Chapter 33
Rocco glanced at the steep, overgrown trail cutting through the Breaklands and then back at Everett.
“You sure you know where you’re going?”
Everett stepped over a root twisted across the path and caught a branch before it slapped him in the face. The jungle grew thick here, dense enough to swallow daylight in patches, with glossy leaves crowding the trail and dark rock jutting through the soil like broken teeth.
“Trust me,” he said. “We’re not lost.”
“That’s what a man says thirty minutes before the rescue team finds his bones.”
Everett kept moving. “If I wanted to kill you, Rocco, I wouldn’t make you hike first.”
“Comforting.”
The terrain rose hard beneath them, climbing away from the safer paths of the King Family property and into the rugged spine of the Breaklands.
The air smelled of salt and wet earth. Somewhere below them, waves struck the cliffs with a dull, distant boom, but up here the forest absorbed most of the sound.
Everett knew this trail in his bones. His boots found the turns before his mind named them, and his hand reached for familiar holds in the rock.
He and Remington had hiked this way nearly every week during the summers they spent together.
Sometimes more. Hiking had been the one reliable way to ditch the others.
Ike had no interest in exploring his family’s property.
Kane hated sweating unless money or a weapon was involved.
Bobby treated exercise like a personal insult.
Remington had been made for the outdoors.
She loved the land like it was an essential part of her.
The heat, the cliffs, the hidden trails, the bruising climbs, the sudden views that made every scrape worth it.
Back then, Everett had still been a Connecticut boy pretending the islands didn’t awe him.
She had dragged the pretense out of him one trail at a time.
Discovering this place with her had opened a part of his life he hadn’t known was sealed shut.
Then they found the guardhouse.
The first time it appeared through the trees, abandoned and half-swallowed by vines, Remington had looked at him like the island itself had handed them a secret.
After that, they mapped every approach they could find.
The easy way. The dangerous way. The way they promised never to take again and took anyway, weeks later.
They turned it into their secret place, the kind of hideaway that felt romantic at seventeen and reckless in hindsight.
Rocco’s boot slipped on loose rock behind him.
Everett caught his arm before he went down.
Rocco steadied himself and scowled. “I packed a satellite phone.”
“Of course you did.”
Everett moved around a jut of stone. “Now tell me the news I’m not going to want to hear. How bad is it for Remington’s case?”
“Not bad for Remi.”
Everett stopped and looked back.
Rocco’s expression had gone grim in a way that didn’t fit the answer. “For your blood pressure, however, it might make you want to set a torch to the entire St. Basil Police Department.”
Everett’s fingers tightened around the strap of his pack. “What did Dr. Forrester find out?”
Rocco climbed the last few steps to join him on a narrow shelf of rock.
Sweat darkened the collar of his shirt, but his eyes were sharp.
“I got into the medical examiner’s office and viewed both bodies.
Bobby and Lois Gaston. I also got a sneak preview from the head examiner on the findings that will be in the final reports they plan to submit to the police.
Findings they’ve already briefed Detective Desmond Francois on. ”
Everett started walking again because standing still made him want to hit something. “What’s surprising about two stabbing victims?”
“The wounds don’t match.”
The trail narrowed between two slabs of dark stone. Everett put one hand against the rock and turned back. “That’s impossible. The cops have been telling the entire island that Remington murdered both of them with a machete.”
“They’re wrong.”
“You saw the wounds yourself?”
“Yes.” Rocco’s voice lost any trace of humor. “Bobby’s wounds were the kind you’d expect from a machete sharpened to cut through dense jungle growth. Deep slashes. Wide tissue damage. Ugly as hell.”
Everett looked toward the canopy, jaw locked.
“Lois was different,” Rocco continued. “Smaller weapon. Narrower wound tracks. Deeper plunging pattern. A large kitchen knife or butcher knife, but definitely not a machete.”
Everett resumed the climb. The rock beneath his boots felt less stable than it had a minute ago.
“So the cops are looking for two murder weapons,” he said. “The machete used on Bobby and the knife used on Lois.”
“At a minimum.”
“We already know there were two machetes. One with Remington’s fingerprints on it, and the other likely taken by the killer when Bobby saw him coming toward the house.”
Rocco ducked under a low branch. “And Bobby couldn’t defend himself out of a paper bag. Never trained. Never went out on security details. Always behind the computer.”
