"Or," James said carefully, "Carlisle chose his former restaurant precisely because he knew it was closed and empty.The practical reasoning still applies."
"True."Isla sighed, frustration building behind her eyes."We're going in circles."
"We're at the beginning of an investigation.Circles are normal."
She almost smiled at that.James had a way of grounding her, of pulling her back from the edge of obsessive thinking.It was one of the things she'd come to appreciate about him over these past two and a half years—his steadiness, his patience, the way he could see her spiraling and knew exactly how to stop it without making her feel patronized.
"We need to verify Carlisle's alibi," she said."Such as it is.Check with the grocery delivery service, and see if we can confirm the timing.Canvas his neighbors—someone might have seen him leave the house, even if he doesn't remember it himself."
"I'll handle that."
"And I want to look deeper into Monica Hayes.No enemies doesn't mean no secrets.Everyone has something."Isla walked back to her desk and picked up the neglected sandwich, turning it over in her hands."A woman doesn't end up murdered and posed in a freezer for no reason.There's a connection somewhere—maybe not to the restaurant, maybe not to Carlisle, but to something."
"And if the connection doesn't exist?"
The question hung between them.Isla thought about the staging of the body, the care that had been taken with Monica Hayes's final pose.Whoever had done this hadn't just killed her—they'd arranged her.Honored her, in some twisted way.
"The connection exists," she said."We just haven't found it yet."
James nodded, accepting this, and gathered his notebook."I'll start with the grocery delivery records.Should have something by the end of the day."
"Thanks, Sullivan."
He paused at her desk, something unreadable in his expression."You should eat that, you know.The sandwich."
Isla looked down at the plastic-wrapped turkey and Swiss, then back up at him."I will."
"I mean it.You're no good to the investigation if you pass out from low blood sugar."
"Is that your professional opinion?"
"My professional opinion is that you're stubborn and you skip meals when you're focused, and both of those things have been true for as long as I've known you."The corner of his mouth twitched—not quite a smile, but close."Eat the sandwich, Rivers."
He walked away before she could respond, leaving her standing at her desk with the sandwich in one hand and a strange warmth spreading through her chest that had nothing to do with the coffee.
She sat back down, peeled open the plastic wrapper, and took a bite.The bread was slightly stale, the turkey somehow both dry and plasticky, but she ate it anyway, mechanically, her mind already elsewhere.
Monica Hayes.A hairdresser with a successful salon, a kind disposition, no enemies to speak of.Found murdered in a restaurant she had no apparent connection to, posed with a tenderness that suggested the killer had cared about her—or cared about what she represented.
What did she represent?
The answer was obvious, staring back at her from the comparison she'd made that morning.Maria Carlisle.Monica Hayes looked like Maria Carlisle.That couldn't be coincidence—not the resemblance, not the location.
But if Vincent Carlisle hadn't killed her—and Isla's instincts still insisted he hadn't—then who else would care about that resemblance?Who else would even know to look for it?
The question nagged at her as she finished the sandwich and turned back to her computer.She pulled up the photos again—Monica Hayes, Maria Carlisle, side by side on her screen.Two women who might have been sisters.Two women who had never met.
One was dead in a car accident.The other was dead in a freezer.
And somewhere in the space between them, a killer was walking free.
Isla saved her work, logged out of the medical records database, and pulled up a new search.If the restaurant was incidental—if the killer had chosen it for convenience rather than connection—then she needed to think differently about the case.She needed to stop focusing on where Monica Hayes had been found and start focusing on who Monica Hayes had been.
The Looking Glass.East Superior Street.Isla made a note to visit the salon later, to talk to the employees, to see the space where Monica had built her life.Maybe there was something there—a disgruntled client, a business dispute, something that everyone had overlooked because they were too focused on how well-liked she was.
Or maybe not.Maybe Monica Hayes really was as perfect as everyone said, and she'd simply had the terrible misfortune of looking like a dead woman.
Isla stared at the screen, at those two faces that were so similar and so different and felt the weight of the investigation settling onto her shoulders.This wasn't like chasing Robert Brune, with his decades of kills and his whispers from the lake.This was something else—something more intimate, more personal, more deliberate in ways she couldn't yet understand.
