Chapter 26
Twenty-Six
LAYLA
The aroma of garlic and fresh baked something filled the Sutter House kitchen, which was not what I’d expected when Rios called a war council.
Gabi stood at the stove, casually sautéing vegetables and flipping them with a practiced flick of her wrist. Bree hovered protectively over a covered dish of what appeared to be mac and cheese.
And the unmistakable scent of baking bread permeated the kitchen, making my mouth water.
Sawyer seemed to be reigning over the preparation of the sweet tea, while Ford and Daniel snuck pieces off a charcuterie tray.
Willa and Madden sat heads together over a legal pad.
Rios himself stood against the counter with his arms folded and the expression of a man who had decided the best he could do was let the chaos happen around him and trust that it would eventually become a meeting.
I stood in the doorway and tried to reconcile the war council with the dinner party. “Do they always do this?” I murmured to Jace.
“Pretty much.” He moved past me, and Roy materialized immediately, tail thumping, demanding his due. “It started as pizza night.”
Gabi looked over her shoulder from the stove. “We think better on good food.” She pointed a wooden spoon at me. “Sit down. Eat something first. Then we’ll get into all of it.”
“I wish I’d known. I should’ve brought something.” It hadn’t occurred to me that I ought to contribute to a dinner I didn’t know we were having.
“There is a Carrera in charge of the kitchen. We’ll all have leftovers for a week,” Madden said.
“Hey, I resemble that!” Gabi protested.
Daniel slid his arms around her waist. “Ain’t nobody complainin’, cher.”
With nothing left to do, I sat at one of the empty spots at the kitchen table.
Koa arranged himself under the table and put his chin on my foot.
Having exhausted scritches from Jace, Roy came to investigate.
He and Koa nosed each other, tails wagging.
I offered Roy a chin scratch from my seat and soaked in the ease of the group.
Despite Jace’s comfort last night, I still felt a little rough around the edges.
Hopefully, this chance to refocus on the case would do me good.
The food was extraordinary. Gabi’s garlic chicken with mushrooms was fragrant and moist. Bree’s mac and cheese had no business being as good as it was.
The cornbread came out of the oven golden and perfect, and Willa set it on the table with a smile and a proclamation that her grandmother would’ve been proud.
I watched the table pass dishes around and talk over each other and refill glasses, and thought about the work of building something like this.
The choosing and being chosen, the years of showing up.
You could see it in how they moved around each other.
The ease that only came from time and trouble and not leaving.
When the plates were cleared, Rios shoved back from the table. “Let’s relocate.”
We all trailed him into the living room and took up more or less the same places we’d occupied on my first day here, when they’d given me the broad strokes of the case. God, that had only been a week ago. I’d expected to be gone by now. Turning things over to Devon.
Instead, I was still here, digging in my heels with the case. With Jace Hollingsworth in my bed. And on my own in a way I hadn’t been my entire adult life. I tried not to think about what that meant as Rios began to speak.
“I managed to get a look at something. Some of Carson’s notes from after Willa’s memory came back.”
The room went quiet.
“How?” Madden asked.
“One of the SBI agents had a folder out on a desk. She stepped away for a few minutes to take a call. I happened to wander by.” He said this in a tone that was anything but casual. “They’ve been so damned tight-lipped, I got what I could before she came back.”
He stabbed at his phone, opening something, then passed it around.
I looked through the photos when they reached me.
Fragments of cramped, hurried handwriting.
Carson’s presumably. Names. Dates. Questions with no answers written next to them.
O’Shea’s name. A date from fourteen years ago circled twice.
An arrow connecting two things I couldn’t make out because the photo had caught the edge of the page.
“What does it mean?” Sawyer asked.
“I think it means he was actually looking,” Rios said.
“After Willa came forward, he reopened the case, and he was actually working it himself. I don’t think these notes would exist if he were tangled up in the cover-up of what happened.
At least insofar as Gwen was concerned. Whatever he found or didn’t find, he was pulling on threads.
Beyond that, I can’t tell you. The notes are incomplete, and I don’t have context for half of what’s written. ”
Madden studied the phone. “He connected something. Look at this. He’s asking where O’Shea’s money came from. That’s not a question you ask unless something has already made you suspicious.”
“But we don’t know what made him suspicious,” Jace pointed out.
“No.” Rios took the phone back. “Whatever he found, he kept it in his head or somewhere we haven’t located. And then someone put a bullet in him before he could do anything with it.”
The table sat with that. Outside the Sutter House windows, the December dark had settled in completely, the ocean invisible beyond the glass, just the reflection of the living room lamps and all of us in it.
“Do you trust the SBI?” I asked Rios.
He looked at me. “I trust them more than Carson. Beyond that, jury’s still out.”
I nodded and let the silence sit for another moment before I looked up. “The videos. Do you have copies here?”
“Yes.” Madden opened her laptop and began tapping keys.
