Chapter 9
Nine
RIOS
The marine lab had always looked smaller from the road.
A low rectangle of weathered siding and tinted windows, it sat just beyond the dunes, tucked behind a line of scrub like it was trying to stay out of the way.
When I’d been a kid, it had been “that place with the tanks” we rode past on our bikes—a landmark, not a destination.
I’d never had reason to come inside until Priya Shah disappeared.
This time, I pulled into the crushed shell parking lot just in time to see Chief Carson step out the front door.
From the driver’s seat, I watched him walk toward his cruiser.
His stride was steady, unhurried. Not the loose, exhausted drag of a man who’d stayed up all night beating the bushes for a missing girl.
Nor the tight coil of someone holding bad news and dreading the delivery.
He moved like a guy coming off a long but ordinary day. The job, not a crisis.
Had the girl turned up after all?
He slid into his car and sat for a second, staring straight ahead. I caught a faint profile of jaw clenched and set mouth. Then he shook his head once, like he was physically clearing out whatever thought had snagged him, and put the car in reverse.
He didn’t look around. Didn’t notice my truck or, if he did, didn’t care.
The cruiser rolled out of the lot and turned back toward town.
I stayed where I was for a beat after he disappeared, fingers drumming on the steering wheel. Something about his posture nagged at me. Not guilt. Not satisfaction, exactly. More like… resolution. A man who’d reached a conclusion and was prepared to defend it.
I’d seen that resolution before. When that conclusion had been me as the scapegoat. It didn’t leave me with a lot of faith about what I’d hear when I spoke with Astrid.
I killed the engine and headed inside. I followed the hand-lettered arrow for ADMIN/RESEARCH OFFICES down a short hall to an office with an open door.
Astrid sat behind the desk, elbows braced on the surface, fingers rubbing at her temples.
Her hair was pulled into a messy knot that had clearly given up hours ago.
Wisps stuck out in half a dozen directions.
She looked like she’d been awake far too long.
I wondered if she’d been here since she left Home Port last night.
Madden stood to one side, arms folded tight across her chest, weight shifted to one hip in a posture that screamed contained fury. Her jaw worked like she was grinding down words that would cost more than they were worth to say out loud.
Both of them looked up when I tapped on the doorframe.
“Hey. I just passed Carson on his way out. What happened?”
Astrid lowered her hands slowly, as if they were heavy. Her eyes were bloodshot and devastated. “He closed the case.”
It wasn’t the words so much as how she said them. Flat. Stunned. Like she hadn’t quite accepted that the syllables were real.
I stepped fully into the room.
“He said it’s resolved,” Astrid continued. “That there’s no longer a basis for treating it as an active missing person investigation.”
“On what grounds?” I asked. “He suddenly find her on a beach towel somewhere, sipping a daiquiri and ignoring her phone?”
It wasn’t funny. Nobody laughed.
Madden shifted her weight, eyes flashing with battle light. “On the grounds that everything conveniently points to ‘she left of her own free will, so not our problem.’”
I glanced between them. “Walk me through it.”
Astrid looked at the monitor, then back at me. “We got an email from Priya. It came in this morning.”
“The timing is what—” Madden started, then caught herself. She gestured to the screen. “You should read it.”
I moved around the side of the desk, tucking myself into the narrow space between Madden and the file cabinet.
Up close, I could smell the faint scent of some floral shampoo and feel the tension vibrating in that slim frame, though inches still separated us.
I registered the faint shadow under her eyes, the way she’d re-braided her hair too tight, as if control in that one area might compensate for the lack of it everywhere else.
A crescent-moon dent showed in the skin by her thumb where she’d clearly been pressing her own nail.
My fingers itched to stroke that braid, down that stiff back.
What the hell? She’s not a fucking cat.
I jerked my attention away from Madden to find the email already on screen.
It was short. Polite. Devoid of personality.
I read it twice. My brain, trained on years of statements and reports, automatically dissected it while my eyes tracked the lines.
Family emergency. No specifics. No mention of who, or what, or where.
