Troy
Stockton’s boat was flat and narrow, and looked nothing
like the other
flat, narrow fishing boats living at the Lito Island
Marina.
“It’s
black,” Elaina said, gazing down at it from the dock.
“So?”
He undid the bow line and whipped it into a neat coil,
which he tossed
on the boat’s floor.
“So,
all the other boats are white.” She stepped aboard.
Everything shifted,
and he caught her arm to steady her.
“No
law against black.” His hand dropped away, and he turned to
flip some
switches at the helm. Soon the engine grunted.
“Looks
like it can go in pretty shallow water.”
“Eight
inches,” he said with a touch of pride.
She
looked around for a good place to stand. There weren’t many
choices,
so she rested a hand on the captain’s chair as they eased
back out
of the slip.
“Hold
on.” He shifted gears, and then they were gliding in the
other direction,
moving out of the sheltering cove the marina shared with
the police
dock. Elaina glanced over her shoulder and watched the pier
recede.
She was going out on a boat with a man she barely knew,
without letting
her boss or anyone else know what she was doing. Not
terribly smart.
She
patted her back pocket, where she’d tucked her cell phone.
While Troy
had waited out on the patio at her hotel, she’d showered
and changed
into the jeans and T-shirt she kept stashed in her gym bag.
Her Glock
was strapped to her ankle, just above her Nike. She had her
phone. And
if Troy tried anything funny, he was going in the bay.
Elaina
shifted, putting some distance between them. She couldn’t
explain
why he made her uneasy, but he did. It made no sense,
because she spent
every day surrounded by macho types—guys trained in
firearms, and
hand-to-hand combat, and mind games. As a border town,
Brownsville attracted
more than its fair share of gun-loving lawmen. Since day
one, many of
the Bureau, DEA, and Homeland Security guys had attempted
to intimidate
her either physically or by getting in her head, and she’d
learned
to blow them off.
But
Troy was harder to ignore.
He
stood between the helm and the captain’s chair, and she
stood beside
him, trying not to cling too tightly and reveal her fear of
toppling
out of the boat. She glanced over and noticed his ropey
forearms and
powerful-looking calves. He was some sort of athlete,
obviously, and
she tried to guess the sport.
“You
get seasick?” Troy asked.
“No.
Why?”
“You
look uncomfortable.” But he wasn’t even looking at her.
Those eyes—which
were the exact green color of the bay—were trained on the
southern
horizon. He wore cargo shorts today and Teva sandals. His
white T-shirt
contrasted with his sun-browned skin, and she envisioned
him on a surfboard.
Why
was she even thinking about this? She needed to focus on
the case, not
Troy Stockton. The man had a reputation. It was coming back
to her in
bits and pieces. She didn’t usually read celebrity mags,
but she had
a vague recollection of the People she’d flipped
through at
her dentist’s office. Troy had been photographed with some
gorgeous
starlet. That girl from Corpus Christi. What the hell was
her name?
“That
was some profile you came up with.”
She
cut a glance at Troy and saw the smile playing at the
corner of his
mouth. She bristled.
“What
do you mean?”
“White
male. Likes hunting and fishing. Owns a boat. Sounds like
half the men
on this island, including me.” He stared down at her,
serious now.
“Except for the getting-it-up part.”
Elaina
felt a blush creep up her neck. “Look, Troy—”
“Here
we are.” The boat slowed abruptly as he pulled the throttle
up, and
she stumbled into him. “She was found just over there,” he
said.
Elaina
looked in the direction he was pointing, but saw nothing
unusual. Just
more grass and water.
“How
do you know?”
He
tapped his control panel, and she noticed the GPS. “I got
the coordinates.”
He
got the coordinates. From the police, no doubt, who clearly
were sharing
information with members of the public, but leaving her
completely in
the dark.
“They
got a good set of prints from the victim yesterday night.”
Troy
veered close to the shoreline, and the water was so
shallow, Elaina
could see grass on the bottom. “They’ll run the thumbs
through DMV,
hopefully get a positive ID soon.”
Elaina
thought of Valerie Monroe, who’d graduated third in her
class at Baylor
med school and recently had been accepted as an intern at
Texas Children’s
Hospital. She wondered what Valerie’s parents were doing at
this moment,
although she figured she knew. Most likely they were either
en route
to Lito Island or camped out at the police station, waiting
for news.
