I see Alice squirm on the other side of the bars. Her little arms reach through them for my body. A little octopus. I lie back down and let her wrap them around me.

I feel it.

The truth.

The fight is coming.

Chapter Thirty

Day sixteen

The day turned to night in a heartbeat, it seemed.

She and Reyes arrived at Laguna just after noon.

They got something to eat in the hotel dining room. Nic could barely get anything down.

She texted with her father to avoid having to hear his voice. She didn’t want him to know what she’d found out, about the affair and the credit card charge in West Cornwall that day. She texted him what she knew about Kurt Kent and Edith Moore. He texted back that his PI was looking into the connection. Reyes called Mrs. Urbansky at the station, asking her to find out about the utility bills at the property on Abel Hill Lane. He asked where Chief Watkins was, said he needed to speak with him.

Then came talk of Nic going home, but she refused.

Then stay here.

Reyes insisted. He didn’t want her near Booth after the incident in his apartment, or across the street from the bar and Kurt Kent who could very well have read her expression when she saw that picture on her phone of him with Edith Moore.

It’s safer here.

He checked her into a room, then went back to Hastings to gather her things from the inn. She gave him her key—the one with the giant wooden ring. He returned a few hours later and they went to the bar.

Watkins is nowhere, Reyes reported. Not at the station or at home.

Mrs. Urbansky said he was taking a personal day. He hadn’t answered his cell, and Reyes didn’t want to alarm him by having Mrs. Urbansky track him down on the police radio. Confronting the chief would have to wait until tomorrow.

But he did have news—and a document. A title copied from the land records at town hall for a property on Abel Hill Lane.

It is a corporation—a group of investors like Booth said, he explained. A holding company. They would have to search the records with the secretary of state to get the names of the investors. Reyes said he hadn’t lived here back then, but remembered there was talk of turning the buildings into a mental facility for criminals. Again—just like Booth had said. It never happened—but that explained the fence with the barbed wire. He said the same corporation also owned the Gas n’ Go.

There was nothing online. The corporation was no longer active. But that made sense—Booth had told her the investors probably only held on to the property for tax reasons.