“It was what he did best.”
“Until someone came at him with a blade.”
Remington’s account of that night sharpened in Everett’s mind. The way Bobby’s attention cut past her, his warning for her to move, and the moment he pushed her out of the way toward the only weapon close enough to help her survive.
“The best thing he could do was get Remington out of the way.”
Rocco’s gaze shifted to him. “Honestly, Remi being unconscious saved her life. If she hadn’t been…”
“Don’t.”
Rocco closed his mouth.
The trees thinned for a few steps, revealing a hard slice of ocean beyond the cliffs, turquoise gleaming gold beneath the sun. Wind hit them, hot and salted, before the jungle folded around the trail again.
Everett forced his voice level. “What else?”
“This is the part where you’ll want to break something.”
“Rocco.”
“Lois was already dead before she was stabbed.”
Everett stopped so abruptly that Rocco nearly ran into him.
“What?”
“The ME found enough pentobarbital in her blood to kill her before the first stab wound. Whoever attacked Lois didn’t need the knife to end her life. The knife was theater.”
The jungle seemed to close around them.
Everett stared at him. “Remington has access to drugs used on animals. Tranquilizers. Sedatives. Medications common on a ranch. There is no way she has access to pentobarbital.”
“That’s my assessment.”
“And Francois knows?”
“He’s been briefed.”
Everett turned and kept climbing because rage needed somewhere to go. “Those bastards already have conflicting evidence, and they’re still going after her.”
“Doesn’t help that you’re so damn good at hiding her. Makes her look guilty.”
“She is hiding because they decided she was guilty before they understood the crime scene.”
“Agreed.” Rocco grabbed a vine to steady himself over a slick patch of rock. “But I’m hearing the Francois brothers aren’t buying that Ace Spade is fully out of PC-5. We both know the island cartel could get their hands on that drug.”
Everett looked back. “So the working theory is that Remington’s father helped her acquire a restricted drug so she could plan a double homicide of her husband and his mistress?”
“I didn’t say it was a good theory.”
“It’s a damn joke.” Everett pushed through a curtain of vines, snatching at the tendrils and ripping them from the tree.
Ace had already made the PC-5 angle clear.
No assassin was assigned to kill Bobby. That was a dead end.
The killer had used Bobby’s death sentence, Remington’s rage, and a woman already dead by another method to make the case look simple.
Too simple.
Rocco’s voice broke through his thoughts. “So is … this.”
Everett followed his gaze.
The trail opened into a clearing.
The guard house rose from the jungle as if the mountain had been hiding it on purpose.
It wasn’t a shack, no matter what the name implied.
The old stone structure sat low in the green with weather-darkened walls, arched windows, and a roofline tucked beneath the canopy.
Vines had claimed part of the stonework.
Moss softened the steps. The whole place had the strange elegance of a forgotten royal lodge, built by people with too much money and a dramatic sense of exile.
Everett stopped at the edge of the clearing.
Memory hit hard.
Remington laughing as she raced him up the steps.
Remington standing in the doorway, sun on her skin, telling him they’d found their own little kingdom.
Remington breathless beneath him years later, whispering that if this place had a name, it should be the Love Shack, then bellowing out the old tune.
A smile pulled at his mouth before he could stop it.
Rocco looked between Everett and the guard house. “When you said guard house, this was not what I imagined.”
“I don’t know why. It was built by the King family.”
From the clearing, the work looked almost invisible. A coil of wire rested beside the landing, a tool case sat in the shadow of the doorway, and one portable work light glowed from inside. The front doors stood open, but nothing about the place looked disturbed from a distance.
Hunter stepped out onto the mossy landing. He wore work gloves, a sweat-damp shirt, and the expression of a man who had enjoyed himself more than he would admit.
“I think you’re going to like what I’ve done,” Hunter said.
Everett climbed the last few steps into the clearing. “Tell me.”
“Trail sensors are live. Alerts route to a closed receiver inside. I added two low-visibility cameras where the path narrows, and the east side is mostly a natural barrier, so I reinforced the old access point instead of wasting resources on the cliff line.”
It wasn’t the system Sebastian would have designed if the full Stingray team had been behind them. There were gaps. Acceptable ones, maybe, but gaps all the same. Everett hated noticing them almost as much as he hated understanding why Sebastian wasn’t here to close them.