Sheriff Landyn gestured over his shoulder with a toss of his chin. “On board.”

  “Send one of them to guard the tape right now,” Nate told him.

  The Sheriff paused, looking right at him.

  “Now,” Nate repeated again, making sure to enunciate very clearly.

  The Sheriff nodded gruffly and turned to go up again. Laura touched Nate’s arm lightly and exchanged a look with him again. Shock. They were going to have their work cut out here if this was his standard of professionalism.

  Nate took the lead up into the ship so Laura wouldn’t have to, following the Sheriff over to where a group of men—mostly in their twenties, by appearance—were standing around in deputy uniforms. One of them was elbowing another one, both of them leaning as far over as they could as if daring each other to lean further. Nate grit his teeth again. A lazy Sheriff and a bunch of boys. This was going to be fantastic.

  He ignored them for now as the Sheriff handed out orders and went instead to the front of the ship to try to get a look at the figurehead. There wasn’t much to see up here, but this must have been where she was tied up. Nate was looking less at the scene—since the body had already been taken down anyway—and more at the logistics of it. Had the killer climbed down from up here? If so, he would need to know his way around a ship. It looked like a daunting task. To do it without safety gear, at risk of falling into the water, whilst also carrying a dead body—that would have been no easy feat.

  Or had he been down there, in the water? Nate leaned over to look. There was enough room for a small craft to pull up beside the larger vessel. A small craft with a ladder in it, or something else to help him get up higher? Was that the answer?

  “Alright,” the Sheriff said, trundling over to them. “That’s taken care of.”

  If he was expecting praise for the job that he should have done in the first place, he was going to be waiting a long while.

  “What can you tell us about the case?” Laura asked, in tones that suggested she wasn’t expecting much.

  “There’s not a lot to go on,” the Sheriff said. “We sent a briefing to the FBI, didn’t you get it?”

  “We did,” Laura said, now looking decidedly unimpressed. “Have you discovered anything since you sent that over?”

  “Not really,” the Sheriff said. “Once we knew you were coming, we held off.”

  Nate wanted to pinch the bridge of his nose, throw the Sheriff off the side of the boat, and go back home to D.C. for a break. But they were professionals, after all, so he did none of that.

  “Who found the body this morning?” he asked.

  “Oh, that was Charlie,” the Sheriff said.

  “And who, or where, is Charlie?” Nate asked.

  The Sheriff turned and pointed to someone standing nearby on the deck just as he took a few steps forward.

  The poor man had been sitting there since dawn. He looked shaken and tired. Probably hungry too.

  “Thanks,” Nate said, in a tone that was intended to be as dismissive as it was sarcastic and walked away from the Sheriff before he said something that he would regret.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Laura tried her best reassuring smile on the ship’s worker who had found the body that morning and was rewarded by a weak smile in return.

  “Charlie, is it?” she asked.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Charlie said. He looked more than a little relieved to be talking to someone who knew what they were doing at last. “I was the one who called the Sheriff.”

  “Please tell us anything you can about your discovery this morning,” Laura said. “Let’s start with whether you saw anyone else around?”

  “No, no one,” Charlie said, shaking his head. “I was up on top of the upper deck, I would have noticed if there was someone nearby. There definitely wasn’t.”

  “Not even at any of the other boats, or back in the parking lot?” Laura asked.

  Charlie shook his head. “I’m the first one here most Monday mornings,” he said. “I have to get started before everyone else. It was dead silent, but I’m used to that. I didn’t think anything was wrong. I just saw the birds.”

  “The birds?” Nate repeated.

  “They were gathering along the railings,” Charlie said, turning to point. “Gulls and some land birds. They were waiting to eat her, I think. Waiting to see if it was safe.”

  Laura made a mental note. That could give them some idea of when the body was placed there. If the coroner found that the birds hadn’t yet tried to eat the flesh of the dead woman, then maybe she hadn’t been there long.

  “Did you recognize her?” Laura asked. It was one of the biggest questions. Who here knew the victims? Who would have a reason to want to harm them? What was the thread that connected this young woman and the middle-aged man?

  “I did,” Charlie admitted. “Not to speak to, or anything. But I’d seen her around the town.”

  “Did you know her name?” Nate asked.

  Charlie shrugged. “I just knew her as the lifeguard down on the south beach. And I think she might be the daughter of someone from the old days, I don’t know.”

  “The old days?”

  “You know, like school and all,” Charlie said. “It’s a small town here and a lot of people stay. I would have gone to school with people around the age of her parents, I’m thinking.”

  It was a close-knit community, then. That was both a blessing and a nightmare, Laura knew from experience. On one hand, it was easy to find suspects. On the other hand, you would be likely to have too many—and rumor would be rife. When you were trying to get to the truth, rumors were rarely useful.

  “Can you describe the body?” Laura asked.

  Charlie looked a little green, and she was sorry she had asked. “She was lashed to the figurehead,” he said. “But it was all wrong. She was just hanging there. Limp. You could see right away that it wasn’t the real thing. Well, not right away. For a minute, I actually…but it was early, and my brain wasn’t working yet. She was all grey too. Not like a living person. Grey and wrong.”

