Chapter 8
Eight
LAYLA
I’d been in enough rooms with enough family members of the lost to recognize what grief looked like when it had been living in a body for a long time.
It stopped looking like grief eventually and moved instead to the set of the shoulders, the pitch of a voice that had practiced control.
These people had carried that weight, and every one of them showed it differently.
Gabi, whose knee had been bouncing since I walked in the door and whose voice stayed level and whose hand stayed tight in Daniel’s.
Willa, steadier now than she’d been talking about the boat, but with the look of someone who’d learned to manage a wound rather than heal it.
Ford, with his jaw set, tracking every word.
Rios, who’d spent fourteen years as the island’s convenient answer to an unsolved crime, sitting across from me with the stillness of a man who’d learned to hold himself carefully in the face of things that warranted the opposite.
And Jace on the hearth, whom I tried not to look at too often.
All their reactions landed on me at once as they began laying out the details.
Koa pressed against my legs, a silent support against the storm of silent emotion.
A part of me, sitting in this room full of people who had loved Gwen, kept whispering, Tell them.
Every reason I couldn’t scrolled through my head. I put the idea down hard every time it surfaced and kept my pen moving. When they’d finished, I reviewed my notes and reflected the information back at them to make sure I understood.
“Roland O’Shea. Sutter family lawyer. Present the night Gwen was taken.
He murdered Joe Anderson on the beach when Anderson refused to deal with Willa being there.
She wasn’t supposed to be, and she wasn’t part of the plan.
O’Shea attempted to kill Willa again last year when she started to remember and died before he could be questioned. ”
“Trampled,” Sawyer said. “By the horses.”
“The wild ones that run the north end of the island,” Willa explained.
I went brows up. “Well, that’s… some kind of karmic justice.”
I wrote it down. A man who’d been a respected fixture of this community for decades.
Someone who’d handled the legal affairs of one of the island’s founding families, had been running logistics for a trafficking operation the entire time.
The specific horror of that kind of proximity wasn’t new to me.
I’d seen it in other cases, the way predators nested inside the structures meant to protect people. It didn’t get less stomach-turning.
“He was a middleman,” I continued. “Connected to whoever made the call, but not the source of it.”
“That’s how we understand it,” Willa said. “He said he was in charge of logistics. He referred to Gwen as a package.”
I held in my instinctive flinch. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard such language. The rest of them didn’t quite manage.
I moved to the next item. “Gwen was taken as retaliation against her brother, Miles. There’s video footage of Miles being threatened. He was told to launder money through the marina and told someone he loved would pay the price if he refused.” I looked up. “And he refused.”
“He told them to go to hell,” Bree said quietly. “Miles was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a coward.”
“And three days later, Gwen was gone.”
Nobody said anything to that. What could they say?
“There’s a second video.” I kept my voice level. “Of Gwen in the hold of a ship.”
“Bound and gagged,” Madden said. “Objectively, it’s not the boat Willa described, but we still believe it to be connected.”
I looked back down at the notebook. I wrote the words and kept my breathing even, and I didn’t let any of it reach the surface, because the hold of a ship wasn’t an abstract concept to me.
I knew what it smelled like. I knew what the floor felt like under my hands and how sound moved in a space like that.
I knew what it meant to be in the dark, with the water pressing against the hull on all sides.
I knew it, and I banked it and kept going.
With a little whine, Koa bumped his head against my free hand. I scrubbed at his ears and continued. “I’ll need to see both videos.”
“Of course,” Madden said.
“David Galef.” I looked at the next line.
“He obtained the videos somehow and used them to blackmail Miles. Threatened to take them public. There was a confrontation, and Galef ended up dead. Miles disposed of the body and is currently serving time for it.” I looked up.
“Do we know whether Galef was connected to the original operation, or whether he found the videos independently?”
“We’ve never been able to establish that,” Madden said. “It’s one of the things that’s never been answered.”
I made a note of it. An unanswered question at the center of everything, the kind that might matter enormously or not at all, depending on what else turned up. “And Miles refused to cooperate in his own trial proceedings.”
“Completely.” Madden’s jaw tightened slightly. The prosecutor in her still rankled at that, I suspected.
The room was quiet for a moment.
Then Madden leaned forward. “There’s one more piece.
In the course of investigating all of this, we’ve found evidence of a much broader pattern.
Disappearances going back at least fifteen years.
I’ve got FOIA requests for more case files going back further, but we’ve concentrated mostly on Gwen going forward and found multiple cases across the region.
We believe Carson actively suppressed them.
Not just failing to investigate, but deliberately kept them buried. ”
I looked down at the notebook.
I wrote the words. Neat bullet points that summarized an ugly reality.
Koa’s head came up from my knee and pressed harder against my leg.
