Chapter 21
Twenty-One
JACE
Panadería de la Isla opened at six-thirty. I was there at six-thirty-two, still half-asleep. Marisol took one look at me and said, “How many?”
“Six.”
I wasn’t caffeinated enough to care that I hadn’t specified what I’d even come for. All her baking was exquisite, and half a dozen of anything would be fine.
She boxed conchas without comment and wished me a good morning.
Rios and Madden’s cottage was a few blocks from the Brewhouse, in the center of a residential section of the island.
Unlike the mega-mansions that lined either coast, this area was where most of the real islanders lived.
The homes here weren’t huge or pretentious, but they were well kept and lived in.
The one Rios and Madden rented belonged to Bree.
She’d lived there with Willa for years. But that was before Willa and Sawyer got married.
Before Ford came back to the island and found out he was a father.
This morning, Rios’s truck still sat in the driveway, beside Madden’s sedan.
The kitchen light was on, which meant at least one of them was already up.
I knocked.
Footsteps, and then Madden opened the door in a cardigan that had seen better days and reading glasses pushed up into her dark brown hair, coffee mug in hand. The complicated shift of her face told me she’d expected someone other than me.
“Jace. Good morning.”
I held up the box. “Conchas. Still warm. I come in peace.”
She looked at the box for a moment. Then she stepped back from the door.
The interior of the cottage was permeated with the scent of coffee made by someone who gave a damn, and my mouth watered at the thought of a cup with one of the sweet breads I’d brought.
I’d been here plenty over the years Willa lived with Bree, and a lot of the same furniture was scattered about, but Rios and Madden had brought their own touch to the place.
Books, legal pads, and other detritus of a former prosecutor’s methods of investigation were on nearly every horizontal surface.
I spotted a laptop open on the kitchen table beside a half-eaten piece of toast Madden had apparently abandoned when I knocked.
Rios’s boots were neatly placed in the tray beside the back door.
Moonpie, Madden’s giant mastiff mix, heaved himself to his feet and padded over for pets.
I obliged as Madden called back toward the hallway, “Jace is here and he brought conchas.”
A pause. Then: “How many?”
“Half dozen,” I hollered back.
Another pause, shorter. “Then you can come in.”
I chuckled as Madden took the box from me and opened it on the counter with a focus that told me she’d decided not to stand on ceremony this early.
She was already pulling one of the steaming cinnamon conchas apart when Rios stepped into the room dressed in tactical pants and button down with the SFPD logo embroidered on the breast pocket.
His braced expression said he expected a problem.
Which, to be fair, was kind of his default state.
He glanced at me, then at the box, then back to me. “What do you need?”
“Can’t a man just bring his friend breakfast?”
“Not before seven in the morning, no.”
“Would you believe I came to bum a cup of coffee?”
Madden poured me a cup even as my friend fixed me with an unimpressed glare.
I took the mug with murmured thanks and blew across the surface.
Rios waited.
Because I wanted to poke at him a little in the way friends do, I reached for the conchas. He intercepted my hand with a pop. “Nah. Not until you tell me why you’re bribing me with pastry.”
“Fine. I was hoping you’d had time to find out something about the guy from the ferry company from yesterday.” Mostly because I’d spent the night remembering the heartbreak and guilt in Layla’s eyes when she’d heard about Diane Crowell, and I wanted to be able to reassure her.
Rios plucked up a chocolate concha and dropped into a chair at the table.
“Tyler Marsh. Twenty-three. No record.” He split the concha open.
“Been with the ferry company for a couple of years. Spoke to Winslow Hobbs about him last night. Nobody who works with him has anything to say except that he’s quiet and does his job. ”
Because he was no longer guarding the box like a pit bull, I snagged a concha for myself and joined him at the table. “You think he’s clean?”
Rios chewed, thinking. “I think a clean record doesn’t tell you much about whether someone’s running eyes for somebody else.
It’s on my list. I can’t do more with it right now than watch.
” He looked at me directly. “I need something more concrete than bad timing and a gut feeling before I can move.”
“The gut feeling is Layla’s.”
