Authors: Linda J. White
As she hung up the phone, Kit wondered if her new boss was
naturally tough or if he had heard the rumors about her. She was not a loose cannon!
She didn’t care what her old supervisor said.
• • •
Kit drove to a vacation-property rental office in town. The
agent, Connie Jester, was Kit’s friend, Chincoteague born and bred, a
sixth-generation islander who knew every native, transient, and come-here who
had wandered over the high, arched bridge and ended up settling down. Her
position made her a pipeline for a rich storehouse of information.
Kit told Connie about the body on the beach. “Well,” the
redhead responded, “that makes sense. When I heard the FBI was involved, I knew
it had to be you. But aren’t you supposed to be on vacation?”
Kit shrugged. “I can’t just ignore a dead child.”
Momentarily, in her mind’s eye she saw faces, Honduran faces, Salvadoran faces,
faces from an adoption Web site. “Connie, what can you tell me about the local
Latino community?”
“Oh, they come in at times, big groups of them, going over to
the beach. Families, mostly, although there always seems to be a bunch of
unattached young men.”
“Where do they stay?”
“Most of ’em are day-trippers. When they do stay, they either
camp or pile people in a motel room.” Connie’s blue eyes flashed. “You know,
there’s a lot of migrant workers on the peninsula, picking tomatoes and melons,
green beans. Some of ’em stay on, working in the poultry processing plants or
picking crabs. A few try their hand at making a living on the water, but that’s
something few natives can do, much less newcomers.”
“Is it likely they’d go out on a charter boat?”
“Have you checked those prices lately?”
Kit bit her lip, buying time to think. In all the years she’d
been coming to Chincoteague, she’d never been out on a fishing boat, never seen
Assateague from the ocean. “Who’s the commander of the Coast Guard station
now?”
“Well, that would be Rick Sellers. Nice guy. From New York,
but a nice guy, anyway.”
Kit wrote his name down. “If a child disappeared, why
wouldn’t somebody report it?” she mused out loud.
“Running drugs,” Connie suggested. “Either that or illegal.
Nobody’s gonna raise a flag when they’re doing something wrong.”
That made sense. Kit heard the sound of the office’s door
opening.
“Here’s David O’Connor,” Connie said. “He’s a D.C. cop. Y’all
ought to get along just fine.”
Kit looked up. Coming in the door was the thirty-something
man from the beach.
The man grinned as their eyes met.
“David took your grandmother’s house for six whole months,”
Connie said. “That’s why I couldn’t give it to you.”
Six months, Kit thought? What was he doing on Chincoteague
for six months?
“It’s a great place,” he said.
Kit felt the color rising in her face. Her grandmother’s
house was now a rental property. She wished she had the money to buy it.
Connie smiled at him. “Kit here’s a Fed.”
“I met her this morning.” Amusement crinkled the corners of
his eyes.
“Why were you up on the beach so early?” Kit asked.
“You don’t surf, do you?”
She blinked, put off by the response.
“Low tide came at 8:16,” he explained. “That’s the best time
to surf. The waves break farther out, and they’re bigger. I drove over to the
island at six, hiked up a ways, surfed until low tide, hiked farther north,
surfed some more, and was walking back when I saw you.” He flashed another
smile. “FBI, right?”
How did he know?
“I could tell by the suit,” he joked.
Embarrassment sent blood rushing to her face. Kit struggled
to regroup. “Not too many cops get six months off. You must be a special case.”
She lifted her chin. “I’ll need your contact information.”
“I was surprised you didn’t ask for it before.” David
motioned to Connie who handed him a pen and he scrawled a phone number on the
back of one of her business cards, then gave it to Kit.
“I’ll be in touch.”
“I can’t wait.”
Connie cleared her throat. “What can I do for you, David?”
she asked brightly.
The two lapsed into a conversation about water heaters and
kayaking.
Kit left. His attitude grated on her like sand. She walked to
her car and sat for a moment, trying to shake off her annoyance. She had to
lose the emotion and prepare for the conversations she planned to have next.
She’d wanted to ask Connie about Brenda Ramsfeld, but she had allowed David
O’Connor to deflect her from her mission.
She was still sitting in the parking lot in her personal
vehicle, a green Subaru Forester, fiddling with her CD player, when David
O’Connor emerged from the rental office. She clicked off her music and watched
him as he opened the lift gate of his own SUV, a battered Jeep Cherokee with an
orange one-man kayak and a blue surfboard on a rack on the roof. She saw him
rummage through a gym bag, retrieve a dark blue golf shirt, and pull off the
T-shirt he’d been wearing. That’s when she saw the scar, an ugly round knot on
his left shoulder blade, still a deep, angry red.
She’d seen that kind of scar before. It was a bullet exit
wound.
End of Sample
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