“Thanks, Hamish.” Before hanging up, Will found himself saying, “You should come to Golden Cove this summer. I’ll borrow a boat and we’ll go fishing and have that beer.”

“You’re on,” was the enthusiastic response. “I should probably mention that I hate fish. You’ll have to eat them all.”

Hanging up afterward, Will stared at the windows awash with rain. He’d made an effort to sound normal for Hamish, but the man who’d once grabbed an ­after-­work beer with the lawyer was long gone. This ­Will… This Will wasn’t so sure who he was anymore. But he knew how to do his job.

He turned back to his desk, and ran a deeper search on all the tourists whose names Glenda had forwarded. All came back clean. Most had been international visitors who’d long ago returned to their countries of origin; the small group of New Zealanders had no criminal records among them.

He then began to make his way through the stack of memory cards he’d taken from the café.

It was only when he looked up after going through all of them that he realized it was dark outside. Going to the doorway, he pulled it open and looked over to the fire station, the rain hitting his face as it slanted in under the eaves.

No lights. No vehicles parked out front.

Hardly a ­surprise—­the rain was crashing down. He took care of a few other matters, then made sure his phone was fully charged and shrugged back into his ­high-­viz jacket for the drive to Anahera’s.

This rain was made to cause emergencies and he needed to be ready to respond. Most Golden Cove residents would call him rather than the official emergency line. At the last minute, he went back and picked up the watch and tin. The station did have a safe, but he wasn’t comfortable leaving the items here before he’d had a chance to examine them.

He put the memory cards not in the main safe but in the hidden gun safe; there was nothing suspicious on them, but it was Miriama’s work and deserved to be protected.

Once in his car, his hair damp again and his jacket gleaming with transparent droplets, he drove past the clinic to make sure Dominic de Souza wasn’t still just sitting inside, shocked and lost. Seeing the place was dark, he swung by the ­two-­bedroom house the doctor rented from Daniel May. It wasn’t far from the surgery.

The single light in the kitchen showcased Dominic at the table, head slumped on his arms. Will frowned. The other man didn’t look in good shape. He was about to get out and knock on the door, make sure depression wasn’t getting the best of Dominic, when another person moved into the frame.

It was the pastor. The ­gray-­haired man was holding a mug of something, and a plate of what looked like toast. He put both in front of Domi­nic, then placed his wrinkled hand on the doctor’s shoulder and squeezed. When Dominic raised his head at last, the older man sat down next to him, seemed to be talking intently. After a while, the doctor nodded and picked up a piece of toast to take a small bite.

Satisfied Dominic was under careful watch, Will turned his vehicle toward Anahera’s place. He thought about picking up something for dinner and taking it along with him, but it looked like everyone had shut up shop early because of the weather. Well, he had half a loaf of bread in his fridge at home. He and Dominic would be having the same meal tonight.

As he drove through the dark and deserted streets, he could see the May estate in the ­distance—­lit up against the night. He wondered if Daniel had returned home from his meetings or if it was Keira up there alone. Just then, he glimpsed red taillights through the trees, as if a car was climbing up toward the estate. Someone from Golden Cove? Or had Daniel come into town to attend the gathering at the fire station, and was now driving home to his wife?

No way to tell from here, the rain diminishing even the limited visibility he normally had of the road up to the estate.

The tourism center, he was happy to see, was also shut up. Glenda lived literally behind it, but he swung around anyway to make sure she was safe. She came to the window and waved when his headlights cut across her front window, well used to his patrols by now. Will flashed his headlights at her in a silent response, carried on. He had to check up on a number of others, elderly and vulnerable individuals who might’ve been forgotten in the tidal wave of worry over Miriama.

All of them proved to be snug inside their homes.

As he drove on, he tried not to think of Miriama out in the cold and wet. He was thinking he should go by Mrs. Keith’s, too, when he got a call. The signal was patchy, but he recognized Evelyn Triskell’s voice: “. . . ­Vincent… his car.”

26

“Evelyn, where are you?”

It took him two minutes of conversation through crackling static to work out that Evelyn was somewhere on the road out of town. Telling her to stay put, he did a U-­turn and headed that way. A car went past him in the opposite direction around the halfway point, but they passed on the turn and he couldn’t see much of the make and model through the heavy rain. It had been small, though, not a truck or an SUV.

It was another ten minutes later that he caught the blurred rear lights of a car on the side of the ­road—­and it wasn’t Evelyn’s old Mini. It was Vincent’s silver Mercedes, a car the other man usually only drove for short trips and never in this kind of weather.

Bringing his vehicle to a stop beside the crippled sedan and turning on his hazard lights as well as the blue and red flashers atop the roof and in his front grille, Will got out. Vincent’s car had smashed into the ditch, the front crumpled in. Not enough to have crushed the driver, but enough that the car would need a tow. More worried about Vincent than the car, Will blinked the rain out of his eyes and wrenched open the driver’s-­side door.

Vincent looked at him, a streak of blood down one side of his forehead and a faint smile on his lips. “This is the last thing you need, isn’t it, Will?”

“Where’s Evelyn?” Will yelled to be heard over the pounding rain that thundered on his head and dripped in rivulets down his face. The extremely low visibility made it difficult to see any markings on the road right in front of him, much less farther down the road; Evelyn’s smaller vehicle could be lying broken ten meters up and he’d never spot it.

“Evelyn?” Vincent stared blankly at him for a second before shaking his head. “I sent her home. She was driving back in after running one of the hunters home, and she saw I’d spun off the road. Insisted on stopping to call you.”

Will knew the chairwoman of the Golden Cove Business Council; a bulldog had nothing on her. “How could you possibly have convinced Evelyn to go home?” At least that explained the car Will had seen heading into ­town—­it had been the size of Evelyn’s compact.

“Wayne.”

Will should’ve thought of that ­himself—­Evelyn’s husband was in a wheelchair as a result of a stroke, and while he had good mobility around the home, he still relied on Evelyn for a lot. He was older than her by fifteen years at least and far more frail.

If Will had realized Evelyn wasn’t home, he’d have checked on Wayne during his patrol. The Triskells lived on his street and he often lent them a hand if they needed physical help with something. Half the time, the request was a thin excuse for Evelyn to attempt to pump Will for scandalous details about her fellow Covers.