Chapter 7
Seven
JACE
I’d done my research on Devon Washington and Unaccounted the same way I did research on everything—thoroughly and without announcing it.
Seven seasons of the podcast, a documented solve rate that would make most law enforcement agencies uncomfortable, and a methodology rigorous enough that the cases they’d worked had held up in court.
Madden had good instincts about people, and she thought highly of Devon.
That was enough for me to take this seriously.
But I hadn’t been able to find out who he was sending.
Devon kept his team’s personal information off the public-facing side of the operation, which I respected even as it frustrated me.
I’d spent two days trying to run down a name and come up empty, which didn’t happen often enough to be comfortable.
I had ways of finding out, but I tried not to use them unless I had a good reason.
The knock came at ten past ten. Sawyer answered the door, and I listened to the murmur of voices in the entryway from where I’d taken up a spot on the hearth, and then she walked in.
The malamute came first, in a service harness now—working animal rather than pet, the shift in his presentation immediately obvious—and she came a step behind him with her dark red hair braided back from her face in a looser style than last night, a camera bag over one shoulder.
She did a fast and thorough sweep of the room, noting faces and positions and exits and the geometry of the space, all of it processed before she’d fully crossed the threshold.
She made it look like someone taking in a new place for the first time.
Most people in the room wouldn’t have noticed it.
I wasn’t most people.
Roy rose from Willa’s feet, thick tail wagging at the prospect of a new friend. The malamute looked at him, ears pivoting forward, nose twitching. Some negotiation happened between them that neither of their people was consulted on, and then Roy lay back down, tail still ticking like a metronome.
The malamute shifted slightly in front of his owner as he turned his attention to assessing the rest of the room.
“Sorry, I’m a bit late. The drive up was longer than I’d budgeted.” The faintest hint of Pacific Northwest flatness underscored her even, unhurried voice. “I’m Layla Murphy.”
Madden stood to handle the introductions, working around the room.
Willa. Sawyer. Gabi, who sat on the floor with her back against the sofa, Daniel beside her.
Ford in the armchair nearest the window, Bree on the arm of it.
Rios. Layla tracked each name, obviously filing things away rather than pretending social ease.
As Madden steered her around the room, I couldn’t help but admire the way she moved through space—fluid and contained at once, every step placed with a precision most people didn’t have and didn’t develop without putting in serious time.
She knew exactly where her body was in relation to everything around it, and the knowledge had become so habitual it had gone invisible, the way it did after years.
Dance or martial arts? I couldn’t place it yet.
Both produced that quality of ease, but differently, and something about her made me want to figure out which.
When Madden got to me, Layla looked over. Something moved across her face, there and gone before most people in the room would have registered it.
“Jace Hollingsworth,” Madden said.
Layla looked at me for a beat, those dark brown eyes assessing. “You clean up well.”
That surprised a laugh out of me. “You too.”
The corner of her mouth moved. Behind her, Gabi watched us with undisguised interest, and I made a point of not looking at her.
My sister wasn’t so circumspect. “Y’all know each other?”
“No. We just ran into each other on the beach last night,” Layla explained.
“Oh, so you saw the Grizzly Adams beard.”
The corner of Layla’s mouth twitched again. “I did.”
Willa looked at me in triumph. “Told you that thing needed to go.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I scrubbed a hand down my now clean-shaven face.
Layla took the open chair near the window and set the bag down, pulling a small notebook from the front pocket.
She shoved the sleeves of her sweater up, and I spotted the edge of ink beginning just above both wrists—dark, detailed work disappearing under the pushed fabric.
On both hands, running from the knuckles toward the wrist, were old scars.
Pale now, fully healed, but they’d been significant once.
I filed it, letting nothing show on my face.
“What exactly is it that you do?” I asked. “Devon’s work I’m familiar with. But yours specifically.”
She looked at me with the same direct attention she’d given everyone else in the room, not more and not less.
“I’m an investigative photojournalist. I specialize in the missing—photographs for advocacy, documentation for cold case investigations, editorial work when the story warrants it.
” She uncapped the pen. “Devon gave me the broad strokes of this case when he sent me. I want you to set all of that aside and pretend I’ve heard nothing at all.
” She looked around the room. “Take it all the way back to the beginning.”
The beginning. I doubted a single one of us had forgotten it.
Ford leaned forward from the armchair, forearms on his knees.
“At the end of May, fourteen years ago—well, fourteen and a half now—last day of school, we had a bonfire at Osprey Beach. Basically, the whole school came. Big party we used to have every year to celebrate the end of the semester.” He paused.
“A storm rolled in off the Atlantic and broke it up. Gwen Busby went into the woods at some point during all of that and never came home.”
“How old was she?” Layla asked.
“Fifteen.” Gabi’s voice softened. Fifteen. The age that didn’t move no matter how much time passed.
Layla’s pen moved across the notebook. “When did she get reported missing?”
“The next morning, when her parents realized she didn’t come home.” Gabi kept her voice even. “Her mom called around to her friends to see if she’d slept over. When nobody had seen her, she called the police.” She stopped for a moment, and Daniel’s hand found her knee.
“We were part of the search,” Ford said.
“Hell, that day, it seemed like everyone on island was part of the search. We walked the grid from Osprey Beach all the way to Sutter House and back. Didn’t find a damned thing.
Dogs were brought in from the mainland, helicopters were deployed, every inch of this island was covered multiple times over. ” A pause. “Nothing.”
“Nothing,” Layla repeated. Not a question. Just letting it sit.
“Nothing,” Sawyer confirmed.
Layla looked up from the notebook. “Who was the last person to see her?”
The weight of implied responsibility that question always carried silenced the room.
