Chapter 2
Looking over the scene as his successor, Marisa Vega, had requested turned out to take less time than it took for Gabe and Wade to reach the scene. The Coast Guard already had the body onboard their surfboat and had as much video footage as they felt they needed.
He caught the tail end of the jetwash as the boat headed back to the marina.
Vega and the department’s junior patrolman, Rick Cho, were winding up their own on-scene preliminary work.
It quickly became apparent the chief had invited him out more as a courtesy, and a cover-all-the-bases plan.
Not that it took long for him and Wade to make their own assessments.
Less than five minutes after walking the well-traveled site, Wade grunted. “Ready when you are.”
Twenty minutes later, they were back at the bakery. Wade snuck a hot snickerdoodle off the tray next to the oven and rushed down the stairs, Diane’s protest following him.
Tom was already halfway through committing a felony when Gabe followed. “Tell me you’re not running facial recognition on a dead guy the Coast Guard hasn’t officially identified yet.”
Tom didn’t look away from his monitors. “That depends entirely on how emotionally flexible we’re being with the definition of running.”
Across the table, Reagan lowered her chamomile tea with the exhausted patience of a woman who had somehow become den mother to a collection of highly competent idiots.
“Tom,” she warned.
“What?” He finally glanced over. “I haven’t actually hit enter yet.”
Reagan pursed her lips. “That is not the reassuring legal distinction you think it is.”
The basement beneath Sugar & Salt had once held extra flour bins and broken shelving. Now it looked like a high-budget intelligence unit assembled by people with excellent intentions and deeply inconsistent respect for federal law.
Tom’s six-monitor workstation dominated the far wall. Wade’s disguised weapons locker sat beside a rack of charging drone batteries. Piper’s algebra homework occupied the far end of the conference table underneath three surveillance maps and half a bag of pretzel twists.
Nobody downstairs found this arrangement remotely strange anymore.
Gabe stripped off his damp jacket and tossed it over the back of a chair while Wade unlaced his boots near the stairs.
Rain hammered steadily against the small basement windows.
“Talk to me,” Reagan said.
Cara crossed quietly to the espresso machine before Gabe could answer. Thirty seconds later she slid a shot across the table toward him without asking how he took it anymore.
Perfect, as always.
Honestly, the woman was dangerous.
“Adult male,” Gabe said, settling into the chair facing the stairwell out of long-ingrained FBI habit. “Mid-fifties. Coast Guard recovered the body below the Overlook two hours ago now.”
“No ID?” Cara asked.
“None.”
Tom finally turned away from the monitors. “Accidental fall?”
Wade shrugged, but Gabe shook his head. “The geometry’s wrong.”
That got everybody’s attention.
He borrowed Reagan’s pen and pulled her legal pad closer, sketching the bluff trail quickly from memory.
“If somebody slips along the main trail here”—he tapped the page—“they hit the pine shelf halfway down.” Another line. “But the victim ended up here, farther north beneath the secondary rock line.”
He drew another line. “But this guy was in the surf, so he had to go off here.” He tapped the overlook spot.
Reagan pursed her lips. “Chief Vega would know that.”
“She's smart. She knows. But she's not going to confirm anything without evidence. No need. The coroner has the body. She'll get a finding by the morning. Maybe sooner.”
Reagan tapped her three-color pen against her legal pad. “And it's not our case.”
“It's not our case,” Gabe agreed.
“There is no client. There is no missing-persons inquiry.” Reagan ticked the points off on her fingers. “In actual point of fact, there is no reason for us to be looking at it at all.”
“There is one,” Cara said. She had been across from Reagan, going over Tom's morning notes, and now she looked up. “We're bored.”
The room sat with that.
“It’s been three weeks since the Vancouver job,” Wade said.
“Nope.” Gabe shook his head. “We're not poaching this.”
Cara sighed now. “We're bored, Gabe.”
He drank some of the espresso. “Vega’s smart. She’s just covering her bases by asking the Old Dog to take a look. She doesn’t need our help.”
Wade was sitting on the floor by the stairs with his back to the cinder block. “She's smart,” he said.
Gabe rubbed the back of his neck. “She is. She's also short-handed. Three officers, a desk sergeant, and a coroner who works two days a week. If this body is what I think it is, she's about twenty-four hours from realizing she's under resourced for it.”
“And then she calls you officially,” Cara said.
“That’s my bet,” Wade said.
“Are we really waiting twenty-four hours when we could get a jump on this?” Tom asked, not looking up from the screen.
Tom had asked the question without attitude — just the question — but it carried what Tom-the-Army-cryptographer used to carry into every operational discussion he had ever been in. We should be moving. Why are we not moving?
“Suppose I could get a photo of the body,” Tom said.
Gabe took another sip of the espresso. “No need.”
“The Coast Guard rescue swimmers wear body cams,” Tom continued as if Gabe hadn’t spoken.
“Their incident report system isn't hardened to FBI standards.
I can pull this morning's footage from the Coast Guard's logs and have a face inside an hour. Twenty minutes after that, missing-persons match. We’ll have a name by dinnertime.”
