air was marginally cooler. The old ceiling fan wobbled as it rotated. The walls were lined with corkboards and whiteboards—ghosts of old cases still faintly visible where the marker hadn’t fully erased.
Sterling sat on the edge of the desk with a cup of coffee that smelled faintly of burned chicory. Dove perched on the windowsill, sunlight through the blinds cutting stripes across her arms. She was barefoot, hair tied in a knot that said she hadn’t slept, tablet balanced on her knee.
“Morning,” Buddy said, setting the box down on the table.
“Right back at you.” Sterling stared at the box. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Yeah.” Buddy pried the lid open. “Simon Court. My own notes. The stuff I kept when I shouldn’t have.”
Dove raised an eyebrow. “Define shouldn’t have.”
Buddy gave her a look. “Let’s call it professional insurance.”
Sterling leaned forward. “You’re sure you want to dredge that back up? You didn’t exactly come out of that case whole.”
“I resent that statement.” Buddy stared at the papers, the curling corners, the black ink of names that still knotted his chest. “Besides, either this bastard is back, or someone wants me to think he is,” he said quietly. “Might as well face him on my terms.”
He started pulling out folders—his handwriting on half the labels, tight and precise, because somewhere down the pike, he’d learned the art of being a perfectionist. Drove Chloe crazy. Drove everyone he worked half nuts. “These are my field notes. Cross-checks. Map overlays. Unofficial witness statements. Copies of images I really shouldn’t have snapped from FBI files.”
Dove stood at the edge of the desk and stared. “I thought you were a rules man.”
“I am, until someone pushes me too far. Simon kicked my ass off the fucking cliff.” He spread the files across the desk like cards in a hand he hated holding.
Dove bent over, hands behind her back, and closed one eye like she was looking through the scope of a rifle. “You’ve got a hell of a system for a guy who hates paperwork.”
“I used to love it,” he admitted. “It helped me make sense of things. Only, how can you make sense of girls who vanish without a trace?”
They worked quietly for a while, tacking photos and notes onto the corkboard. The hum of the fan filled the silence, along with the faint sound of gulls over the water. Outside, Calusa Cove went about its routine — engines, distant laughter, the low moan of a boat horn cutting through humidity.
Sterling broke the quiet first. “Who’s watching Fallon?”
“Cullen,” Buddy said, not looking up, because he couldn’t. He needed to focus and thinking about Fallon would break that. Only, it had been broken the second she was out of his arms and out of sight. He’d wanted to tell her to call in sick. To come to work with him.
But that would make him look like a total prick, and he was on thin ice as it was.
Consequences were already playing out, except they weren’t the ones he’d expected. He thought he’d get squirrely. That he’d need more space. More room to breathe. That he’d want to sleep alone. Be alone.
