He didn’t look around. Didn’t notice my truck or, if he did, didn’t care.
The cruiser rolled out of the lot and turned back toward town.
I stayed where I was for a beat after he disappeared, fingers drumming on the steering wheel. Something about his posture nagged at me. Not guilt. Not satisfaction, exactly. More like… resolution. A man who’d reached a conclusion and was prepared to defend it.
I’d seen that resolution before. When that conclusion had been me as the scapegoat. It didn’t leave me with a lot of faith about what I’d hear when I spoke with Astrid.
I killed the engine and headed inside. I followed the hand-lettered arrow for ADMIN/RESEARCH OFFICES down a short hall to an office with an open door.
Astrid sat behind the desk, elbows braced on the surface, fingers rubbing at her temples. Her hair was pulled into a messy knot that had clearly given up hours ago. Wisps stuck out in half a dozen directions. She looked like she’d been awake far too long. I wondered if she’d been here since she left Home Port last night.
Madden stood to one side, arms folded tight across her chest, weight shifted to one hip in a posture that screamed contained fury. Her jaw worked like she was grinding down words that would cost more than they were worth to say out loud.
Both of them looked up when I tapped on the doorframe.
“Hey. I just passed Carson on his way out. What happened?”
Astrid lowered her hands slowly, as if they were heavy. Her eyes were bloodshot and devastated. “He closed the case.”
It wasn’t the words so much as how she said them. Flat. Stunned. Like she hadn’t quite accepted that the syllables were real.
I stepped fully into the room.
“He said it’s resolved,” Astrid continued. “That there’s no longer a basis for treating it as an active missing person investigation.”
“On what grounds?” I asked. “He suddenly find her on a beach towel somewhere, sipping a daiquiri and ignoring her phone?”
It wasn’t funny. Nobody laughed.
Madden shifted her weight, eyes flashing with battle light. “On the grounds that everything conveniently points to ‘she left of her own free will, so not our problem.’”
I glanced between them. “Walk me through it.”
Astrid looked at the monitor, then back at me. “We got an email from Priya. It came in this morning.”
“The timing is what—” Madden started, then caught herself. She gestured to the screen. “You should read it.”
I moved around the side of the desk, tucking myself into the narrow space between Madden and the file cabinet. Up close, I could smell the faint scent of some floral shampoo and feel the tension vibrating in that slim frame, though inches still separated us. I registered the faint shadow under her eyes, the way she’d re-braided her hair too tight, as if control in that one area might compensate for the lack of it everywhere else. A crescent-moon dent showed in the skin by her thumb where she’d clearly been pressing her own nail.
My fingers itched to stroke that braid, down that stiff back.
What the hell? She’s not a fucking cat.
I jerked my attention away from Madden to find the email already on screen.
It was short. Polite. Devoid of personality.
I read it twice. My brain, trained on years of statements and reports, automatically dissected it while my eyes tracked the lines.
Family emergency. No specifics. No mention of who, or what, or where.
Leave the island immediately. Past tense implied. It read like something written after the fact, not in the middle of an ongoing situation.
Won’t be back for the rest of the season. Pretty definitive for someone supposedly blindsided by a crisis.
“Feels like it came out of a template,” I said finally. “Like she searched ‘professional resignation email’ and copy-pasted the first hit.”
“That’s exactly what I said,” Madden muttered.
