When they’d been younger, he’d been the kind of kid who didn’t have close friends but was welcome into any group when he showed up. Partially because he’d always been generous with his joints, sloppy and questionable though they were. Mia hadn’t indulged, but sometimes Asher and Cash had, as they spread out on the rocks by the lighthouse, watching stars, their normally clipped cadence turning to molasses as they laughed at nothing.

Sammy’s lips twitched beneath her appraisal, and then he was moving on like he always had, never really standing still long enough to be known.

“Back here,” Sammy said with a nod toward the hallway. “Welcome to my jack-of-all-trades office.”

She fell in behind him, with Izzy trailing. “Do you live here, too?”

“Nah, I took the floor-through apartment above the diner.” He pointed toward the wall of the house that was in the direction they’d just come. “Frankly, I don’t get a lot of dead bodies in here, but when I do, I don’t quite fancy spending more time with them than necessary.”

“Hasn’t been a murder on St. Lucy’s in how long?” Mia asked. Murder wasn’t the only way dead bodies turned up on the medical examiner’s table, but they both decided to ignore that particular elephant in the room. She couldn’t stop her thumb from rubbing over her scar, though.

“Sixty years,” Sammy said. “I think it was a domestic. Wife shot the husband after she found another woman in the bed.”

“A bit cliché,” Izzy called out from behind them.

Sammy glanced back, his eyes hooded. “You need your murders to be original, then?” In a different tone, the words might have been a joke. But it was clear he wasn’t teasing her.

Mia pressed her lips together, knowing she should have warned Izzy this was how it would be. They’d twist anything Izzy said to find fault with it just because she was an outsider.

Izzy’s footsteps faltered behind Mia, but there was nothing much to say to that. The uncomfortable silence stretched until they got to what was clearly the makeshift morgue.

The sterile equipment, metal examination table, and two side-by-side cold chambers to house bodies were all incongruous with the cozy, floral-printed wallpaper and the lace curtains on the window. For some reason, the contrast of it all fit the Sammy she remembered.

“My predecessor had these custom built a while ago,” Sammy said as he gripped one of the thick handles of the cold chambers and pulled. Mia got a quick glimpse of brown hair before the whole tray slid out.

Robert Twist.

Mia tried to cover her rough inhale, but Sammy’s eyes were immediately on her face. “Not a pretty sight, huh? Think he was in the water for a few days.”

The words slipped out, unchecked. “It’s not that.”

Izzy shifted beside her. “What’s up?”