“You think there are others.” He didn’t pose it as a question.
I didn’t have quite that much confidence in my theory. “I don’t know. Maybe. Can’t hurt to check. I’m submitting a FOIA request for every missing persons report filed on this island for the last fifteen years.”
“That’s a lot of paperwork.”
“And if even one case fits a pattern…” My stomach tightened. “I’m not letting her become another unsolved file.”
He studied me for a long moment. “Carson won’t hand those over.”
“The FOIA exists for a reason,” I said. “If he stalls, that tells me something too.”
He nodded slowly. “All right. You pull on that thread. I’ll follow the digital one.”
“We update each other,” I said.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “No surprises.”
I wasn’t sure I believed that—about him or about this case. Not when every hour I spent with him was decimating everything I’d ever thought about him. Not when he was starting to feel like the one stable thing in the chaos of this island. But it was what we had.
“Tomorrow,” I said.
“Tomorrow,” he echoed.
And for the first time since we started this, it felt like we were actually moving forward.
Fifteen
RIOS
After I dropped Madden back at the research center so she could pick up her car, I pointed my truck north and let the road unwind. The two-lane strip that ran the length of Hatterwick on the west side of the island wasn’t long enough to get lost on, but it gave me ten decent minutes of quiet where I wasn’t focused on the case.
Instead, I thought about Madden.
The woman who’d sat across from me at Home Port, onion ring grease on her fingers, talking about transference and monsters and losing her faith in the system wasn’t the privileged island princess I remembered. She’d walked into this thing clearly expecting me to tell her to go to hell and asked for my help anyway. Apologized without being pushed. Looked me in the eye and called bullshit on the idea that becoming “used to be” with your life’s work was always a choice.
There’d been no way she could know how close to home that hit. Maybe that’s what bothered me most: she saw more than I’d expected. Certainly more than I wanted her to.
I wasn’t sure what to do with that.
I’d once lambasted her for making assumptions about me, and hadn’t I done the same to her? The idea didn’t sit well with me.
Madden was… fierce in a way I hadn’t expected. In the middle of day trippers and vacationers and islanders going about their ordinary summer routines, a grad student had vanished—and Carson had decided it was easier to pretend she’d just gone home.
Instead of trusting the system with the blind faith she’d had at seventeen, Madden had refused to accept his edict. She’d thrown herself into an investigation she really had no personal stake in, and she’d asked me, of all people, for help. And it didn’t seem to be because I was the only available option. She seemed to legitimately trust my capabilities as a cop. Or, at the very least, my motivations for being willing to keep pushing.
I’d seen the sharp-edged prosecutor as we watched that maybe-Priya on the ferry footage. When we’d walked the alley where someone had been pinned and nearly brutalized, I’d seen the way she paled, the way her throat worked. Saw her blink hard, like she was holding back something that would knock her off her feet if she let it out. Real-life investigations didn’t have the distance she’d been accustomed to from police reports and crime scene photos. But it was more than that.
The memory of Gwen was still right there under her skin.
As it lived beneath mine.
Madden had taken her trauma and turned it into a career, putting bad people in cages. I’d taken mine and gone into the part of the process where you found enough truth for someone like her to lock those doors. Different paths, same target.
I hadn’t expected to have anything in common with her. Least of all, the same fundamental driving force.
Life didn’t offer up many chances to revise old judgments, and I had no idea what to do with the fact that she’d handed me one. Or with the simmer of entirely inappropriate awareness I’d felt as we’d blocked out the attack in the alley.
Sutter House came into view at the crest of the dunes, saving me from going further down that mental rabbit hole. The big bastard of a house that had been in Willa’s family since the island had been settled some century and a half before. She’d inherited it upon the death of her grandparents, along with the ferry company and pretty much everything else, save for some provisions for her elder brother, Jace. A great big middle finger to her parents. Sawyer had done some polishing and upkeep since he’d moved in, and everything about the place screamed history with comfort.
