Holt listened without interrupting.
“She seems to think Victoria is in Miami,” June finished. “That’s all I could get from her before she went under again. But Lucy was there. She heard every word.”
“Then it’s official,” Holt replied. He looked at the wall for a moment before looking back at June. “We have to assume it was Victoria who figured out that Judy, Margo, and Lacey were getting close to uncovering what happened ten years ago.”
“She knew about the Hidden Truths channel,” June reasoned. “She must have.”
“She had access to the police station through Tom,” Holt pointed out. “She’d have known exactly who was asking questions and when. And because she’s Victoria, getting information out of people who didn’t even realize they were giving it would’ve been effortless.”
“She turned up everywhere,” June agreed. “Every gathering, every event. Always in the right place to hear the right thing.” She looked at Holt. “If she really is a cat burglar, she’d have contacts and resources that most people wouldn’t even think to look for.”
“A cat burglar covering their tracks wouldn’t leave loose ends,” Holt replied. “Especially not ones that could connect them to something that happened ten years ago.”
They fell quiet for a moment.
June frowned at the middle distance.
“It takes a particular kind of person to lock five people inside a cabin and set it on fire,” she said. Her voice was careful. “Victoria is cold. She’s calculating. She’s been capable of genuine cruelty.” June shook her head slightly. “But that?” She looked at Holt. “Something still doesn’t sit right with me.”
“Maybe we never knew the real Victoria,” Holt replied.
June nodded slowly. He was right. She knew he was right. Everyone kept secrets. Everyone had parts of themselves they never let anyone see. She knew that better than most.
The thought arrived with the force of something that had been waiting for exactly the right moment, and with it came a wave of guilt so sudden and so complete that June had to work to keep it off her face. She glanced at Holt standing beside her in the corridor of the Sandpiper Inn, and the voice at the very back of her mind was quiet and clear and entirely relentless.
Yes, it told her.Just like you.It was in that moment that June realized she was falling in love with Holt all over again. It was also in that moment that she knew it was time that a secret she’d been carrying for a long, long time had to come out.
June swallowed as she realized the repercussions of it.
13
HOLT
Five days had passed since Sienna Morrison had walked into his office with a flash drive, a letter, and a confession about lying to Rad.
Five days of forensic teams, late nights, phone calls that went nowhere, and the slow, grinding work of building a case out of evidence that kept producing more questions than it answered. Five days of Victoria Morrison’s name sitting at the center of everything like a stone dropped into still water, the ripples of it reaching further than any of them had anticipated.
Holt stood at the front of the Sandpiper Inn’s boardroom and looked at the people gathered around the table.
The room was fuller than it had been at the last meeting. Willa sat beside Ace near the middle of the table with Harvey on the other side of her. Rad was between Margo and Holt’s mother, Mina. Tom sat between Dean and Lucy with Carmen on Lucy’s other side next to Zane.
Lacey was not there, and Lucy had been clear on that. Lacey’s recovery was progressing, but she still had no memory of theattack. Lucy had no intention of changing that situation by putting her sister in a room where everything they were about to discuss would be laid out in detail. Holt had agreed without argument.
Judy was in and out of consciousness at the hospital. She’d said nothing more since June’s visit.
The boards were back out, brought up from the storage room where Margo had been keeping them locked since the first meeting. Holt had added all the new threads and confirmations to them, running alongside the original columns. Looking at it all together now, he could see in the faces around the table the same thing he’d felt standing in Victoria Morrison’s home office with the hidden panel open in front of him.
It was bigger than any of them had thought.
“I’ll start with what the forensic teams found at the Morrison property,” Holt began. He kept his voice measured. “Then I’ll move to what it means for both the current case and for what happened ten years ago.”
The room settled into the particular, attentive quiet of people who’d been waiting a long time for answers.
“In Victoria Morrison’s home office,” Holt continued, “the forensic team found a hidden panel behind a section of built-in shelving. Inside the panel, they found a collection of documents. Blueprints. Floor plans. Handwritten notes. Photographs.” He paused. “The documents date back to when Victoria would have been around fifteen years old at the time they were first compiled.”
Margo’s pen slowed on the page. She looked up.
“We also found two journals,” Holt continued. “The first belonged to Victoria’s grandfather. It documents every theft he carried out over the course of his career as a professional thief. It documents what he took, where he disposed of it, and what it was worth.” He looked around the table. “You’ll remember from the letter Sienna brought in that her grandfather referred to his father as the Night Raider. The journal confirms it.”
