Chapter Sixteen
He watched the harbor lights through the windshield, the wipers smearing freezing rain.
Hope Island didn’t look like a place where monsters lurked. That was the beauty of it.
He sat a block up from the docks, engine idling low, heater humming just enough to keep the windows from fogging. Down below, the water rocked a forest of masts and rigging, boats shifting gently against their moorings, stern lights blinking like tired eyes.
One light in particular burned brighter than the rest. The Harbor Rose. Troy Malbern’s boat.
Troy Malbern. Loud-mouthed, easily offended, always spoiling for a fight. A man driven by a collection of small, festering grievances: Property lost, respect denied, tickets written, warnings given. A man who’d spent years complaining about everything from tourist traffic to fishing quotas.
Back then, his white SUV had been impounded for illegally parking.
A stroke of luck. Malbern didn’t have the money to get it out.
It would have stayed there until it was sold if not for him.
No one had known he’d slipped into the police’s impound yard and taken the vehicle.
After he’d parked near the Hardesty place for a while at night, he took the SUV and hid it where it wouldn’t be found.
Now, he watched Malbern crossing the gangplank.
A stocky shape in a worn parka, cigarette ember flaring red in the dark.
Malbern paused at the dock box, cursed at something, kicked it for good measure, then stomped onto the deck of his boat.
Same temper. Same sloppy awareness. Same sense of indestructibility.
He smiled faintly.
Malbern had always been useful. He’d been useful when the Hardesty property changed hands, ranting to anyone who’d listen about what he’d lost. Complaining about Raymond Dutton harassing him for being near the property in the past. He stomped into the bar, red-faced that night, ranting and raving, promising that one day he’d make people pay.
Very useful when people remembered him more clearly than they remembered certain other faces in the bar.
He noticed a police cruiser driving by the harbor. The cruiser seemed to slow as it passed by Malbern’s boat.
He leaned back against the headrest, letting the satisfaction roll through him.
They were looking at Malbern for the murder of the former police chief.
Good. Let them paw through Malbern’s past. Talk to grumbling fishermen about him and dig up stories about a man who couldn’t keep his mouth shut on a good day.
People like Malbern were magnets for suspicion. Loud. Visible. Angry in all the right places.
People like him learned early how not to attract light.
He thought of the girl—the woman, really—sitting in that briefing room at the station earlier today. He hadn’t seen her, but he could picture her. Shoulders tight. Eyes too big. Hands clenched around nothing. Maya Callahan. He hadn’t counted on her remembering more than he’d planned for.
Vanessa. He thought he’d erased her existence and everyone who could identify her that night when he’d threatened the adoption agency person into assisting him. Killing Vanessa had been his last hurdle, or so he believed.
Except for a four-year-old heart beating so loud in the shadows he could almost hear it over the rain.
He’d leaned down. Laid out the rule like a commandment.
Don’t say a word.
Not then. Not ever.
Killing a child would have brought a level of scrutiny even he couldn’t control. Fear was quieter. Fear lasted longer.
He hadn’t expected the girl to end up working in plain sight, serving coffee to half the town.
He hadn’t expected Raymond’s son to come back to the island years later, wearing a badge and a promise.
He hadn’t expected the cold cases on the mainland to start whispering to a new generation of detectives.
Mistakes. People like him didn’t often acknowledge them, but he acknowledged this much: They were closer than they’d ever been, although still not close enough.
Malbern shouted at someone on the dock, his voice carrying up through the damp air. He watched the man for a long moment, his eyes narrowing. There were two ways to survive when people started closing in. Disappear, or make sure someone else tripped all the alarms first.
He shifted his vehicle into gear and rolled slowly away from the harbor.
The current chief wanted to follow past threads. Fine. He would hand him a knot.
◆◆◆
The conference room had emptied, but the call still lingered in Asa’s mind.
He sat alone for a moment at the end of the table, elbows on his thighs, hands loosely laced. The fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. The whiteboard still bore the names they’d written earlier: Vanessa Warren. Troy Malbern. Hardesty Farm. Fire set to cover up any evidence. White SUV. Unsub.
All the while Margaret Cormier’s voice kept replaying in his head. He said he’d do anything to protect them.
Asa drew in a breath through his nose and exhaled it slowly. The cuff of his shirt brushed the band of his Apple watch. Time. So much of it lost. So much of it looping back now to a single night in a barn.
