“Another dead end,” Rad confirmed.
Ace looked at his plate.
He thought about the journal. About the blueprints in the hidden panel. About all the years of careful, methodical criminal activity that had been sitting inside that house while the rest of Sandpiper Shores moved around it entirely unaware. Victoria Morrison had been operating in plain sight for most of her adult life, and nobody had seen it because nobody had thought to look. The most effective hiding places were always the ones that didn’t look like hiding places at all.
Ace’s phone buzzed in his jacket pocket.
He pulled it out and looked at the screen.
Sienna.
The irritation arrived before Ace could stop it, quiet but present, the specific irritation of a man who’d been trying to let something end gradually and was being prevented from doing so by the other party’s refusal to acknowledge the signals.
“Excuse me a moment.” He pushed back from the table.
Ace walked far enough from the table that the conversation wouldn’t carry, stopped near the edge of the treeline, and answered.
“Hello, Sienna,” he said. “I can’t really talk right now.”
“You’ve been avoiding me since you got back from that island,” Sienna replied. Her voice had the particular edge it got when she was building toward something she’d decided in advance. “Are we still going to the concert tomorrow? Because you already put it off a week and it’s the last night.”
Ace pressed his free hand against the back of his neck and looked at the ground. “I can’t make any decisions about the concert right now, Sienna. Give me until the morning.” His jaw went rigid, and his shoulders straightened.
“Fine,” she replied, and the single word carried approximately fourteen different layers of displeasure. “But call me first thing so I can make other plans if you’ve changed your mind again.”
She hung up. No goodbye, just a dead line.
Ace lowered the phone and stood for a moment with his eyes closed, pressing the bridge of his nose between two fingers.
He should have just told her he wasn’t going. He’d been meaning to have that conversation for weeks, had rehearsed various versions of it, and had somehow managed to avoid having it every single time an opportunity presented itself. Ace wasn’t entirely sure why. It wasn’t that he particularly wanted to go to the concert. It wasn’t that he particularly enjoyed Sienna’s company, as she seemed to believe he did. It was something else, something he hadn’t quite been able to name, that kept him from making the clean break that the situation clearly called for.
“I think you should go.” A deep male voice resonated softly from behind him.
At first, Ace thought it was Shaun haunting him again, and he spun around.
For a moment, relief surged through him when he saw it wasn’t the ghostly figure of his late best friend. Holt was standing a few feet behind him, his hands in the pockets of his jacket, his expression entirely unreadable.
“I beg your pardon?” Ace stared at him.
“The concert,” Holt replied. “I think you should go with Sienna.”
“Why? We already know it’s Victoria,” Ace pointed out, keeping his voice low. “The journal, the footage, the letter, all of it points directly at her. I agreed to continue seeing Sienna to help find out if her family were involved, so why would I need to?—”
“Walk with me,” Holt said.
It wasn’t a suggestion. Ace recognized the authoritative command in Holt’s voice as he started walking, and he fell into step beside the man without arguing. They moved further from the crowd toward the quieter edge of the grounds near the water.
Holt glanced around once. Then he looked at Ace directly.
“Something doesn’t sit right,” Holt admitted to him. “About Sienna’s visit to the station. About the letter and the missing page. About all of it.” His eyes were steady and very serious. “June feels it too. We’ve both felt it since Sienna walked in with that flash drive and that confession.”
“What specifically doesn’t feel right?” Ace pressed. “Because it kinda feels like you got given the golden goose here.”
“That’s what I need you to find out. If Sienna is telling the truth or not,” Holt replied. “You’re the perfect person for it. Sienna trusts you. She’s comfortable with you. She’ll say things to you that she’d never say in an interview room.” He glanced toward the table where the group was still gathered before looking back at Ace. “I need you to get closer to her. Find out what she’s holding back.”
Ace was quiet for a moment. “What do you think she’s holding back?”
“As I said, we’re not quite sure,” Holt told him. “It could be nothing, but I’ve trusted my instincts for many years, and they have not let me down yet.” He glanced back toward the table where Willa and the crowd Ace had just left were again. “And right now they are screaming at me that something isn’t right.”