Leave the island immediately. Past tense implied. It read like something written after the fact, not in the middle of an ongoing situation.
Won’t be back for the rest of the season. Pretty definitive for someone supposedly blindsided by a crisis.
“Feels like it came out of a template,” I said finally. “Like she searched ‘professional resignation email’ and copy-pasted the first hit.”
“That’s exactly what I said,” Madden muttered.
Astrid rubbed at her temples. “She doesn’t write like this. Not to me. She calls me Astrid. She includes memes. She sends me turtle GIFs.” Her voice wobbled. “If something had happened at home, she would’ve called. She knows I would’ve understood. I told him that.”
“Carson?” I asked.
“Yes.” Her gaze slid to me. “They did a welfare check at her place this morning. Said most of her personal stuff was gone. Clothes, toiletries, electronics. No sign of a struggle. Then Carson comes in here and tells us she was on the ferry manifest, and acts like the email ties up the bow on the whole thing.”
I straightened slowly. “Ferry manifest?”
“He says she bought a ticket on the first ferry out yesterday morning,” Madden said, voice clipped. “Credit card on file matches the one she used to pay her rent. And a deckhand thinks he remembers seeing her in line.”
“’Thinks,’” I repeated.
The word was doing a lot of work.
Astrid pushed away from the desk, standing because sitting was clearly too passive for all the emotion zinging through her body.
“Young dark-haired woman—he said Indian, but who knows for sure—traveling alone, backpack and rolling suitcase. That’s what the deckhand told them.
” She threw her hands up, helpless. “Have you seen the tourist traffic on that dock? That describes half the people getting off the damn ferry in July.”
An exaggeration. But still, I could picture it.
The terminal jammed with families and couples and groups of college kids, everyone lugging gear and coolers and tote bags, faces blurred by sun and motion.
One tired ferry worker trying to sort tickets and keep an eye out for safety issues, not memorize faces.
“And all of this together was enough for him to decide she left voluntarily and stop looking,” Madden added.
I leaned my hip against the file cabinet, letting the metal bite into my thigh while I processed. Email. Card charge. Vague witness ID. Apartment that may or may not have been packed by the time cops got there.
On paper, all of it added up to a neat, plausible narrative.
I’d seen neat, plausible narratives lie before. And something in all this was niggling at me.
“Who let them in for the welfare check?”
Astrid hesitated. “He didn’t say. The landlord, I assume.”
“I spoke to her landlord yesterday. Maria. Remember what I told you last night? She said the bed was rumpled, and most of Priya’s stuff was still there.”
“Oh my God,” Astrid murmured.
Madden’s fingers dug into her own arms, pressing the fabric of her shirt tight against her skin. “So either she didn’t look properly, or Carson’s officers didn’t, or somebody’s decided to… reinterpret what they saw to fit what they want to believe.”
“I’m not saying anyone’s lying,” I said carefully. I’d learned early on that accusing cops of dishonesty, even obliquely, shut down conversations faster than a closed fist. “But I am saying the story seems to have changed overnight.”
“Do you think that’s enough to get him to reopen the case?” Astrid asked. “The police didn’t know what she told you yesterday, and I’m so tired I didn’t think of it while he was here.”
I thought about the way Carson had looked walking to his car. Settled. Perhaps even relieved. Not the face of a man who’d want his authority challenged without iron-clad evidence.
“He’s not exactly my biggest fan. I doubt he’d take anything I have to say seriously. Maybe if we speak to Maria again and clarify what she saw.”
Silence fell for a moment, thick enough that even the muffled pump noise from down the hall seemed to fade. Outside the small window, the sky was a flat, washed-out blue, too bright and too blank.
Madden’s gaze slid to mine. “We’re going to need more.”
Against my better judgment, I asked, “What did you have in mind?”
“Emails can be spoofed.” The words came out like she’d been holding them in for hours and finally let them go.
