Chapter 6
Six
LAYLA
The morning came in gray and cold, the kind of light that didn’t so much arrive as seep, which I saw because I habitually woke before dawn, no matter what time zone I was in.
At the cottage’s little kitchen table, I worked my way through a cup of the mediocre drip coffee the Airbnb had provided, already thinking through what I needed from the meeting and how to run it.
I always went in knowing as little as possible about the specifics of the new case and let the people closest to it tell the story from the beginning in their own words.
What they actually had and what they believed they had were almost never the same thing, and the gap between them was usually where the real work started.
Without fail, bias always played a role in why these cases grew cold to start.
Investigators who had a pet theory and jumped on evidence that supported it, while neglecting or discarding anything that didn’t.
Add to that a precedent for biased questioning of witnesses, who were unreliable to start, and suddenly there were false trails or convictions in cases that should never have gone to trial.
Things had improved some. Law enforcement was slowly adapting to a more rigorous standard, and the tech around evidence processing was far better than it used to be.
My own father was meticulous about detail when investigating his own cases.
Or had been before he retired from the FBI a few years ago.
He’d seen that I knew better, and I’d wager I’d had more thorough training in actual investigative techniques than a lot of other reporters in the field.
I didn’t take that lightly.
It was my job to avoid bias and comb through the facts with fresh eyes to see what the evidence actually said, not to attempt to make it fit a preconceived narrative.
That was admittedly harder to do in this particular case, given my insider knowledge.
All the more reason that I say nothing until I had a clear idea of what they knew.
For my own safety, I couldn’t risk a slip that indicated I wasn’t an impartial third party.
I fed Koa, layered up, braided my hair back in something looser than I had last night, and grabbed the smaller camera bag again.
“Come on, pal. Let’s go explore.”
Front Street was quiet but not dormant. Someone had been through recently with Christmas lights.
White strands strung along the storefronts and cedar garland wound around the lampposts, the red ribbon at the ties working loose in the wind off the water.
A sandwich board outside one of the shops advertised a Christmas market on the first weekend of December.
Several storefronts were dark, with reduced hours posted on the doors.
The ones with lights on were the ones that served the people who lived here year-round.
As I’d noted last night, Sutter’s Ferry was more developed than I’d expected.
I spotted gift shops full of the t-shirts and branded knick-knacks tourists always loved for souvenirs.
Other windows showed companies offering tours and water-based excursions like parasailing and fishing trips.
At the far end a couple of blocks from the marina, I spotted a building of clean, modern lines, with a classy hint redolent of old wooden sailing vessels.
Pelican Point Bistro sprawled across the sign in a fancy font.
The core of the village seemed intact, though.
The working waterfront at the south end with its scents of diesel and cold salt water.
Home Port with its sign unlit at this hour, the kind of bar that opened for lunch and closed when it felt like it.
Closer to the center of town, I found the hardware store and thrift shop.
For a moment, I stopped in front of a massive, two-story building with clapboard siding and awning windows closed against the chill.
A sign proudly announced OBX Brewhouse, with a smaller note touting wins at what I could only assume were beer brewing competitions.
Koa catalogued everything, nose down, working the sidewalk with focused attention.
I found the bakery by smell, on a side street off Front, the sign reading Panadería de la Isla above a door propped open despite the cold to let the warmth and the scent of cinnamon and yeast out into the morning.
A line of waiting patrons trailed out, and that was the best kind of advertising.
Stomach growling, I joined it, and that was when I saw her.
The poster was on the community board just inside the door, between a flyer for the Christmas market and a notice about the library’s holiday hours. Newer paper than the others I’d passed on the way here. This one recently replaced, the colors still saturated, the edges still flat.
I’d seen the age-progression renderings online before I came. I’d been careful not to go too deep into the case before the meeting, not wanting to build a picture that would bias what the family told me. But seeing the Missing poster in person was different from a screen. It always was.
She’d been fifteen in the last photographs taken of her.
Round-faced, bright-eyed, with the unfinished quality of a girl who hadn’t grown into herself yet.
Christ, she’d been young. The computer rendering aged her forward, and her face narrowed, the jaw more defined, the eyes the same but older.
