She fights back. With everything she’s got. Deep down, at the animal instinct level, she knows: this person means to do her harm.

But the stranger’s hands, they’re too powerful, and she’s had too much to drink. They pull on her wrists and she’s brought down to her knees, then tumbles down onto the sand.

Still, she refuses to give up. Whatever those hands want with her, it can’t be good. She punches, she kicks, she scrambles up to her feet, and she thinks she’s just about to make it when…

She’s tackled, hard—her face smashing into the beach. She inhales to scream and sucks coarse sand down her throat.

Her attacker does not care. The hands, so incredibly powerful, drag her choking body down to the water’s edge. She tries to hold on. Struggles to undo the mistakes she thinks she’s made tonight. If she can only hold on a little longer…

But the tracks from her fingers, as they claw at the beach, will be erased by the tide the next morning.

Chapter 2

THE STINGRAYS

“Paige Ryerson’s body was never found,” Matthew Quinn says, continuing his tale as he sprays the inside of a Teflon pan with coconut oil.

The five of them, as usual, gather in the oversized kitchen where Quinn is cooking breakfast. His $7,000-a-month Cambridge loft has plenty of other places where they can gather, but they prefer to talk about their cases over a hot meal. In this instance: the Sunday morning omelet station.

The other four take in the details of Quinn’s story as the pan heats up.

“That last bit is your theory, of course,” says Theo Selznick, who is standing at Quinn’s immediate right. The stocky, clean-cut man has known Quinn the longest, and he expects to be served first.

“My theory?” Quinn asks, as he cracks an egg over the side of a silver bowl.

“You know, the part about the hands grabbing her out of the darkness and all that. The last person to see her alive was the cop with the sweet lips, right? As far as we know, Paige Ryerson is still alive and well somewhere in paradise. Oh, and no cheese in mine, please.”

“It’s not an omelet without cheese,” Quinn says.

“You’ve known me since college,” Theo replies. “When have you ever known me to give a damn about the rules?”

Quinn cracks another egg. “Kate? How about you?”

Kate Weber, standing to Quinn’s left, has a stormy look on her thin face. “If she were my sister, I’d be rounding up the lifeguard, the rich kid, the captain, and the cop and work them over hard until I learned the truth. Maybe twice, just to be sure.”

“No,” Quinn says. “On your omelet, I mean.”

“Oh,” Kate says. “Just egg whites, please.”

“That’s also not an omelet, either,” Theo says. “You know, according to the rules.”

Quinn expertly cracks three eggs and separates the yolks from the white by using the two halves of the shell. His movements are fluid, relaxed—almost sleight-of-hand. He admires Kate’s Spartan tastes. She was the same way in the US Army, when they briefly served together. No muss, no fuss. Just get the job done.