Chapter 11 #2
“And we don’t see her buy the ticket—just that she has one.” I nodded at the ticket counter feed. “The card trail says that ticket was purchased with a card in Priya’s name. But as we both know…” I glanced at her. “Cards get stolen. Or used under duress.”
She met my gaze, understanding flashing there. “Or cloned. Or handed over.”
“Or someone else bought the ticket for her entirely,” I added. “We don’t know if this woman is the person who used the card.” And we didn’t have the time-stamp of the purchase or the card number to get Willa’s people to pull it up.
Elliott shifted in his chair, discomfort clear. “You saying someone could’ve faked all this? Just to make it look like she left?”
“We’re saying it’s a possibility,” Madden said, voice even. “We don’t have enough information yet to rule anything out.”
At the edge of my awareness, I felt Willa’s attention sharpen. When I looked over, she was watching the screens with a kind of pinched focus I recognized from too many people who’d sat through case updates. The words might change; the helplessness didn’t.
“The police didn’t stay to watch this with you?” I asked Elliott.
“No, sir. Chief’s guys came in, asked for the time window. I copied the files onto a drive and handed it over.” He rubbed the back of his neck, brow furrowing. “Didn’t seem real interested in sitting down with me to go through it.”
Of course they didn’t. Why put in more work than necessary when the story already made them comfortable?
I bit back the comment. No point making Elliott defensive when he was being helpful.
Madden had her phone out now, thumbs flying over the screen. “I’m texting Astrid. We need to know if any of the other students could’ve come to Priya’s apartment to pack up her things. Or if Priya has any other close friends on the island who might’ve done that.”
“That’s good,” I said. “If someone was doing her a favor, they’ll say so. That’s the clean explanation.”
“And if nobody did,” Madden replied, “then someone else went in there and scrubbed her presence from that apartment after Maria saw it. Someone who believes this—” she flicked her eyes toward the monitors, “—is sufficient cover.”
Her phone chimed a minute later. She read the message, mouth flattening.
“Astrid says none of the grad students have been to Priya’s apartment since she disappeared.
Nobody’s shipped anything for her, nobody’s been asked to collect her things.
And as far as she knows, Priya’s only friends on-island are the other students and a couple of staff at the research station. ”
“So no one she knows of had a reason to be in her apartment,” I said.
“Which doesn’t mean no one was,” Madden acknowledged. “Just that it would be out of the ordinary for Priya to ask for that kind of favor from anyone else.”
Out of the ordinary. Like everything else about this situation.
Roy nudged his nose against Willa’s hand, and she absently scratched his head, eyes still on the frozen image of the blurred woman in the boarding line. “You think she’s still here.” It wasn’t really a question.
Madden’s answer was immediate. “I think the story we’re being given is convenient. That doesn’t make it true.”
“And what do you think?” Willa asked me.
I looked at the screens, at the timestamp, at the grainy image of the woman with the backpack. At the ghost-clean apartment in my memory and the landlady’s trembling insistence that it hadn’t looked like that yesterday. At Carson’s relieved certainty that the case was closed.
“Honestly?” I said. “That we can’t trust any assumption we didn’t verify ourselves.”
It wasn’t a yes or a no. But the truth was, I didn’t know what to think. The possibilities all tasted bad.
Elliott cleared his throat. “You want me to burn you a copy of this segment?” he asked. “So you can review it again later if you need to.”
“That would be great,” Madden said before I could. “Thank you. And if you could actually give us the full twenty-four hours on either side, that would be helpful.”
I had to appreciate her thoroughness, even if I didn’t exactly relish the thought of scrubbing through 48-hours of footage. It wouldn’t be the first time.
While he queued up the export, Willa stepped away from the door and came to stand beside Madden.
Up close, the contrast between them was stark—Madden in her neat, pressed shorts and blouse, hair pulled back tight, posture straight; Willa in a faded T-shirt and jeans, sun-bleached freckles across her nose, easy slouch.
Two very different routes out of the same kind of pressure cooker.
“You doing okay?” Willa asked quietly.
Madden’s jaw flexed. “Define okay.”
Willa huffed a small breath that was almost a laugh, but not quite. “Yeah. Fair.”
They stood in silence for a moment, Roy leaning into Willa’s leg, Madden’s fingers finally going still on her bag strap.
“If you need anything,” Willa added, “beyond this, you know where to find me.”
Madden’s head jerked toward her, surprise and an odd vulnerability flickering across her face before the mask came down again. She nodded once, the movement short and sharp. “Thank you.”
What was that about?
I didn’t think the two of them had been friends back when. But both of these women knew what it was to lose the same important someone, so maybe that was a bond in and of itself.
Elliott handed me a USB drive. “This has all four angles you asked for,” he said. “If you need more time windows, just let me know. I’ll do what I can.”
“Appreciate it.” I slipped the drive into my pocket. “And if you think of anything else—anything off, any staff who mentioned something weird—call me.” I rattled off my number. He typed it into his phone with care.
We stepped back out into the corridor. The hum of the terminal seeped in around us again, the ordinary chaos of people running for departures or starting a vacation.
Willa walked us as far as the waiting area, Roy trotting obediently at her heel. “You really believe Carson’s just… sweeping this under the rug?”
Madden’s lips pressed together. “I think he’s chosen a narrative that makes his job easier. Whether that’s negligence, incompetence, or something more deliberate remains to be seen.”
Willa’s gaze flicked to me. “And you?”
I considered all the effort he’d put into pinning Gwen’s disappearance on me. How many other leads had he ignored because he’d decided I was the best scapegoat?
“I’m not ruling anything out,” I said.
We stepped through the doors and back into the heat. The noise of the parking lot washed over us—engines, a honking horn, a kid crying because somebody had taken their spot in an imaginary game.
Madden shaded her eyes again, scanning automatically. “So, where does that leave us?”
“With a maybe on the ferry,” I said. “A definitely on the apartment being altered since Maria first saw it. And a Chief who seems awfully eager to accept the simplest explanation.”
“In other words, nowhere good.” She let her hand drop. “We still don’t know where she is or what actually happened to her.”
“No,” I agreed. “But we’ve eliminated one clean story. That’s something.”
She shot me a sideways look. “Are you always this optimistic?”
“Trust me, this is me being optimistic.”
That earned me the barest ghost of a smile. It was gone almost as quickly as it had appeared, but I still caught it. Somehow that felt like my biggest achievement of the day. Which really wasn’t saying much about the state of our case so far.
She tipped her head toward the lot. “Astrid’s going to be waiting to hear what we found. Or didn’t.”
“I’ll touch base with her,” I said. “In the meantime, I keep circling back to what Jimmy at Home Port said—about how Priya liked to work there late.”
“You think someone there might’ve seen her with somebody?” Madden asked.
“Bartenders notice patterns. Who sits where, who they talk to, who they avoid.” I started toward the truck. “If Priya had more of a life here than the research station sees, odds are good it shows up there.”
“Then how do you feel about lunch?”