Mia didn’t have an answer yet, though she knew Izzy was getting restless. Maybe they were thinking too much like the cold-case detectives they were, making things complicated where they didn’t need to be. Maybe their leaps of logic were unsupported by the circumstances. Maybe they needed to step back. Like Izzy said, it looked like suicide, and it probably was suicide.

For now, though, their hands were tied. They hadn’t even seen the body yet, let alone gotten a feel for any of the rest of the evidence. Until they got a better handle on it all, there was little else to debate. Murder or suicide? It was too early to make the call.

Izzy knew it, too, Mia knew, because this was where the conversation ended. She pivoted, as she had every time they’d reached the impasse before. “So what’s the game plan, boss?”

It was something else they’d gone over a dozen times, but Mia didn’t mind. She wondered if it was a particular tic with Izzy, or if the woman was trying to find her footing, feeling a bit untethered by the general lack of information in the case.

“We’ll talk to the seaplane pilot,” Mia said. “This ferry only runs once a month, so the reporter probably had plans to get off the island somehow. Or he was booked to be on this one, and we’ll be able to get the records for that.”

“If his departure was planned for anytime soon, maybe the killer was trying to stop him from leaving St. Lucy’s?” Izzy easily followed Mia’s train of thought.

“We’ll also want to check out the cabin he was renting. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to access his computer or notes.”

If Twist’s death had been a homicide, his notes could at least give them a place to start for a motive.

Mia bit her lip. Knowing why Twist had come to the island, what sore spots he’d been poking, would have been helpful. Going in blind was unsettling, another handicap when they would already have enough trouble getting anyone on St. Lucy’s to talk to them.

People on the island didn’t like outlanders, didn’t trust them, especially not someone who was snooping around and getting in their business.

Give or take a birth or a death, there were about only two hundred people who lived on St. Lucy’s year-round, so the community was a tight one.

In the summer, there was an influx of artists who came and took up space and were barely tolerated despite the money they poured into the town before they left at the first signs of fall. But spending a few warm months on the island didn’t make you one of them.

Mia wasn’t sure growing up there for sixteen years would hold much water anymore, either.