“I’d like to see both of them. Maybe there’s something there a fresh pair of eyes will catch.” That my experienced eyes would catch. But I didn’t say that out loud.
Someone turned on the TV, and Madden cast the grainy image to the larger screen.
It was cellphone footage shot on something old, the image quality of a phone that had been cheap even when it was new.
The camera was held loosely, shakily. Whoever was filming didn’t care about the picture.
They cared about the threat. The faded marina logo was visible in the background, the Busby family name just legible at the edge of the frame.
Miles Busby stood in front of it. Younger—significantly younger, his face not yet fully settled into itself, shoulders narrower than they must be now.
He was looking at whoever held the phone with his chin up and his jaw set in a way that suggested he understood he was in trouble and had decided that showing it would be worse than feigning bravado.
“Have you considered my offer?” There was nothing especially notable about the male voice from off-screen. It was mid-tone, conversational. No particular accent.
Miles rocked on his feet, a betrayal of the nerves he was trying to hide. “I can’t do it.”
“Come on now. We both know your family is struggling. This would provide a much-needed influx of cash.”
Miles shot a glance around. Checking for backup? Listening ears? “It’s dirty money, and I’m not gonna use my family’s business to launder it for you.”
A fist came in from off-screen and buried itself in Miles’s stomach.
He folded with a grunt. The voice didn’t change at all.
“I don’t think you understand the situation here.
I was being nice, giving you the illusion of a choice.
But either you say yes and take the deal, or someone you care about is going to pay the price. ”
Straightening, Miles wiped the blood from his split lip and spat. “Fuck you.”
The defiance in that look. I knew from the records that he was nineteen, a kid who had grown up on this island thinking he understood the shape of his life, standing in front of his family’s marina being told to do something he’d decided he wasn’t going to do.
He didn’t know yet. I could see it clearly—the moment before he understood what his refusal was actually going to cost. He thought he could hold the line. He thought no meant no.
“You’re going to regret that, Busby.”
The video clip ended.
“Once more,” I requested.
When it had finished again, I sat back. “There were at least two people. The one hitting him, one holding the phone. The speaker is probably the one with the phone. The hitter is muscle.” I looked at the frozen frame.
“The camera angle was deliberate. They wanted Miles to have this afterward. Wanted him to be able to watch it again and again and know exactly what was coming.”
“We never got anything actionable off it,” Rios said. “Nothing identifiable about either of them.”
Madden moved the cursor to the second file and looked at me. I nodded.
The second video loaded.
Better quality than the first. Less grain, steadier hand. The light was dimmer, but somehow the image was clearer, which meant whoever took this one was better equipped. Or cared more about what they were documenting.
Metal walls. The curved interior of a ship’s hold, the kind of space that swallowed sound and kept it.
I felt the world drop out from under me.
Not literally. I was still in my chair, still at the Sutter House with Koa at my feet and everyone I’d been working with arranged around me.
I was still here. But another part of me had gone somewhere else entirely, pulled back by the image on the screen with a force I hadn’t prepared for.
Because I had thought the years and the distance and the work I’d done would be enough to let me watch old footage on a TV screen in a warm house and not go anywhere.
I was wrong.
The stink came first. Not actually present, but my memory supplied it with complete fidelity.
Saltwater and diesel and the cold of metal walls that had been closed for a long time before they were opened for this.
The darkness of the corners where the light from above didn’t reach.
The way sound moved in a space like that, absorbed and returned in ways that made distance impossible to gauge.
The figure on the screen was bound and gagged, dark hair tangled around her face, wrists behind her, pressed into the corner of the hold with the compression of a body trying to make itself as small as possible.
Fifteen years old. Terrified in a way that went beyond expression into something purely physical, the body’s own accounting of what was happening to it.
Someone in the room spoke. I registered the sound without processing the words.
The camera angle. Narrow. Cutting off the left side of the hold entirely, the far corner invisible, the width of the space impossible to determine from what was shown.
“—never got anything actionable off of this one, either.”
My own voice, from what felt like a very long way away.
“This wasn’t the first video.”
Koa’s weight drove hard into my leg. A hundred pounds of dog pressing against my calf with the focused urgency of an animal whose one job had just activated, and the pressure of it pulled me back up through the layers and into the room. The living room. The TV screen. Everyone looking at me.
“What?” I said.
The silence was careful. Held.
Jace murmured my name.
“How do you know that?” Willa’s voice was low and steady, as if she was holding something very tight. “How do you know it wasn’t the first one?”
I played back what I’d heard myself say.
Heard it again. Felt the room around me, all of them present, all of them watching, and understood that there was no version of an answer that didn’t require the truth.
Every other explanation would unravel in seconds.
I had just told them something that had no source except the thing I hadn’t told them.
Koa pressed harder. I dropped my hand to his head and held on.
Jace said my name again, just that, just once, just enough.
“Because I was there.”