The Edge

He drove her back to Jocelyn Point. She got out and then peered back into the Tahoe. “I’m sorry I wasn’t more help.”

“You might have been more help than you think,” he replied.

“Your meeting with my brother?”

“What about it? Changed your mind and want to join?”

“No. But, piece of advice? Don’t believe everything you’re told.”

She slowly walked to her art studio.

Chapter 19

Hoping to beat the incoming storm, Devine drove straight back to where Jenny’s body had been found and walked the area with a soldier’s eye for detail.

He stood at the spot where the shell casing had been found. The .300 Norma magnum round was mostly, but not exclusively, used by the military and its snipers. The casing had been next to a stand of bare trees, providing some good cover. He had noted all of that before. He drew a sight line between the ejected casing and the spot where Jenny had been standing before toppling over the edge after being shot.

Or so the story goes.

He lay prone on the ground and pantomimed taking aim at Jenny Silkwell.

He pulled the invisible trigger and counted three beats. The bullet would have hit her in the blink of an eye from this distance, but it would have taken a few beats for her to fall over the edge and hit the rocks below.

He stood and pulled out his phone. He’d had the medical examiner, Françoise Guillaume, email him the preliminary autopsy report. As he read it, the weather system coming in off the coast had raised the temperature enough to where the precipitation that started to fall was rain, and not sleet or snow.

He caught himself smiling. Alex Silkwell would get to teach her art class today.

He hustled back to the Tahoe and reached it before it really started to pour. He sat there staring at a crime scene that had definite shakiness to its outlines, and thus its substance.

He texted Campbell with his theories and waited for a reply.

He got it five minutes later, a testament to how such a busy man, with a dozen missions like Devine’s to oversee, was laser-focused on this one. But it was no doubt the only mission under his command that had to do with a man who had saved his life. As a former soldier Devine got that one really well. It forged a bond stronger than just about everything else in life.

Campbell’s advice was explicit:

Follow your gut and keep things close to the vest. Dak Silkwell’s military file is sealed. I cannot break through it as yet. And Curt never talked to me about his son’s military career, and why he left, and I never asked. Stay tuned. It is critical to find her government laptop and personal phone, Devine. Ulcers are forming in people’s guts here.

He knew that if someone had taken those devices, then Devine might be looking at a stranger having killed Jenny in order to get some intel from her. They had checked the secure cloud of her government-issued computer and personal phone and found nothing unusual, nor had there been any attempts to hack into them. And there had been no calls, emails, or texts that would foreshadow her being murdered. If she had communicated with anyone about her trip here, she had not done so electronically on her personal or government devices.

Being an ops officer, she knew the pitfalls of sending anything over the internet. But she could have used a burner phone or prepaid phone card and left no trail. She had no social media accounts at all, not unusual for someone with her occupation.

He sent a brief reply to Campbell, put the Tahoe in gear, and fought the wind and rain to his next destination.

Earl Palmer’s house.

Chapter 20

The rain started to ease some as Devine pulled onto the long gravel drive. In the daylight everything looked different as he wound back through a thick stand of bare woods with cluttered undergrowth. The long limbs swayed, dipped, and creaked in the stiff breeze that had never been absent since Devine had stepped foot in Putnam.

The little cottage appeared to him in the middle of the woods. Coupled with the inclement weather, the place had an ominous sensibility to it, like something out of a Brothers Grimm violent yarn masquerading as a fairy tale. In the light he could see that it was white clapboard with faded green shutters, just as the man who had confronted Devine outside the bar had said it would be. He eyed the ancient station wagon again. And the F150 looked even older. The truck bed was filled with old tools, long metal rods, what looked to be a small concrete mixer, rolls of fish netting and rope, and grimy buoys.

Next to the house, on a small rusty trailer, was a wooden dinghy with a name neatly stenciled on the side.