Words. They were a thing I normally knew how to use. How did they work again?
“Yeah. Okay. Give me five.” I retreated into the cabin before I could humiliate myself further by openly ogling him like a thirsty barfly.
“Get it together,” I muttered at my reflection in the tiny bathroom mirror.
My cheeks were still flushed from sleep—what little I’d managed—and far too much screen time. I splashed cold water on my face until my skin prickled, then did the world’s fastest triage: ponytail, a swipe of eyeliner and mascara, clean t-shirt, jeans that could handle whatever grime today had on deck. Boots. Willie Sanders was not a judge I had to impress. As I dressed, I tried not to think about the fact that my first truly coherent thought of the day had been Rios is hot instead of Find the missing girl.
One was a problem. The other was a priority.
By the time I stepped back onto the dock, he was already there, leaning against his truck with his arms folded. Mercifully, a gray t-shirt now covered his torso. Less distracting. Also, somehow worse, because it clung to all those muscles that would now be living rent free in my brain in all their tan, sweaty glory.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Yeah.” My voice came out steadier this time. Progress.
I climbed into the passenger seat and tugged the door shut. He backed out of the marina lot and turned us toward the narrow spine of road that ran north.
For a minute, the only sound was the hum of the engine and the low rush of the wind through the open windows. I tipped my face into it, appreciating the hint of salt in the air instead of the smog I’d have gotten in Los Angeles. A part of me really was happy to be home, which hadn’t been a certainty when I’d impulsively driven cross-country to be here.
My skin prickled with awareness, and I glanced over to find Rios watching me, expression inscrutable.
Not at all sure what he’d see, I defaulted to business. “I sent the FOIA request. Every missing persons report on Hatterwick in the last fifteen years. We’ll see how much Carson tries to stonewall.”
Rios turned his gaze back to the road. “Carson always stonewalls.”
“True. But he can’t magically make the existence of public records disappear. If there’s nothing else… that’s something. If there is, I want to know.”
“Yeah.” He tapped the steering wheel with his thumb, a small, restless rhythm. “I spoke to my contact last night. He confirmed the last ping of Priya’s phone was in the vicinity of the ferry terminal at six in the morning day before yesterday. Since then, it’s been switched off or destroyed.”
I glanced toward him. “Do I want to know who this contact is?”
“Probably not. But we’re not building a case for you to prosecute. He also confirmed that the email did come from her device.”
“From her device, but no way of knowing if she was the one who sent it,” I murmured.
“Exactly. He’s doing some more digging to see if he can find any electronic trail of harassment.”
I definitely didn’t want to know about that. Anybody who could get access to that information without a warrant was breaking a multitude of laws.
“I went at it from a different angle and hit up the grad students again last night. Asked if they’d noticed anything off with Priya the past week—anyone bothering her, weird phone calls, that kind of thing. Nothing. No change in behavior they can point to.”
“None of the usual signs of her being harassed,” I translated. “So that theoretically cuts one possible connection between the alley attack and her disappearance.”
His glance showed approval for my having intuited his line of thinking.
“Unless she didn’t feel safe saying anything,” I added.
“Could be,” he allowed. “But if she’d been jumped behind Home Port and still showed up to work like nothing happened… that tells us something about how she handles shit, too.”
“Self-contained,” I said. “Private.”
“Yeah.”
We fell quiet as the village thinned behind us. Businesses gave way to clusters of small houses, then to stretches of marsh and scrub broken up by the occasional weather-beaten mailbox. The sky was a washed-out blue, already hinting that we were in for a scorcher.
“So, you heard from Sanders?” I prompted.
“Yeah. Texted a little after three this morning. Said he was back in and gonna crash for a few hours but was happy to talk to us this morning if we met him at his place.”
