“Or someone else bought the ticket for her entirely,” I added. “We don’t know if this woman is the person who used the card.” And we didn’t have the time-stamp of the purchase or the card number to get Willa’s people to pull it up.
Elliott shifted in his chair, discomfort clear. “You saying someone could’ve faked all this? Just to make it look like she left?”
“We’re saying it’s a possibility,” Madden said, voice even. “We don’t have enough information yet to rule anything out.”
At the edge of my awareness, I felt Willa’s attention sharpen. When I looked over, she was watching the screens with a kind of pinched focus I recognized from too many people who’d sat through case updates. The words might change; the helplessness didn’t.
“The police didn’t stay to watch this with you?” I asked Elliott.
“No, sir. Chief’s guys came in, asked for the time window. I copied the files onto a drive and handed it over.” He rubbed the back of his neck, brow furrowing. “Didn’t seem real interested in sitting down with me to go through it.”
Of course they didn’t. Why put in more work than necessary when the story already made them comfortable?
I bit back the comment. No point making Elliott defensive when he was being helpful.
Madden had her phone out now, thumbs flying over the screen. “I’m texting Astrid. We need to know if any of the other students could’ve come to Priya’s apartment to pack up her things. Or if Priya has any other close friends on the island who might’ve done that.”
“That’s good,” I said. “If someone was doing her a favor, they’ll say so. That’s the clean explanation.”
“And if nobody did,” Madden replied, “then someone else went in there and scrubbed her presence from that apartment after Maria saw it. Someone who believes this—” she flicked her eyes toward the monitors, “—is sufficient cover.”
Her phone chimed a minute later. She read the message, mouth flattening. “Astrid says none of the grad students have been to Priya’s apartment since she disappeared. Nobody’s shipped anything for her, nobody’s been asked to collect her things. And as far as she knows, Priya’s only friends on-island are the other students and a couple of staff at the research station.”
“So no one she knows of had a reason to be in her apartment,” I said.
“Which doesn’t mean no one was,” Madden acknowledged. “Just that it would be out of the ordinary for Priya to ask for that kind of favor from anyone else.”
Out of the ordinary. Like everything else about this situation.
Roy nudged his nose against Willa’s hand, and she absently scratched his head, eyes still on the frozen image of the blurred woman in the boarding line. “You think she’s still here.” It wasn’t really a question.
Madden’s answer was immediate. “I think the story we’re being given is convenient. That doesn’t make it true.”
“And what do you think?” Willa asked me.
I looked at the screens, at the timestamp, at the grainy image of the woman with the backpack. At the ghost-clean apartment in my memory and the landlady’s trembling insistence that it hadn’t looked like that yesterday. At Carson’s relieved certainty that the case was closed.
“Honestly?” I said. “That we can’t trust any assumption we didn’t verify ourselves.”
It wasn’t a yes or a no. But the truth was, I didn’t know what to think. The possibilities all tasted bad.
Elliott cleared his throat. “You want me to burn you a copy of this segment?” he asked. “So you can review it again later if you need to.”
“That would be great,” Madden said before I could. “Thank you. And if you could actually give us the full twenty-four hours on either side, that would be helpful.”
I had to appreciate her thoroughness, even if I didn’t exactly relish the thought of scrubbing through 48-hours of footage. It wouldn’t be the first time.
While he queued up the export, Willa stepped away from the door and came to stand beside Madden. Up close, the contrast between them was stark—Madden in her neat, pressed shorts and blouse, hair pulled back tight, posture straight; Willa in a faded T-shirt and jeans, sun-bleached freckles across her nose, easy slouch. Two very different routes out of the same kind of pressure cooker.
“You doing okay?” Willa asked quietly.
Madden’s jaw flexed. “Define okay.”
Willa huffed a small breath that was almost a laugh, but not quite. “Yeah. Fair.”
They stood in silence for a moment, Roy leaning into Willa’s leg, Madden’s fingers finally going still on her bag strap.
“If you need anything,” Willa added, “beyond this, you know where to find me.”
