After he spoke with Jocelyn Hodge that morning, he’d thought he felt the boom—that singular moment when a case suddenly bursts open and pieces of evidence explode into view. Then he got Lindsay Kelly to give up the fact that Hope had been the one to suggest the fishing trip and choose the guide company. He was on fire.

But now, back at the station, he was down to embers. He had snapshots of a story, but he was missing the context he needed to see the bigger picture.

Lopez had left behind no real electronic footprints. Jocelyn said he had zero interest in social media. He had both a Gmail account and an address linked to his business, but the messages there suggested nothing unusual. Carter knew from an East Hampton Star write-up in January that Lopez had moved to the East End to take over Reel Deal Fishing from Frank Garner. The piece described Lopez as a longtime friend of Garner and included a photograph of the two men to mark the passing of the torch.

But it was as if Garner were the one and only person who had known Alex Lopez before he appeared on Long Island. When Carter called the older man in Florida, he’d said the two met thirteen years earlier working on an Alaskan salmon boat. Garner had become something of a mentor. The two would go their separate ways off-season, but always link back up to work the same boats when it came time to make money again. Lopez apparently lived a nomadic life, sometimes staying put in Anchorage but often taking short-term rentals in other parts of the country. Like Lopez’s girlfriend, Jocelyn Hodge, Garner was under the impression that Lopez had grown up in Arizona; he had never mentioned Wichita, Kansas. “He talked a couple of times about a sister, though,” Garner added. “He told me he wished he could see her more, but I didn’t press as to why he couldn’t.”

To Carter, it didn’t sound like the kind of close friendship that would lead to handing over the keys to the man’s business, and he said as much. Garner’s response had been straightforward. “He was a lot like me. A loner. Quiet. But just a good, nice, trustworthy man. Rock solid. Hard to explain it better than that.”

Jocelyn Hodge had given a similar depiction, as if they were both innately able to recognize a person’s fundamental goodness. What neither of them could do, however, was offer Carter a bead on who the man actually was and why Hope Miller might have killed him.