“Yeah,” Robert murmured, “whoever laid out these bones had to have ice for blood. Jesus, the bones are lined up as if he used a ruler.”

“Shane’s a novelist, says he walks this trail in the early morning when he wants to think.” Will wanted to pass on the information, then leave, get to Anahera. “No indications of any violent tendencies and no record in either New Zealand or Ireland.” That information Will had discovered during his initial run on all possible suspects in the Cove. “Shane’s mentored a number of young female writers, but they’re all accounted for.” He’d spent the wait making calls, confirming that. “My ­take—­he’s just the unlucky bastard who found the bones.”

The two detectives exchanged a look, but Will didn’t much care what they thought of his instincts. They’d come to the same conclusion after a couple of minutes with ­Shane—­the man remained green around the gills. “Look, unless you need something else right now, I have to get to the second site.”

“Yeah, we’d better go examine the skeleton. I’ll let you know what the bone specialists say.”

As Will drove away from the site, he saw curious locals beginning to slow down their battered trucks and rusty sedans as they passed the ­dump—­they’d probably come to abandon rubbish, been startled by the forensic van and multiple police vehicles. Just wait until the second team arrived. Golden Cove was about to become a circus.

He shut his mind to all of it as he drove, thinking about what Shane had found, what Anahera had found. Coincidence? Yes. No one could manipulate the sea. But he’d have to look at the body first to confirm. It’d all depend on how long Miriama had been in the water. Because if you knew the sea really ­well—­as so many of the men and women in this area ­did—­it might be possible to drop a body in at a particular point with a fairly good expectation of it being washed up on the beach.

Will should’ve gone straight to the beach, straight to relieve Anahera’s lonely vigil, but he knew how fast information could travel in the Cove. And he knew Matilda would’ve heard about the sudden appearance of police vehicles at the dump site.

So he went to her home. She was waiting for him wrapped up in a faded gray polar fleece robe, her face strangely motionless. “Did you find her?” she demanded. “Did you find my baby?”

“We found her.”

She keened and collapsed onto the floor before he could tell her anything else.

Going down beside her, Will did what he could, but it wasn’t enough. He was grateful to see one of her ­neighbors—­Raewyn ­Clark—­running over, her blonde hair a mass of frizzy curls; Raewyn’s flinty expression told him she’d guessed exactly what terrible news he’d brought. “I’ll take care of her.” The heavily tattooed former gang member went down beside Matilda, put her arms around the broken woman. “You know she’d want you out there, looking after our Miri. Don’t let the outsiders treat her as nothing.”

Will rose, got back into the SUV.

It felt as if it took him forever to get to the water, and all the while, the clouds grew blacker and heavier overhead. Scrambling down the pathway after reaching the edge of the cliff, he ran toward Anahera’s seated form. She didn’t get up, just waited for him to come, a silent sentinel with dark hair knotted by the wind and eyes struck by grief. “She shouldn’t be dead,” were her first words to him. “No one as alive as Miriama was should be dead.”

Crashing down onto his knees beside her, he took her into his arms. She resisted, stiff and unbending, but he didn’t let go, and at last, she allowed herself to wrap her own arms around him and hold on tight. There were no tears, but he hadn’t expected any. Anahera was used to holding her pain within.

If and when she chose to share it, it would be on her terms.

When they separated, he did what he didn’t want to do: he went and looked at Miriama’s body. One glance and he knew that she’d been in the water a considerable time. Odds were, since the day she disappeared. The condition of the body eliminated the possibility she’d been thrown in recently with the hope she’d wash up close to when the skeleton was discovered. That didn’t mean the same person wasn’t responsible for both crimes.

One new. One old.

Taking out the slim but powerful digital camera he’d slipped into his pocket before Robert’s arrival, he began to snap. Anahera watched in unmoving quiet. It was only when they heard the sound of a police vehicle getting closer, the siren carrying on the air, that she got up. “I’ll show them the way down. Give me the camera’s memory card.”

He slipped it into her hand, replacing it with an empty one he had tucked into the case, then put the camera back in his jacket pocket. If anyone thought to ask if he’d taken photos, he’d hand over the camera.

But when his colleagues finally arrived, all of them ­ill-­prepared for the sand and the waves and the wind, Anahera wasn’t with them. And he was faced with a surprise. It appeared he was still in charge of Miriama’s case.

“I’ve been sent to assist you.” Short and solid, with a cap of fair hair and wearing a standard dark blue ­body-­armor vest over a light blue uniform shirt, Kim Turnbull was someone Will had worked with on a prior case. “Everybody wants in on the skeleton you found, what with it being all serial killer like, so the junior gets the drowning.” She seemed to realize what she’d implied a second after the words left her mouth.

Going bright red under the freckled paleness of her skin, she said, “Sorry, sir. I didn’t ­mean—­”

Will waved off the apology, too damn glad to be insulted. Being officially in charge of Miriama’s case gave him a far better chance of getting her justice. He wouldn’t have to rely on others to access the necessary reports and he could openly interview people of interest.

As for the skeleton so cruelly laid out on the edge of a dump, it had kept for a long time, and the men in charge of that victim weren’t ­incompetent—­though they’d be handicapped by their lack of knowledge about this town and its secrets. Oh, people would talk to Robert and the others, but whether they’d tell them anything useful was another question.

Once Will had put Miriama’s ghost to rest, he’d find a way to do the same for that lost woman’s ghost. Because he had not a single doubt that it was a woman’s skeleton Shane had found. The way it had been displayed, the way it had been discarded, that was a thing too many men had done to too many women across time.

Waving across the new forensic team, he was startled to see Dr. Ankita Roshan with them. “I expected Robert to keep you captive!” he yelled out to the forensic pathologist over the rising wind.

“Told him I can’t do much with bones!”

Today collided with yesterday. Because Ankita had called in a forensic anthropologist in the aftermath of the fire, too. The smallest person in the house, the smallest body, hadn’t survived with enough flesh on his bones for a viable autopsy.

In the now, the painfully thin ­forty-­something pathologist shook his hand. “Let’s get to the remains before the skies open up.”

There wasn’t anything she could tell him that he hadn’t already guessed. “You’ll have to wait for the autopsy for more,” she said.