Page 42 of Slack Tide Kill

"Looks like Mayhew's warrant came through," Liam said, holding up a wad of papers. "This is the full shift from last night at the reactors, construction workers included."

Sally grunted. "Interviews have begun?"

Liam sifted further. "Looks like, yes, Mayhew's started, but there's nothing concrete yet. Nobody saw anything."

Sally sipped the coffee, looking up at the clock over the door. 2 p.m. already. Where had the day gone? "And forensics?"

Liam sorted through the piles. "Here's the preliminaries from Umberside Lodge, plus on-site fingerprinting from Gabriel Rook's van. No fabric or hair yet, no DNA, full culturing of black mold from the shack walls will take days." The papers made a shushing sound as he leafed deeper into the stack. "Ketamine is a match for what CSM Akilota found in the victim's bloodstream. No source of a cardiotoxic agent though, not anywhere in the Lodge."

"Huh," Sally murmured. "One drug but not both."

"Techs have also uncovered the Rooks' livestream ID. There's records of what they've posted. It's unsavory. Also, uh, I think this is tide tables?" He held up a page crammed with numbers. "Then there's all of Reginald Rook's business interests, Reactor Logistics included."

Sally took another bite then wiped crumbs from her mouth. Her lips stung, and she remembered Roarke Rook punching her. She took another stubborn bite.

"We dig deep. Look for an angle. Then hit him hard."

"We want him as perp or witness?"

"Both. Either. We crack him and see what spills out."

Sally took another glug of hot coffee, then picked up the tide tables and studied the columns of dates and times. High water. Slack tide. Back and forth, in and out every six hours. Around 3 a.m. that morning, the tide was fully in. She pictured it lapping over the boy's body, maybe washing the feet of the killer as they kneeled down in the shingle, shells in their hands.

She shuddered, picturing the insertion of the shells, all while the boy stared and struggled to move. She thought about the perverse combing of his hair, the emptiness of that unforgiving desert. While the Rooks were just a few hundred yards away at their shack, loading trafficked girls into a van.

Had he cried out? Had the Rooks heard his pleas, above the wind and the sea? Had they seen the killer, a shadow against the starlit sky?

She set the tide tables down.

"Still no ID on the boy," she said.

Liam looked up from his phone, distracted. "Uh, no. Not yet."

That bothered her more than she'd expected it to. He was still just the boy on the beach. The body in the tent. The victim in their CSM's photographs.

But he'd been someone's son. Maybe someone's brother. Not so far from the Rook brothers in age. Around the same age as the first boy washed up on that same strand line, 30 years ago.

She took another bite of the steak bake and refocused on Rook's jacket, rain beating down on the skylights overhead.

19 TWO OR THREE

Gabriel Rook sat in the Interview Room, jaw set hard, glaring at the one-way glass to the Observation Room. Sally and Liam stood on the other side, studying him. 6'2", swollen with muscle like his brothers, 22 years old and hardened.

It was there in the eyes, but also the rough skin, the contoured stubble, the angular slant of his large lantern jaw; as if he'd taken a hammer to the bones himself. Looking at him sent shudders through Sally, driving her back to the suffocating mud of the bird preserve.

Gabriel was the youngest of four, and close to a carbon copy of his elder brother. They could almost be twins. But something was off. Maybe the eyes were slightly too close-set, or the hint of a receding widow's peak. Something she couldn't put her finger on, but disquieting.

Beside him sat his lawyer, a tall man with a slick side parting and a designer charcoal wool suit.

"Any minute," Liam muttered by her side.

Sally turned. He had some of the old life about him, now. His skin was still blotchy, a nervous tic worked like a pulse in his throat, but he no longer stank of alcohol.

"Where is she?" Sally asked.

"Coming. She's done at Umberside. Gemmell says she's angry."

"At us?"