“I know whose gut feeling it is.” His expression didn’t change. “Her instincts are good. I’m not dismissing them. I’m telling you the reality of what I can do with it right now.” He picked up his coffee. “Diane Crowell is still critical. Hasn’t come around. I’ve got an officer at the hospital.”
I hadn’t known that. “Anything useful from the scene?”
“Single vehicle. No skid marks, which could mean a lot of things or nothing. State highway patrol has it, and they’re being territorial about sharing.” A muscle moved in his jaw. “I’ve called twice.”
“He was very polite both times,” Madden said, from her position at the counter where she was sneaking another pastry with the purposeful air of someone pretending not to be listening.
“I was,” Rios agreed, in a tone that suggested the third call might be less polite.
“I’m sure they’ll come around,” she said.
“Mm.”
She snagged the other cinnamon concha and said nothing more, but I caught the slight curve at the corner of her mouth. Rios caught it too, and the set of his shoulder relaxed by a few degrees.
I had genuinely not seen the two of them coming.
I’d known Madden for years in the way of people whose lives intersected through other people.
She’d been a year behind us in school. Gwen’s cousin.
Not Rios’s outright accuser, but she’d swallowed Carson’s theory about him hook, line, and sinker.
Then she’d come back to the island and upended everything, blowing the whole thing open.
I’d expected the complicated history between them to stay complicated.
I hadn’t expected this—the ease of it, the way she moved around him like she’d mapped his edges and had decided to work with them rather than against them.
Good for him. Long overdue.
“There’s something else.” Rios reached across to Madden’s end of the table and pulled a legal pad from beside the laptop toward him. He flipped to a page near the back and slid it across to me.
Marcus Teller. A web of entities below the name: Tidewater Marina Group LLC, one of the real estate holding companies we’d been looking into, with two local properties listed, and at the bottom of the page, the business license for the Pelican Point Bistro.
I looked up.
“Madden found it,” Rios said.
“Three weeks of county business records.” She sank into her chair with the concha and her coffee.
“When your bar membership transfer is still being processed and you have nothing but time, you read a lot of very boring documents.” She tapped a few keys on the laptop and read from some document on the screen.
“Teller’s been on the island for four years.
Opened the Bistro two years in. The Tidewater connection is buried in LLC filings that nobody would ever look at unless they knew what they were looking for. ”
“Is anyone on the island aware he’s connected to the marina?” I asked.
“Not that I’ve found.” She looked up over her reading glasses.
“He’s done everything right. Sponsors the Christmas market.
Attends council meetings when they affect his business.
Has lunch with the right people. He’s been here long enough to seem like a fixture without ever actually becoming one.
” She paused. “It seems he’s very good at it. ”
I looked at the web on the legal pad. Four years of Marcus Teller making himself unremarkable on an island where everyone eventually knew everyone, while the marina he was quietly connected to kept doing what it had been doing since the Busbys sold it.
“Does he know Strand?” I asked.
Rios and Madden exchanged a glance that made it clear they’d discussed that exact point. “That,” Rios said, “is a question worth answering.”
I drank my coffee and sat with that for a moment. Then Rios set his mug down and looked at me. My gut tightened because I recognized that face. He’d made a decision and was going to say the thing whether I wanted him to or not.
“She’s got secrets,” he said.
I didn’t bother pretending I didn’t understand. “Most people do.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“I know what you said.” I looked at the legal pad. “I’m not going in blind. I know there’s more to her than she’s showing. I’m not asking for it.” I paused. “She’ll tell me what she tells me when she’s ready.”
“That’s a patient position.”
“She’s worth being patient with.”
Rios looked at me for a long moment. Not skeptical exactly. Something more like careful. “Just look out for yourself,” he said. “That’s all.”
“I always do.”
“You absolutely do not,” he said, “but I appreciate the confidence.”
Madden made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh and deliberately kept her eyes on her laptop.
I pushed back from the table and picked up my jacket. “Thanks for the intel.”
Madden held up the last bite of her concha. “Thanks for the bribe.”
“Glad they worked.”
Rios waited until I’d reached the door. “Next time, get the full dozen.”
Laughing, I let myself out.