The door clicked.
He glanced up.
Maya hovered in the doorway as if she wasn’t sure if she should come in.
“Hey,” he said quietly. “You don’t have to knock.”
“I didn’t,” she said, her voice a little rough. “I thought about it. Does that count?”
“Not in this building. In this building, you get honorary family status.”
She stepped inside, closing the door halfway behind her. The room felt smaller immediately, but not in a bad way.
The overhead lights picked up the faint smudges under her eyes, the way her cheeks were still pink from earlier tears. She’d tied her hair back, but a few strands had escaped, curling near her jaw.
“How’s your head?” he asked.
“Loud,” she said honestly. “Yours?”
“Same. Different noise.”
She came around the table and slid into the chair beside him instead of across. Close enough that he could feel the warmth of her shoulder, even though they weren’t touching.
“Will send everyone scurrying?” she asked.
He nodded. “He’s trying to locate anything about your mother, now that we have her name.
Rachel and Declan are setting up surveillance on the docks.
JT’s digging through old incident reports that might involve Troy Malbern’s name, but if my father handled Malbern privately as a favor to the Hardesty family, there won’t be any.
Hopefully, there’ll be something on that white SUV.
Eli’s looking at financials. It’s a long shot. ”
Her fingers twisted together in her lap. “And you?”
“Waiting for round two,” he said. “Will wants us along when he talks to Malbern, or at least when he starts watching him.”
She was quiet for a beat. “I don’t recognize his name. Do you think he did it?”
The question hung there, heavier than it had any right to be.
“I’m not sure,” he said eventually.
The tension in her shoulders eased a fraction.
“I think Troy Malbern is a man with too many connections to ignore. He owned the property before the Hardestys. He left a trail of complaints about losing it. He drove a white SUV. He’d been escorted off that land more than once by my father, according to the Hardesty family.
That doesn’t make him guilty, but it does mean we’d be foolish not to take a hard look at him. ”
“So he’s . . . a possibility.”
“A possibility,” Asa confirmed. “A loud, angry, uncooperative possibility.”
“But not the only one,” she said, her voice soft.
“No. Not the only one.”
She stared at the tabletop for a long moment.
“Margaret’s voice . . .” she began, then swallowed. “The way she remembered him. Your father. Like he wasn’t just another chief. Like he mattered to her.”
“He did. He mattered to a lot of people.”
“Your father brought us here and did his best to keep us safe in that farmhouse. He made a promise, and he followed through until . . .” Her throat closed on the word until.
“Until someone killed him,” Asa finished for her, no gentleness in that part. “On purpose. To shut him up.”
She nodded, eyes shining again. “I keep thinking about the way she said it,” Maya whispered. “That he told her my mom had seen something. That he brought us here because it was the one place the man hunting us wouldn’t think to look. Only he did look. He found us anyway.”
“I’m guessing that you and your mother didn’t have any connection to Hope Island, which made it a good plan,” Asa said. “My father just didn’t realize he was up against a man who’d already decided the rules didn’t apply to him.”
“Your father knew the risk, and he still brought us anyway.”
Asa’s chest tightened. “Yes.”
“I don’t know what to do with that,” she admitted.
“I get it. Your brain’s been carrying the version where you were abandoned for a long time. It’s going to take it a minute to swap that out for ‘protected’ and ‘fought for.’”
Her fingers traced the edge of the table. “Protected,” she repeated, like she was trying the word on for size.
He watched her profile, the way her jaw tightened, the faint tremor in her hands. He’d spent years thinking about how his father had died. Only now was he beginning to understand all the ways his father had lived. “You were worth it,” Asa said, his voice firm.
Her gaze flicked toward him. “You keep saying that as if it’s obvious,” she murmured. “Like I’m supposed to just . . . believe it.”
“You survived a monster in a barn and still grew up capable of making cinnamon rolls and sarcastic retorts,” he said. “That automatically raises your stock price.”
Despite everything, her lips twitched.
Asa hesitated. Then he lifted his hand, slow enough for her to move if she wanted to, and he tucked a loose curl behind her ear before dropping his hand.
Her breath caught.
“Also,” he added, because the truth wanted out, “I’m more biased than your average juror at this point.”
“Biased?” Her voice came in an unsteady whisper.