I kept my free hand on him, controlled my face, and kept the pen moving.
Fifteen years. I knew what that pattern looked like.
I knew it from the inside, knew the shape of it and what it felt like to be one data point in something that nobody had been connecting yet because someone had been making sure they didn’t.
The operation had been running before Gwen.
It had been running before me. And Carson hadn’t just looked the other way.
He’d actively kept it buried. Every family who’d been told there were no leads.
Every case that had gone cold without anyone looking hard enough.
All of it a choice made deliberately. Maintained deliberately.
“How many cases?” I asked.
“We don’t have a full count yet,” Madden said carefully. “The audit is still working through the files.”
I nodded and wrote that down, too, to give myself a moment before I looked up at the room.
“What is it you’re hoping to achieve? I want to understand the objective before we go any further.”
The tenor of the room shifted. No doubt it was a question they’d all lived with so long they’d stopped considering the possibility of an answer.
“We know she’s most likely gone,” Willa said quietly. “We understand the probability of that.”
Good. At least they were prepared for that, insofar as they could be. “Then what does a successful outcome look like for you?”
Madden answered first. “Answers. Who made the call. Who built this operation and ran it. And accountability. Miles is in prison, but he was a victim in this as much as anyone. We want whoever gave the order.”
“The puppet master,” Gabi said. The word came out with an edge on it.
“Closure,” Willa said. She said it simply, and the simplicity of it carried everything. “She deserves to be more than a poster on a wall forever.”
I looked at each of them and accepted the full weight of what they were asking for.
It was the hardest thing to deliver in a cold case.
Not just answers, but justice. Not just information, but someone held accountable for it.
Those two things didn’t always come together.
Most of the time, they didn’t. But I understood wanting both.
Understood it in a way that ran deeper than professional sympathy.
“Then you follow the money,” I said. “If someone had Gwen taken in retaliation for her brother’s refusal to launder money through the marina, finding out who wanted that money laundered leads you directly to whoever made the call.
And given they fully carried out their threat and did exactly what they said they would do, chances are the laundering happened anyway, once Miles was sufficiently motivated.
Which means the financial records from that period are where you start.
” I looked at Madden. “Does anyone have access to the marina’s records from that time? ”
“The marina was sold several years ago. That was something else Miles admitted during his confession. He talked my aunt and uncle into selling, hoping to get out from under whoever was behind all of this. It didn’t work.
” Madden turned her pen over in her fingers.
“I can check with my uncle to see if he still has any records from that period.”
“Your uncle. That would be Gwen’s father.” Something I already knew, but needed to ask. “Is he still on the island?”
“No. He and my aunt divorced after the marina sold. He lives in Beaufort now. I don’t know what he might have kept.” A pause. “I can also check with Miles’s wife. Well.” Her mouth compressed slightly. “About to be ex-wife.”
I absorbed that. Another family still breaking apart in the long wake of all this. “Has anyone spoken to Miles directly? Questioned him about any of this since everything came to light?”
“I don’t yet know what records exist with the police department or the prosecutor’s office around his arrest and conviction,” Rios said, “but I’ll find out. That’s something I can move on immediately.”
“He refused to name anyone during the trial,” Madden said. “On the grounds that he still has family who could be targeted. A wife and children.”
“Not an unreasonable position on his part, given everything else we know about these people.” I tapped the pen once against the notebook.
“He’s got no obvious motive to speak out now, so put a pin in him for the moment.
” I looked back at the notes. “What other business was he conducting in the years after the marina sold? If someone went to all this trouble to get him under their thumb, they weren’t doing it for the sake of one laundering operation.
Presumably they found other uses for him. ”
“He had a lot of latitude as mayor,” Jace said from the hearth.
I looked at him. “Has anyone spoken to the current mayor? Was there any kind of audit performed of his tenure after his arrest?”
“Not that we’re aware of,” Madden said.
“Then that’s another angle. Who he worked with in that capacity. What projects he championed. Who benefitted from those relationships and where the money moved.” I looked back at Jace. “Would the current mayor be inclined to cooperate with that kind of inquiry?”
Ford leaned back in the armchair with an expression of elaborate casualness that didn’t suit him at all. “Oh, I think the mayor would be very inclined to cooperate. Particularly with Jace.”
Jace’s expression stayed even. “That was a long damned time ago.”
“She still checks out your ass every time you come home.”
“Ford.”
“I’m just saying what everyone in this room is already thinking.”
The corner of Jace’s mouth moved into a reluctant upward twitch. He looked at me across the room, steady and direct. “I can set up a meeting. If you want to come.”
This was why I was here. This was exactly and precisely why I’d come, and every question about whether any of it was wise was a question I’d answered on a ferry in the dark and couldn’t usefully revisit now.
“Set up the meeting.”