  Laura nodded. More detail. That could help a lot. It seemed to suggest that the body had been dead and cold a while, but that clashed with the hungry birds. Was the victim killed elsewhere and then brought here? Was this someone planning out specific scenes?

  “Do you know of any more relevant detail that might help us?” Nate asked. He must have noticed how green Charlie was looking too.

  “Not that I know of,” Charlie said. “I told everything to the Sheriff, anyway, but that was all I could tell him. Whoever did this was gone when I got here, and I wasn’t even close enough to see her properly, you know? The rest is up to your people, I suppose.”

  Our people, Laura thought wryly, nodding at him. As if they were going to really get any cooperation at all from this lackadaisical Sheriff and his group of lads. “Thank you, Charlie,” she said. “You’re free to go home.”

  Charlie nodded gratefully and left, clutching a weathered hat in his hands and waving it by way of farewell. He disappeared down toward the walkway, off the ship, and Laura turned thoughtfully to watch him go. She took in the whole view—the ships all lined up, the sea on one side and the town on the other.

  A town, she had no doubt, which had many secrets—but she wasn’t going to see any of them from here.

  “Let’s pay the coroner a visit,” she suggested, and Nate nodded in agreement, turning to lead the way.

  ***

  “So, what was that about?”

  Laura looked at Nate, her hand on the passenger side door handle. She’d been about to get out of the car now that they were parked outside the coroner’s building, but Nate had stopped and was looking at her expectantly.

  “What?” she asked, floundering. Was she supposed to know what he meant?

  “Sheriff Landyn,” Nate said. “I saw how you reacted to his handshake. You looked like you were going to throw up. And I know you don’t have a problem with water.”

  Laura looked away for a moment. She’d said she would be honest with him, hadn’t she? It was still hard to remember that. To remember that he wasn’t expecting her to lie or come up with some innocent explanation that would allow him to keep his blinkers on. The blinkers were off, and they were staying that way.

  “The aura,” she said. “The shadow of death. It’s on him.”

  Nate’s eyes widened. “Like you said I had on me?”

  “Yes.” Laura took a breath, swallowed. It was hard to talk about. Hard to think about. “It was powerful. I think he’s going to die soon.”

  “As part of this case?”

  That was the one thing Laura wished she could answer. “I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t have a vision. Just the aura of death. Unless I get more details at some point, I don’t know what’s going to happen to him. It could be anything. He might have undiagnosed cancer.”

  Nate nodded. “I guess we’ll take it under advisory.”

  Laura reached for the door handle again. “Shall we go?” she asked, feeling like she was asking permission and not liking the feeling very much.

  “Yeah, sorry,” Nate said. He got out of the car, too, allowing Laura to consider the matter closed as she shut her door behind her. She didn’t want to dwell on it. The aura of death made her feel so unwell whenever she encountered it, and it was laden with bad memories: the death of her father, the time she had spent running after Nate and trying to do everything in her power to prevent the death she felt coming for him. She would much rather leave it alone and never feel it again. That would be better.

  Sheriff Landyn wasn’t someone she loved. Someone she would feel the loss of. Maybe it was her responsibility to save as many people as she could, due to her work, but sometimes that burden felt too heavy to bear. And touching him again, putting herself through that black sickness again, in the vain hope of seeing a vision that might not come or might not even help…

  Maybe she wouldn’t be able to handle it.

  They walked into the building, Laura barely noticing her surroundings as she wrestled internally with the dilemma. She simply followed Nate until he stopped and looked up to find that they were standing in what was clearly the local morgue.

  Only, there was no one else in sight.

  Nate sighed.

  “Hello?” he called out, glancing around as if expecting someone to pop out of one of the drawers. “Hello?”

  There was resounding silence.

  “There’s a log on the table,” Laura suggested.

  Nate walked over and grabbed it from beside a switched-off computer, flipping through the pages. “Drawers five and seven,” he said, glancing up to see the matching drawers on the wall. “Should we…?”

  “I guess,” Laura shrugged. The place was deserted, and no one had stopped them from coming in. It wasn’t as though they had hours to spend waiting for someone to come along. They needed to get on with the case, after all.

  Then again, she wasn’t sure how useful this whole trip would be without the expert view of the coroner to guide them.

  “Oh!”

  There was a sound from the doorway which made both her and Nate turn. Nate’s hand was on the handle of drawer five, about to open it, so the timing could not have been better. The woman in the long white coat standing over there, with a takeout container in her hand, was clearly the coroner.

  She was overweight and had frizzy hair that didn’t seem to want to sit still, and thick spectacles that made her eyes seem owlish as she blinked at them.

  “Are you the coroner?” Nate prompted, seeming to realize that she wasn’t going to say anything herself.

  “Yes,” she said, stepping forward and seeming to recover her faculties. “Who are you? Should you be in here?”

  “Well, there was nothing to stop us from coming in,” Laura snapped, fed up already with the small-town mentality here. “We’re FBI. We’re the agents taking over the case.”

