“Does everyone have three or four jobs around here?” So much about this place was foreign to Izzy. Living in Maine, after spending her entire twenty-seven years of life in Dallas, was already a struggle. Everything was harsher—the weather, the accents, the people. They didn’t draw out their vowels, and they didn’t chat at cash registers, and they didn’t know what to do with a six-foot-tall girl with brown skin and a sleeve of tattoos.

She’d be forever grateful to Gina Murdoch for giving her a chance with the job. Izzy had been in a rut at her old station, having stomped on the wrong toes her first week out of training and paying for the misstep for years to follow with shitty shifts and bottom-of-the-barrel partners. When Gina, her father’s old friend, told her about a position she had open on her cold-case team—a rarity in this era of budget cuts and speeding tickets—Izzy hadn’t thought twice.

It just would have been nice if the job had been somewhere that didn’t feel like a different country.

The doc shrugged off her question. “When you have fewer than two hundred people on an island, you have to wear a few hats to make everything work.”

“Did Jimmy say how Twist reacted when he was caught at the lighthouse?” Mia asked. There was an intensity to Mia that seemed out of step with the rest of the mood of the interview. The lighthouse. She had started getting weird once the lighthouse was mentioned.

“Nope, just that Jimmy had to chase him off the property.” Sammy turned around and grabbed a box of latex gloves, then held them out to both of them.

They all took pairs. Izzy always hated the smell of them and the way they never fit her fingers quite right.

“All right, well, here we go.” Sammy bumped Izzy out of the way with his hip. “Robert Twist, TOD sometime between about nine p.m. on Sunday, January sixth and Tuesday, January eighth.”

“Why that range?” Izzy interrupted.

“He left the bar at that time on Sunday, which was the last anyone can distinctly remember seeing him,” the doc said, in professional mode now. “And there are signs he was in the water for about a week. It could push the time of death to Wednesday, but I’d focus on that tighter window.”

“Could he have been held outside for a while and then dumped?” Mia asked. “Would that change anything? Slow down the rate of decomp?”

“That’s a little beyond my pay grade.” Sammy shrugged. “Could be. That kind of thing might need someone from the mainland.”

If this turned out to be a homicide, they’d bring in a professional. But for now . . .

“Best guess?” Izzy pressed.

Sammy’s hand hovered near the back of Twist’s head before dropping to his side.