It occurred to me I might be the victim of self-sabotage. Could it be that my subconscious was trying to trick me? I have too much history with gruesome homicides to assume everything’s flowers and rainbows when I find blood all over the walls, but what I was feeling wasn’t just healthy skepticism: it was a bone-deep belief this missing person was dead. There were parallels to the horrors I’d left back in New York. Memories circled me like hungry dogs. The sooner I solved this case, the sooner I could get off the island. I wanted to be there, but I didn’t. Thought I could do what needed doing, and doubted myself at every turn. It was a push and pull between my head and my heart. Either way, I lost.
I was willing to consider Tim’s theory. Of course I was. But when he winked at me and said, “It’s not as complicated as you think, Shane,” all I heard was “Listen, sweetie, get a grip. This isn’t Law & Order.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.
His eyes got marginally larger. “Just . . . I know you’re used to crazy cases in the city. Around here, the explanation’s usually pretty simple.”
“A missing person and a ton of blood. You think that’s simple?”
“Not simple,” he said, flushing. “Simple’s not the right word. But this is a missing persons case.”
“That was called in as a murder. Everything I’ve seen so far leads me to believe that’s what we’ve got. So I’m thinking we should take them back to the station.” I said it quick, knowing my resolve wouldn’t last. I didn’t know if I could trust it, but if my intuition about these people was right, I didn’t want to be alone with them on the island for one more minute. “We’ve got the two boats. You drive one, Norton will take the other.”
“Take them all in? In this weather? Shane, come on. It’s rough on the water, getting worse all the time. We have to question them here. On the off chance we need to make an arrest, then we can—”
“A man is missing without a trace! We’ve got critical evidence up there that’s deteriorating with every passing second!”
“We’ve got no body,” Tim said. “He could still show up—what then? Do you want to be the one to explain why we’re clogging up headquarters with eight witnesses to a nonexistent crime?”
“You know as well as I do that murder and a corpse aren’t mutually exclusive. We don’t need a body. We don’t even need the murder weapon, not if we’ve got a confession or enough circumstantial evidence. It’ll take hours to question everyone, and it’s already nearly noon. We’ll be here all day. If we stay, we could get stuck.”
“Yeah, but not, like, forever.” Tim showed me the side of his face and looked at me from the corner of his eye. “You’re acting weird. What’s this all about?”
Shit. Pull yourself together, Shay. “It seems like a bad idea, us against them.”
To my absolute horror, Tim laughed. “There are two of us, and we’re both armed. I think we can handle them for a few hours, don’t you?”
He looked tickled, like this wasn’t a homicide investigation but some sort of weekend team-building retreat. I wondered why he didn’t share his theory with me sooner. Was he humoring me all morning? Did my efforts to probe our witnesses amuse him? So much for the two of us being on the same wavelength. “You’re a BCI investigator,” I said, suddenly furious. “You were trained to solve murders. Why does it feel like you aren’t doing your fucking job?”
The smile melted from Tim’s face. After a beat he said, “No, that’s fair. I should have prepped you better. That’s on me. Look, I’ve been working for the New York State Police in this region for seven years. You want to know how many homicides I’ve seen during that time?”
I already knew the answer. When I applied for the job, McIntyre dangled the data in front of me like a fishing lure, and I’d bitten greedily. I didn’t see the point in playing his game. “I’d rather know how many times you’ve found a bed soaked with blood and it turned out a woman ran out of pads. Don’t you get it?” I said. “We don’t have the team we need to do this right. We have to be on the same page, and that page has murder written all over it. This is entirely about protocol,” I told him. “I’m not okay with straying from procedure, and you shouldn’t be either. It’s sloppy, Tim, and sloppy is dangerous. You understand that, right? Please tell me you get that.”
Over the few weeks that I’d known him, I’d challenged myself to learn Tim’s tells. I was getting pretty good at extracting information from the most neutral of expressions. If Tim doubted what he was hearing, whether from a witness or suspect, his mouth shifted a hairsbreadth to the right. When he was nervous, he swallowed twice in quick succession. If I was ever in doubt, I could always rely on his eyebrows. But as he sat there in that comfy chair, staring up at me, his face was as indecipherable as a book written in a foreign language I was trying to read upside down.
“Sure, Shana. I get that,” he said.
I thought about explaining myself. I didn’t think about it for long. It was an asshole move, attacking him like that, but I figured Tim and I had years of thoughtless remarks and regrets and makeup sessions ahead of us. He’d stumbled across a trip wire. In time he would learn to sidestep those, just like I would circumvent his.
Silence. His eyebrows were a steady line. “So what now?” he said when he tired of waiting for an apology that wasn’t coming.
The question was rote. What came next couldn’t be answered with a word or a three-point plan. I was still in the middle of preliminary interviews, and there would be follow-up questions, hours more of exploration as I searched for a crack that would give me a sure foothold on the case. What Tim actually meant was you’re acting crazy, and I don’t know you well enough to understand why, so can we please move on?
“I’d like to check in with McIntyre,” I said. She’d have heard about the case by now, and I should have called her sooner, had been putting it off. I knew what McIntyre would say when she found out where I was, and after talking to Carson, I didn’t feel like listening to another lecture.
“Yeah, okay,” Tim said, faking cheerful. “But first, let’s see if Norton’s done buttering his toast points and spooning the caviar. I’m starving.”
ELEVEN
Tim and I broke bread with the Sinclairs while a grandson, brother, boyfriend was missing, possibly out in a historic storm, dead already or fighting for his life. I couldn’t help but think about how, just that morning, I’d sat at the breakfast table with Carson and reached for his pumpkin-spice creamer believing it was the most excitement I’d see all day.
The in-box on my iPhone had been crammed with messages from brands—reminders to update the wedding website Carson built for us, e-mails from Crate & Barrel and Williams-Sonoma warning me their sales were going, going, gone. I scrolled through them while sipping my too-sweet coffee. After I got my scar, getting married wasn’t something I thought I’d do. God knows planning a wedding wasn’t something I expected to enjoy; the fashion and extravagant frivolity were lost on me, a woman who used dollar-store shampoo and owned exactly three pairs of pants. But Carson kept signing me up for newsletters, hoping I’d come around. He said it would be cathartic, and it was true I’d found some comfort in ticking off a to-do list. My ability to be methodical about unresolved issues means organization comes naturally. Plus, planning the wedding kept my mind off the marriage itself.