  “Right,” the coroner said, sounding vaguely impressed. “Well, you’ll want to see the bodies then. Do you mind if I grab a spot of lunch first?”

  Laura and Nate both stared at her.

  “Right,” the coroner said again, clearly a little put out by their lack of flexibility. “Well, you might as well open the drawer, since you’re there.”

  Nate pulled open drawer five, revealing the body of a man who Laura recognized from the case file photographs as Elias Makks. He looked almost as though he might be sleeping—except for the vivid red marks around his throat and his wrists.

  “Was he restrained when he was killed?” Laura asked, noting this unusual sign immediately.

  “No, I don’t believe he was,” the coroner said, tucking some of her frizzy hair behind her ears—and doing nothing at all in terms of neatening her appearance—as she dropped the takeout bag on her desk and ambled over. “I think he was strangled first, and then tied to the figurehead. It was the same rope used in both cases. One length for each of his wrists, one of which I have tested and linked to being the strangulation rope, and then another to lash his feet to the bottom of the spit. The lividity here comes as a result of the sheer weight of his whole body hanging from the wrists. They were over his head. The killer finished up with a rope around the waist to ensure that he would fit snugly to the figurehead instead of hanging loose.”

  “That’s odd,” Laura said. “If it was me, I’d want to tie him around the waist first so I didn’t have to support his weight so much.”

  “Maybe our killer wasn’t worried about the weight,” Nate frowned. “Maybe he’s strong enough not to mind it. Or maybe he has some other kind of technique. Are you sure the waist was the last one?”

  “The marks are deepest around the wrists,” the coroner explained, pointing to them for comparison. “See the darker color? That means the wrists were tied not long after death, while the blood was still pooling. And then, see, the stomach has this dark patch with the white line across it.”

  “What is that?” Laura asked.

  “Blood pooled in the front of his body because he was hanging downwards slightly,” the coroner explained. “That’s how we know he was placed into position not long after death and then the rope was placed around his stomach last. He was most likely killed right next to or even on the ship. It’s the same story with the female victim.”

  So much for my theory about the bodies being moved from elsewhere, Laura thought. This was why they needed the experts. She just wished the Jones Harbor experts seemed as trustworthy as she wanted them to.

  Laura reached out to adjust the sheet that had been pushed down to the victim’s waist, picking it up and pulling it back over his head as if she wanted to preserve his dignity. As she did, her hand brushed just lightly against his dead flesh. It was cold and did nothing as far as triggering a vision. She was expecting that, these days. Still, something had made her want to try.

  “And the other one?” Laura asked.

  The coroner slid Elias Makks back inside his temporary home and reached for the other drawer, pulling it out to reveal the body of Dina Grey. She was so much younger than Elias that Laura actually found herself sucking in a breath. She looked pale and, yes, maybe grey under the light. Laura could imagine her looking even worse in the dim light of dawn.

  Though part of her theory may not have held water, there was one part that did—Laura could see that much.

  “They weren’t attacked by the birds,” she said out loud. “Neither of them has any other marks on them.”

  “That’s correct,” the coroner nodded. “I would guess that they weren’t up there long enough. The seabirds would have gathered around them in the morning, but they were both strung up at night and found quite early on. The birds didn’t have time to get bold enough to try them.”

  “Or maybe they didn’t want to approach before the bodies were found because there was still someone nearby,” Laura said thoughtfully.

  The coroner shrugged. “I couldn’t say. Bodies are my expertise, not birds.”

  “Well, thank you,” Laura said, even if grudgingly because she didn’t like the way things were being run around here. “Please make sure you lock the doors if you leave the morgue empty again. We need to keep these bodies protected. They’re evidence, after all.”

  “They’re people,” the coroner said, blinking at her from behind those thick glasses as if she was offended.

  “Even more reason to protect them from unauthorized access,” Nate said, turning to follow Laura as she led the way out of the morgue.

  “We’d better head to interview the families,” Laura said. She was already thinking that they were probably going to discover no interviews had been done at all, or that they had been done badly and the families were suffering.

  The quicker they crossed all the Ts on their own investigation into this case, the better.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Laura tried to suppress a grimace as each member of the family insisted on reaching out to shake first Nate’s hand, then hers. She’d had a bad enough experience with a handshake already this morning.

  The first to reach out was Tobias Makks, the eldest son of Elias. He was in his early to mid-twenties, fresh-faced and blue-eyed. His brother was the same: Jens Makks must have been only a few years younger, with the same looks and the same blond hair. They both stood tall, towering over their poor mother. Ellen Makks was the last to shake, and the one with the most haunted eyes.

  “Please,” she said. “Take a seat. I’ll make you some coffee.”

  “No, please,” Laura said, holding up a hand. She could sense a devastated exhaustion around the woman. “It’s not necessary. Just take a seat. You don’t need to exert yourself on our part.”

  “I could make everyone coffee, if you wanted,” Nate suggested, picking up on the approach that Laura was going for.

  There were nods all around. Nate disappeared into the kitchen with a significant glance at Laura, telling her to do her thing. He would no doubt be listening as much as he could from the other room, but it was up to her to see what she could get out of them.

 

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