Emily had no intention of returning to Quinn’s house, now or ever. She pocketed her phone, got out of the car, and walked to the water’s edge. Four days ago she’d pulled an auction bidder card from the weeds right here. Quinn had taken one look at the card and broken down in tears. Looking back, it seemed bizarre that Wally had last been seen at an auction and that bidder card had washed up right under Emily’s nose. Almost as if . . . she’d been meant to find it.

Auctions. They seemed to keep coming up. Wally had been attending one the day he was killed. According to Quinn’s first wedding announcement, she’d worked in an auction gallery. And hadn’t there been auction catalogues on Mr. Murphy’s desk?

Emily scrolled back through the pictures she’d taken the first time she and Becca had visited the Murphys’ house. There was Murph’s boat. His carved birds. And before that, his desk. Emily zoomed in. On top was a catalogue from Kalmus Fine Art.

Kalmus. That was the auction house where Quinn had once worked. Maybe Quinn knew the Murphys. Maybe she’d helped them sell ill-gotten maps and books. And maybe it was Quinn who’d been spotted by the observant security guard, making trips to the storage unit where they kept their treasures. That would make it a whole lot less surprising that Wally’s body had ended up in the Murphys’ storage unit, and it explained why Mrs. Murphy wasn’t about to reveal that she knew the dead man’s wife.

Emily looked past the parking lot and out across the water. The tide was low and the wind off the river was coming in gusts. Had this been yet another stage set? It was supposed to look as if Emily had followed Walter Newell here after he’d bumped into her at the Java Connection. She’d confronted him here. Run him down. Rolled him up in a rug she’d conveniently had with her. Stashed his body in the water for a while, then driven it across the river to Inner Peace Storage. With evidence the police had collected—paint from her car on Wally’s front fender and CCTV footage of her car at the storage facility in the middle of the night—they had to be a whisker away from charging her with murder or, at the very least, manslaughter.

And yet, they hadn’t.