CHAPTER 19
Kelsi
16 Days to Trial
It was Mondaymorning, and Kelsi and Dylan were seated next to each other at Dylan’s desk. They were preparing for a video conference with an expert in oceanography that they had consulted. He was supposed to provide them with analysis of the currents in the creek the night of Tripp’s death.
Kelsi took a long sip from her mug of room temperature coffee, grimacing when she swallowed gritty dregs. She set her empty mug off to a corner of the desk.
Dylan stood, grabbing her mug and his in opposite hands. “I’ll go fill these. Dash of cream and two sugars, right?”
She nodded, eyes wide as he recited her coffee preference. Kelsi needed the extra caffeine boost to keep her eyes open—and to process Dylan at this hour. “That would be perfect.”
He smiled, a small one, enough to cause crinkles to form at the corners of his eyes, and headed off to the break room.
She pored over the notes and documents they had scattered across the desk. The expert had emailed them ahead of time and Kelsi found a portion she wished to ask him about, so she searched his pencil holder for a highlighter. Not finding one, shegrumbled and pulled out the top drawers of his desk to see if he had one stashed inside.
She found a highlighter in the top right drawer, but when she moved to close it, she stopped—there was a picture frame shoved inside, face down. She recalled how he’d hidden the frame from her that first day in his office. Nibbling her thumbnail, she glanced toward the door. There was no sign of him yet.
Hesitantly, she pulled the frame out and turned it over in her hands. Her breath caught in her chest. It was a picture from the summer after they graduated from college. Dylan was looking at the camera, smiling as he laughed at something his mom had said while taking the picture, but it was her own face she couldn’t pull her gaze from. She was looking at Dylan rather than the camera. Her smile was wide and her eyes soft as she looked at him, and all she could see in her own expression was love.
It was so obvious that she was in love with her best friend, and somehow he’d never known. Or, maybe he had, but chose to ignore it. But why had he hidden the picture from her?
Footsteps in the hall startled her, and she quickly shoved the picture back. She shut the drawer, uncapped the highlighter, and bent over the file. She didn’t look up until his steps grew closer and she could smell the freshly brewed coffee. He cautiously placed her full cup in front of her, careful not to spill a drop on their work strewn about.
“Thank you,” she choked out, cheeks flaming, finally looking up at him as he sat next to her while they waited for their expert witness to log onto their video call. She took a sip of her coffee and sighed at the perfect taste. Somehow he still remembered exactly how she liked it.
Luckily, their meeting started not long after he returned, so Dylan’s attention was on the man on the other end of the callinstead of her. Which was perfect, because she struggled to meet his eyes and instead focused on a spot over his shoulder when he spoke to her.
The expert worked as a professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, and he looked the part. Wiry gray hair stuck up in every which direction, framing owlish glasses that rested on a tall and thin nose. He sported a short-sleeved fishing shirt with a leather strap peeking out from underneath the collar, a shark’s tooth tied to the end. The perfect mix of mad scientist and beach bum.
He stood in a lecture hall. Behind him was a wall of whiteboards, some of them covered by informative posters on aquatic animals tacked on by magnets, and he spoke directly into the camera when he talked, giving them a lovely view of his tonsils. Kelsi cringed.
“Did you both get my email?”
Dylan cleared his throat. “Yes, we did, Dr. Hawthorne.”
He had emailed them maps of the creek and the Chesapeake Bay around the location the body was found. He had also included one of the creeks right off the McGuinnesses’ home. Arrows on the maps indicated the direction of the currents on the night Tripp died.
“Awesome,” he drawled, like a stereotypical surfer. Basically Crush fromFinding Nemowith Einstein’s IQ. “All right, I’m going to dive right in with the maps, if you have them ready.”
He paused, an eyeball close to the screen, and Kelsi and Dylan both rapidly spoke assurances.
“Okay, so obviously you don’t have a specific time of death. Nor do you have an exact location where the body went into the water. That’s where Mother Nature and I come in.” He shuffledhis own maps around in the camera view. “Based on the tide schedule and the currents the night your victim died, I was able to go back and map for you where I believe he would have been dumped. I calculated every half hour. That’s the map I sent you that has the little x’s with time stamps.”
Kelsi flipped around the printed maps until she found the one in question, which was an aerial view of the creek. It was zoomed out enough that they were able to see the location where the body washed up, the McGuinesses’ house, and the waterway that connected them.
“As you can see, the x’s I have marked are all well away from the property your victim was staying at.”
The map very clearly showed that the victim’s body could only have gone into the water at one possible location. For the timeline and currents to match up with where he was found, Tripp had to have fallen in the next creek over.
Dylan and Kelsi exchanged a glance, because this was what they needed. If there was no possibility for the body to have gone into the water at the house, there was no way the victim could have been drunk on the dock and accidentally fallen in. Someone had to have brought Tripp out on the boat.
“So, you’re saying that the victim could not have fallen off the dock at the property?” Kelsi asked the professor.
“From my calculations, there is absolutely no possibility where that could have happened.” He held the map he was looking at close to the camera. So close it blurred out of focus and instead gave them a fuzzy black-and-white image resembling static. “See these arrows here in the creek that property is located on?”
They couldn’t see anything at all on his map, but Kelsi pointed to the arrows in question on their printed copy.
