By the time she dropped onto the bed, she was too tired to even strip the comforter off, even though she, like everyone else in America, had watched those stupid exposés that used blue lights to show all the fluids that saturated the fabric. Her body ached, and her shoulder throbbed, no longer bleeding but bruised, and she knew if she tried to close her eyes, sleep would evade her anyway. She spared a thought to Mia’s insomnia and wondered how the woman was still functioning. This buzzing beneath her skull was brutal in its subtlety and persistence.

Her email notification dinged on her phone, and it was only then that she remembered she still had an unread message about Peter, the artist.

She patted the bed blindly until she found her cell, and dismissed the junk message that had set it chiming in the first place. There beneath it was the one from the uniforms who had looked into Peter’s identity. Another possible missing piece in their puzzle.

Izzy clicked on it and blinked hard to get her eyes to focus as the screen loaded.

While she skimmed the email, the fingers on her free hand tapped out a staccato against her jean-clad thigh, more an expulsion of energy than a nervous tic.

Peter Hughes. An amateur artist out of a small town north of Portland, he was a bartender by night and worked at a grocery store during the day. He also hadn’t returned to either position after he’d quit for the Bell residency.

That might not be odd. That’s how artists were, right? Whimsical, untethered to reality and things like addresses.

There were a few other small tidbits but nothing earth-shattering. At the bottom of the message, the uniform had attached a profile of Peter that had run in what looked like a tiny artist magazine, if she had to guess by its name alone.

Her phone lagged under the weight of the motel’s shitty Wi-Fi, and her eyes blurred, at the point of exhaustion from the long day, the long drive, the long pause of nothing but white screen.

Then the article loaded, fuzzy at first before sharpening with the internet’s final push. When the picture at the top came into focus, Izzy sat up fast so that the rush of it caused black spots to pop in her eyes.

Jesus.

Izzy checked the caption three times just to be safe and then thumbed over to her call list. Mia’s phone sent her straight to voice mail four times in a row. The storm. The goddamn storm.

She dropped the cell to the bed, bringing up the screen with the profile, her fingertip pressing against Peter Hughes’s face.

It was the same one she’d seen just days ago after he’d been pulled from the bay.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

MIA