Troy
veered left into a narrow inlet.
“We’re
going in?”
“You
want to see it, don’t you?”
“Yes,
but…” she watched him deftly steer the boat through the
tight opening.
The water wasn’t even a foot deep, and she saw ripples in
the sand
as they skimmed along the surface. “What if we run
aground?”
He
smiled. “You get out and push.”
But
they didn’t run aground. He tipped up the engine and slowed
down,
using just enough speed to maintain control over the
steering as they
maneuvered this way and that through all the channels. She
began to
doubt that he really knew where he was going. Maybe he was
leading her
to some generic patch of marsh.
She
spotted something yellow tangled in the reeds. “Look
there.”
She pointed at it.
“Well,
shit.” He let the motor stall and then jumped out of the
boat and
waded over to take a look. “I’ll be damned.”
“What?”
The
boat drifted into the grass, and bumped against the
bottom.
Troy
gazed down at the thin yellow twine, but didn’t touch
it. “They
must not have seen this,” he muttered. “Or maybe they came
in from
the south.”
“Who
came in?”
He
looked up. “The crime seen guys. Breck, Maynard, Chavez.
They should
have collected all this. It’s evidence.”
“Evidence
of what?”
He
trudged back to the boat and shoved it into the center of
the narrow
channel.
“Of
your unsub.” He climbed aboard and got them moving
again. “This
marsh, it’s like a maze. I grew up all over this bay, and I
get lost
half the time. Looks like the killer used twine to mark the
route so
he could find his way out after dumping the body.”
Elaina
stared at the twine, struck by the idea.
“And
how do we know it came from him?” she asked. “Maybe Breck
left it.”
“He
didn’t.”
“How
do you know?”
“Because.”
Troy gave her a hard look. “They found it in Gina’s case
too. He
leaves it every time.”
Elaina
continued to look queasy, so Troy hugged the coast as he
headed back
in. He felt her behind him as she gripped the chair and
stared silently
off into the distance.
She
hadn’t liked him poking holes in her profile, but that was
too damn
bad. Sure, the profile sounded good in theory, but given
the demographics
around here, it didn’t narrow things down a whole lot. Troy
had never
cared much for mind hunters. Most of them stayed holed up
in their basement
at headquarters and rattled off psychobabble while the real
cops rolled
up their sleeves and worked the cases. If criminal
profiling was Elaina’s
thing, she was going to have an uphill battle getting
anyone around
here to buy into it. Profiling and fortune-telling were
first cousins,
as far as Chief Breck was concerned.
But
she’d figure that out soon enough.
Troy
glanced back at Elaina and saw that she still had that
uneasy look.
Her nose was pink, too, and she’d forgotten sunscreen. She
wasn’t
from around here, evidently, but he didn’t know her
background. He
needed to do some digging and find out just how green a
green-horn she
really was.
She
squinted at something up ahead, and he followed her gaze.
“What’s
going on?”
“Dunno,”
he said. But as they neared the marina, it became clear
something had
gone down during their little sight-seeing cruise. Cars and
news vans
filled the LIPD parking lot.
“Breck’s
holding a press conference,” Troy guessed, turning into the
cove.
They glided past the police station, and Elaina turned to
gape at the
crowd.
Troy
pulled into his slip without touching the dock. He hopped
out and tied
the bow line to a cleat, then held out a hand for
Elaina.
She
barely glanced at it as she stepped onto the pier without
help.
“I
hope your police chief knows what he’s doing,” she
said. “If he
releases too much detail, he’ll compromise the
investigation.”
“That’s
one thing you don’t have to worry about. The man hates
reporters.”
“But
he talks to you?”
Troy
walked across the pier and surveyed the situation. Breck
was talking
to the media—or more likely, dodging their questions—from
the station
house steps. Cinco stood on the sidelines. Troy caught his
eye, and
the deputy joined them on the lawn beside the marina.
“What’s
up, Cinc?”
He
glanced at Elaina. Then he eyed Troy’s muddy sandals and
seemed to
put it together where they’d been.
“Good
news and bad news,” Cinco said. “We got an ID. Girl’s name
is
Whitney Bensen.”
Troy
felt Elaina go rigid beside him.
“What
about Valerie?” she asked.
“That’s
the bad news,” Cinco told her. “Valerie Monroe is still
missing.”