“Tell me about it. Your belly must be jelly by now. I’m calling about that fishing guide who drowned this morning. Chris told me about it this afternoon. He said you were involved somehow. Does that mean it wasn’t a drowning?”

The Chris in question was a reputable journalist who was also part of the gym crowd. He was a national cable anchor, but always seemed to know every local development as well. An “anonymous police source” had confirmed that a body was pulled from the water near Star Island in a suspected drowning, but the department had not yet released the man’s name or the fact that he was a fishing guide.

“Nah. I took the initial report when he went missing. Must have taken a couple days for his body to wash up.”

“But it’s an accidental drowning? Nothing . . . fishy?”

“Harvey, would you believe you’re the very first person to have used that pun today?”

“Not at all. I was asking because one of my clients owns a dive shop out in Montauk. This is crazy, but he found a twenty-four-kilo kettlebell at the bottom of Fort Pond Bay yesterday. He assumed someone was goofing off on their boat and lost their grip. Anyway, he managed to get it out of the water and dropped it off at the gym today, thinking we could always use an extra bell. But then I hear a dude’s body floated to shore, so I want to make sure I don’t have some kind of murder weapon sitting on my gym floor right now.”

“I doubt it. Bodies sunk with fifty-pound weights tend to stay missing.”

“Maybe the tie came loose or something. All I know is I’m not touching that bell now. Gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

“Yeah, okay, set it aside. I’ll pick it up from you tomorrow, just in case.”

Carter had returned to his profile-scrolling when he found himself thinking about Alex Lopez again. Damn it. The nagging feeling Carter had about Alex Lopez as he left Star Island had long passed, but now Harvey’s phone call had him wondering again. He closed the dating app and pulled up the number for the Suffolk County Medical Examiner’s Office. He was soon connected to Dr. Loretta Mason, the deputy chief.

“Hi, Doc. I know you said the autopsy on Alex Lopez would probably be tomorrow, but I was calling to see if anything was out of the ordinary so far.”

“Well, first of all, thank you for not saying ‘something fishy.’ But perfect timing, because I was actually about to call you. This definitely wasn’t an accidental drowning.”

“I got a call about a weight found in Fort Pond Bay. Maybe—”

“It’s a GSW.”