Because we’d all been there except for Daniel and Madden.
Any one of us could have decided to stick closer, pay more attention.
But we’d all been kids. And we hadn’t known it would be the last time we’d ever see her.
Across the room, Willa sat forward slightly, her hands coming together in her lap. “I was.”
Layla looked at her directly, without the careful, slightly averted attention people sometimes aimed at trauma. She seemed to understand that looking away did its own kind of harm. “What did you see?”
Sawyer’s arm, already along the back of the sofa, dropped to Willa’s shoulder. She took a breath.
“I was in the woods with her. I don’t remember why we were there—I… well, I nearly drowned that night, so the pieces I have are largely fuzzy.”
Layla sucked in a breath, compassion and horror mixing in her eyes as she held Willa’s gaze. “Keep going.”
“I’ve tried so many times to recover that part, and I just don’t have it.
Someone attacked us. There were at least two men.
” She stopped, and I watched her work through it the way she’d learned to, not letting it take her under the way it used to.
“They took us both down to the water. There was a boat waiting, and more men. They got into an argument because I wasn’t supposed to be there. Gwen had been the target.”
“Someone said that?” Layla asked.
“Yes. I was collateral damage. The man who seemed to be in charge—Roland O’Shea—told them to kill me. So they hauled us both onto that boat and launched into the storm. The last time I saw Gwen was before they threw me overboard.”
I’d heard the full account for the first time more than a year ago, when my sister recovered those memories.
It still struck me hard below the sternum.
A horror I couldn’t go back and change, no matter how many years I spent wanting to.
She’d been in those woods because I hadn’t been watching.
It wasn’t that simple. I knew the men who took Gwen would have found another way and another time.
I understood that on an intellectual level, and it didn’t do a damned thing for the part of me that would always go back to that night.
Willa’s hands had tightened in her lap. Sawyer started to reach for her, but Layla was already there, leaning forward from her chair, her hand covering Willa’s on her knee. She didn’t make anything of it. She just held on.
“Nothing that happened that night was your fault.” The gentleness in her voice held iron underneath it, the kind that didn’t leave room for argument.
“Nothing. You wouldn’t have been able to fight them.
They were prepared for exactly what they were doing, and it is a fucking miracle you didn’t drown as they intended.
” She held Willa’s gaze steadily. “The fact that you remember any of it at all is a help.”
Willa looked at her for a moment. “I wish I’d remembered sooner.
It took me until last year to get any of it back.
” Her voice was steadier now, but the effort showed.
“If we’d known from the beginning that she was trafficked—if I could have told them what I saw back then—maybe we could have found something before the trail went cold. ”
“If you’d remembered and spoken up back then,” Layla said evenly, “they’d have had you killed. End of story.”
The room stilled, and my hands fisted as I fought back the instinctive rage that anyone would target Willa. And because I knew Layla was probably right.
“They did try when she finally did remember.” Sawyer said it in the quiet, matter-of-fact way he always did. A fact he’d made peace with because that was what Sawyer did. He looked at the worst things directly, made peace with them, and kept going.
I hadn’t made peace with it. The gratitude I had for Sawyer Malone was the kind that didn’t fit into words without getting unwieldy, and underneath it was the part I’d never entirely resolved—that it had been him here for her and not me.
That she’d needed someone, and he’d been the one.
I knew why I hadn’t been there. I knew the choices I’d made and why I’d made them, and I stood by most of them.
Knowing all of that didn’t fully close the gap.
Layla looked at Sawyer and nodded once before turning her attention back to Willa. “There.” She released my sister’s hand and sat back in the chair. “You see? No blaming yourself. She wouldn’t want that.” A beat, a gear shifting. “Now. What else is known?”
She was good with survivors. The balance between giving someone space to feel the weight of something and not letting them disappear into it, between gentleness and forward motion—it was a skill that looked effortless and wasn’t.
I’d seen enough people attempt it badly to recognize the difference.
She’d found every line without appearing to look for any of them.
Whatever had built that in her had been built on something real, and I found myself turning that over in my mind while Ford picked up the thread.
“That’s where things get complicated,” Ford said. “The chief of police at the time—Bill Carson—turned out to be dirty. Deeply dirty. He was killed back in August after kidnapping Madden for stirring things up.”
Layla’s gaze shot to Madden, where she sat with her hand tucked in Rios’s. “Stirring things up?”
Madden shrugged her shoulders. “I asked questions he—and apparently others—didn’t want answered.
It started because of Gwen. She’s my cousin.
But it’s so much bigger. She’s not the only one to disappear.
Anyway, I submitted my findings to the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, and they’ve been auditing the department since Labor Day.
We have no idea how badly the original investigation was compromised, what was deliberately buried versus what was incompetence versus what was genuine dead ends. ”
Layla’s pen had stilled. “What was he into?”
“We aren’t entirely sure.” Rios kept his voice even.
“He was being paid under the table by parties that haven’t yet been identified.
We suspect his primary role was in smoothing the way, allowing bigger parts of criminal enterprises to operate with less oversight.
Drug running. Money laundering. Possibly the trafficking itself.
It all goes well beyond the island. The audit is still ongoing.
I was sworn in as provisional chief three days ago.
I’m still finding out what I’ve actually inherited. ”
“So anything that came through the official investigation has to be treated as potentially tainted.” She looked at Rios. “And anything you know for certain, you know because you were there or you confirmed it independently.”
“Yes.”
She looked around the room, taking in each face in turn, with the same unhurried attention she’d given everything since she walked in.
“Then you assume anything you didn’t experience yourselves or have first-hand confirmation of isn’t truly known.
” She looked back down at the notebook, then up again. “And you start over at the beginning.”