Gabe glared at him. “And when the Coast Guard logs an access from this basement and shares it with HCPD next week?”
“I route it. No one will know.”
“Tom.”
“I can route it.” Tom turned in his chair. He was not smiling. “I shouldn't. But I can.”
“And what does that buy us?”
“It buys us a name.”
“That we can't do anything with, because we got it the wrong way, and if we move on it, Vega knows inside twenty-four hours. And the second she knows, Ellie is the one she comes for. Not me. Ellie.” No way he’d shove Ellie Torres under the bus.
Ellie was young and ambitious, the best detective on the tiny Haven Cove force by a mile.
And Vega knew Ellie and Gabe had been close.
She’d suspect Ellie of leaking the victim’s image, and there’d be no way for Ellie to prove her wrong. Not happening.
Tom's jaw worked.
Reagan set her pen down. She had been making the same small note in three different colors of ink. “Gabe is right.”
“Why?” Tom asked.
“Because if you and I were Vega, working three weeks into a job where the previous chief of twenty years turned out to be a criminal, and the guy after that lasted a couple months.” She turned to Gabe. “No offense.”
“None taken.”
She smiled and continued. “And we asked our nearest experienced investigator for a fresh set of eyes, and that investigator's basement started identifying our victim before our coroner did — what would you do?”
Tom looked at Reagan.
She rolled her eyes. “Hello? You'd shut us down. And you’d never collaborate with us again. You really want to burn that source over a non-case?”
The room was quiet for a long beat.
“I'd run the face,” Wade said from the floor by the cinder block.
Reagan glared at him.
“What? It's the truth. I'd run the face,” Wade said. “I'd feel bad about it after, but I’d do it.”
Cara, across the table from Gabe, did not weigh in.
“No face running. We sit,” Gabe said. “Twenty-four hours. The coroner's finding will tell us what we need to know. If it comes back as we expect, Vega's going to call me back, and we're going to have a conversation.”
Tom said a whole lot of nothing.
“Tom?”
“I heard you.”
“Tom?” Gabe prompted again.
Tom shrugged. The light from the monitors reflected off his glasses, hiding his eyes. “No search. I got it.” He stood and reached for his jacket. “I need to get home. Piper’ll be back from band practice soon.”
Reagan went back to her three-color note, at no point looking up. “By the way. The Manny papers came back from the lawyer. Signed Friday. Effective immediately.”
Wade clapped. “Congrats.”
“Thanks.”
Cara winked at Gabe then turned to her friend. “When are you telling him you'll be at the Grill six days a week regardless?”
Reagan toyed with her pen. “I haven't.”
Gabe hid his own smile. Reagan had only recently agreed to make her longtime line cook the official manager of the Saltwater Grill. Not that she wouldn’t be up in Manny’s business on a daily basis, Sweet & Sawyer caseload permitting.
Gabe's phone rang on the conference table. He looked at it.
David.
“My brother,” he said, and stood.
He headed up the stairs. “Yo.”
“I just saw a news ping out of Haven Cove. Body in the surf. Coast Guard pulled him at eight.”
Great. His baby brother was one of the premier investigative journalists on the West Coast. Okay, the whole country.
“We heard that, too.”
“What's the story?”
“No idea. I'm not official anymore, remember?”
“Gabe.”
“David.”
There was a long pause on the line. Gabe could literally feel David trying to find the story angle. He tried to head him off. “Dude, the coast is steep here. People end up in the surf all the time.”
“Aha. You didn't say, ‘fall.’” David sounded annoyingly triumphant.
“I'm coming down,” he said. “This weekend. Sophie too. Don't tell me not to.”
“I'm not telling you not to, but there's no story here.”
“Got it. No story. Yet. Anyway, I’m not coming for your latest accident. Or whatever. We’ve got things to discuss.”
An electric charge zinged down Gabe’s spine. “Things,” could only mean one thing: new intel on Neptune.
On the other end, David laughed. “I thought that might get your attention.”
“Most definitely.” Gabe almost smiled. “Friday night. The Inn.”
“Don't get yourself killed before then. Sophie’s looking forward to seeing you.”
“I'll take that under advisement.”
He hung up.
He had not told David what they knew. He also had not lied about what he didn't know.
He had walked a tightrope and David, who used to be the kid who couldn't get a baseball over the plate at age twelve and was now a Pulitzer-finalist Pacific Northwest investigative journalist — had walked the same tightrope back at him.
He headed back down the stairs.
“That was David.”
“We heard,” Reagan said.
“I didn't tell him.”
“We heard that too.”
Tom was gone. The middle two screens of the rig had cycled back to the Coastal Heritage filings. He had not pulled the Coast Guard incident report.
Gabe sat down. He picked up the espresso. He took another sip.
Vega didn't ask me to consult because she likes me, he thought, watching the room. She asked because the body was too clean. No ID. No nothing, so not an accident or a jumper.
Tom would hate him for a while, but David would be here by the end of the week, then they’d be in the middle of something Neptune-shaped that would keep Tom buzzing for weeks.
He took another sip of the espresso.
It was, as always, perfect.