“Accounts can be accessed. People can be coerced into typing what someone else tells them to say. This email proves only that a message came from her account. Not that she sat there and carefully crafted it. And even that’s not a guarantee if you have the right people with the right skills. ”
Astrid swallowed hard. “You think—”
“I don’t know what I think,” Madden cut in. “I just know that every part of this triggers my bullshit detectors. The timing. The vagueness. The way it all fits so neatly with the narrative Carson already wanted.”
Her voice was rising. Not to a shout, but to that contained courtroom intensity that makes a jury sit forward.
I’d seen that before. Not from her—never from her—but from other lawyers I’d worked cases with. And against. The ones whose blood pressure shot up when something didn’t line up.
She paced once, the short length of the office forcing a tight turn near the door.
“I’ve spent years reading case files where a supposed ‘voluntary departure’ started with an email that sounded exactly like that.
” She jabbed a finger toward the screen.
“A neat little exit note that made everyone feel better about not asking too many questions. And later, once we got the rest of the story, we found out that the victim had been threatened, or drugged, or was dead before the message was ever sent.”
Astrid closed her eyes briefly, then opened them, hating that possibility but unable to reject it.
I couldn’t argue with Madden. Not about that.
“And the credit card?” I added. “All that tells us is that someone used her account to buy a ticket. Could’ve been her. Could’ve been someone else who had access to her wallet, or her computer, or anything with autofill set up.”
“Carson dismisses that,” Madden said. “He says there’s ‘no evidence of a crime.’ No signs of a struggle, no screaming witnesses, no bloody handprints leading to the dock, so statistically she just decided to leave, and we’re all overreacting because we care about her.
Or because—” her mouth twisted “—we’re still traumatized from the last time a girl vanished on this island. ”
That landed between us like a stone.
Gwen.
My chest tightened, the way it always did when her name came up, even indirectly. It wasn’t just Madden who still carried that weight. Every time I walked past one of those posters, every time I caught myself scanning crowds for a face I knew I’d never see again, that summer came back in high-def.
“I’m not letting this happen again.” Madden’s words came out like brittle steel.
She stopped pacing, planted her feet, and uncrossed her arms. Her hands curled instead, fists forming and releasing at her sides like she needed something to hit that wasn’t a person.
“I’m not going to stand here and watch them shrug and turn away because it’s complicated and inconvenient.
Because the victim is an adult whose choices they can hand-wave.
I’ve spent years watching cases fall apart because somebody at the beginning decided it was easier to assume a woman made a bad decision than to consider the possibility she was in danger. I am not doing that again. Not here.”
Her gaze swung to me, pinning me in place. “Will you help?”
It was a simple question. Three words. But they hit me like a live wire.
There was a part of me that wanted to say no.
To remind her that she’d once parroted the worst things this island said about me.
That for years she’d been one more person who believed I was the boy who hurt Gwen, or at least the boy who failed her.
That working alongside her felt like inviting someone to rip open an old wound that had never quite healed.
But under that was something older and louder. The memory of long-ago search parties. Flashlights cutting through darkness. Carson’s voice on a bullhorn, calling Gwen’s name into the trees. The sick, hollow certainty that we were already too late, even while we told ourselves we weren’t.
Priya’s name would never be printed on posters in quite the same way Gwen’s had been. She was older. An outsider. Easier to reframe as someone who’d walked away.
That made it worse.
If the system was already folding up its tents because the story looked tidy on paper, somebody needed to keep digging. I’d been forced out of the Navy because I refused to let a predator skate by on technicalities. That part of me hadn’t changed just because I no longer wore a uniform.
Madden’s eyes held mine steadily, but there was a flicker underneath the anger now. Something like fear. Or maybe it was just the rawness of a woman whose faith—in systems, in people, in her own instincts—had taken hit after hit.
She’d been the last person I expected to ask me for anything.
And yet here we were.
I blew out a breath as the weight of the choice settled across my shoulders. It felt a lot like every other time I’d stepped into something messy, knowing it could end badly for everyone involved if we were wrong, but knowing we’d never forgive ourselves if we didn’t try.
“Yeah.” My voice came out rougher than I intended. “I’ll help.”