“What? I saw the body.” Granted, Carter had been phoning it in lately, but he’d notice a freaking gunshot wound. Or would he? How much attention had he really paid? Even though something about the case had bothered him that morning, he’d done nothing to follow up on his instincts. Instead, he had passed on a flyer from Lindsay Kelly to a few high school students and tried to tell himself he’d done his job for the day.

“Don’t blame yourself. He’s got very thick hair, and it was plastered to his scalp with water. It’s one shot at the base of his skull. Twenty-two caliber. Didn’t go through and through, so no damage to his face or the rest of his skull. It wasn’t until I really started examining him closely that I saw it. He’s got two small gashes above his left temple as well, but they were also covered by his hair.”

“Do you have a sense of when he was killed?”

“The water makes it tricky. Submersion slows decomposition, and that varies with temperature, and as you know, our water temperatures vary greatly depending on location and depth. My guess is he was in the water about a week, but there’s a big margin for error.”

Carter turned up the volume on the baseball game after the call, but his mind remained elsewhere. He should have listened to his gut that morning, but he’d convinced himself that the odds of a murder in the Hamptons were far lower than the odds of a drowning.

Why? he thought. Why had the case bothered him as he was leaving Star Island? The reason he was the detective assigned to the callout: he had been the one to take a missing person report from Lopez’s girlfriend. He had a sudden image of Lindsay Kelly standing in front of his house three mornings before. He’d told her why he had to leave.

Are you actually going to look for that poor person? she had asked. Unlike you did with Hope? She saw through his superficial charm and had no reluctance to call him out. It was why he had driven to the beach today to help out with her missing person flyers. He used to be a good cop—the one who believed his father when he said a man who lies is a man who has no bottom. But then Carter saw three fellow cops “teach a lesson” to a suspect who “made us chase him,” and had committed the cultural crime of telling the truth during the investigation that ensued. The knuckleheads who had abused the power of their badges paid not a single penalty thanks to the police union that defended them, but it quickly became clear that Carter had reached the end of the road when it came to the department.