They’d done reasonable work with it. They usually did these days.
But there was something in every age-progression image that never quite resolved, some quality of personhood the algorithm couldn’t generate because it had never known the missing.
The woman on the poster looked like someone who might have been. A possibility. Not like herself.
She would have been thirty yesterday.
The ache pinned me in place until I realized the line had moved.
I pulled my focus back to the bakery and inched forward, scanning both the chalkboard menu suspended from the ceiling and the case of glistening, carb-based jewels in front of me.
I ordered a coffee and cinnamon roll from the Latina woman behind the counter, who looked at Koa in his service dog harness and smiled.
“What a good boy. Can he have a little treat? I make biscuits for the local pups.”
“Oh, that would be great. He’d love that. Thank you.”
“For here or to go?”
“To go, please.”
She rang me up. “Give me just a few minutes.”
I stepped to the side to wait.
A scrap of conversation reached me from the table nearest the window.
“—about time, I say. Though I still think it’s strange putting Rios Carrera in charge, after everything.”
I glanced over and spotted two women hunched over mugs of coffee, with no apparent concern about being overheard.
“After everything.” The second woman’s tone made her position on that clear. “After everything done to him is what you mean. He was railroaded.”
“Maybe so. But you have to admit it looked suspicious at the time. He was the last one to see her.”
“That doesn’t make him responsible. It never did.”
“I’m just saying what people were saying back then.”
“People said a lot of things back then that turned out to be completely wrong. Carson had his reasons for letting that story run, and none of them had anything to do with finding that poor child.”
My pulse sped up. Were they talking about Gwen?
A pause.
“At least he found the Shah girl. That’s something.”
“Small mercy.” The first woman wrapped both hands around her mug. “At least she came home. Gwen never did.”
Seeing the woman behind the counter with my food, I walked away from the temptation to eavesdrop more, grabbing my coffee and bag of pastries and pushing back outside, Koa on my heel.
I walked toward the boardwalk that ran for a stretch along the sound-side beach and found a bench to eat my breakfast and think.
I offered Koa the fancy bakery dog biscuit.
His nostrils rounded, and he turned a fast, excited circle before plunking his butt to the ground and offering a paw.
I shook it and gave him the signal for down.
He stretched out on his belly. I balanced the biscuit across the top of his nose and watched his eyes almost cross with focus.
“Hold.”
Koa didn’t move a muscle.
Satisfied with his performance, I gave him the signal to release, and he tipped his head back, tossing the cookie in the air and snapping it between his jaws. The whole thing was gone in seconds, and he looked at me for more.
“I mean, you could do something radical and chew.”
Deeply unimpressed with that suggestion, he huffed and lay back down at my feet.
I dug my own pastry out, inhaling the cinnamon spice mix before taking a bite and moaning. Damn, that was a good cinnamon roll. For a few minutes, I focused only on the food and the truly excellent coffee. Then I finally let my mind wander.
The thing that always struck me, working cold cases, was how quickly the missing faded from the conversation of the people left behind.
A year, sometimes two, and then the name shifted from present tense to past tense, the posters came down, and what had been a person became a cautionary tale or a statistic or silence.
It happened faster than anyone who hadn’t watched it up close would believe.
But Gwen was still present tense here, in a way.
Even from the woman who’d gotten her story wrong, who’d sat in a warm bakery and implied that Rios Carrera’s proximity made it reasonable to judge him guilty.
Even so, her name was still in the room, still attached to something unresolved rather than filed away.
That was more than I could say for a lot of cases.
I finished my breakfast and the coffee and resumed walking, camera in hand this time.
I snapped the Christmas lights against the gray sky.
The garlands on the lampposts. The Missing poster in the bistro window and the one on the market’s community board, even the one in the window of Home Port.
All of them recently replaced, the colors still true.
The village took about forty minutes to cover properly on foot, Koa ranging at the end of the lead. I’d be back with more intention once I knew what I was actually looking for. Today was just for looking and absorbing.
My phone buzzed with the reminder I’d set. Forty-five minutes until the meeting, and Sutter House sat at the far end of the island.
Time to start the real work.
I called Koa to heel and turned back toward Marsh Street at something close to a jog.