White male, forty to fifty. Nondescript. Dark hair, dark eyes, medium build, medium height. Well-groomed, with a day or two worth of beard growth. Straight, even teeth. Recent haircut. Expensive watch. No wallet, no phone, no keys found around the body.
Morgan’s words came back to him.A squatter looks like a squatter.
This was no squatter.
The question was, what was he?
15
DEEPTRACE
MORGAN
Morgan wokeup thinking about Patrick Callaghan, which was inconvenient but not surprising. She’d done the same thing the day before as well.
She lay there for a moment in the grey pre-dawn quiet, Shadow a warm weight against her side, and did what she always did with inconvenient thoughts. Noted them, then filed them away.
The trouble was, that file wouldn’t stay closed.
Her visit to the pub had been a nice change of pace. The place was warm and welcoming, the embodiment of small-town family and community at its finest. Riley—Patrick’s cousin—was a hoot, and Morgan’s conversation with Jack Callaghan had given her a new perspective on her grandfather. The level of mutual respect between those two was exceptionally high.
And, she admitted, the time spent at IHOP with Patrick had been useful. He had local knowledge, good investigative instincts, and access to local resources she didn't. Discussing the case had moved things forward in ways she couldn't have managed alone. That was the value of a collaboration.
The fact that she'd stayed two hours longer than necessary just talking was irrelevant. As was the fact that she had to keep talking herself out of finding excuses to go back into town.
Knowing that more sleep was out of the question, she left the warmth of the bed and prepared for the day. To do what, she hadn’t quite worked out yet.
The thing about Patrick Callaghan,she thought, standing at the counter waiting for the percolator, was that he was exactly the kind of man she had to be careful around. He was charming in a way that made a woman—even one as sensible as her—forget to be careful. The kind of man who made a woman feel like the most interesting person in the room with appalling ease.
She'd met men like that before. Smooth talkers. Manipulators. Men who were accustomed to getting what they wanted with a smile and pretty words.
The difference with Patrick was that he seemed so genuine. The charm was innate, not contrived. He actually listened rather than waiting for his turn to speak.
In that, he was something of a unicorn—at least in her limited experience.
Still. There was no sense in romanticizing it. She was here for a few weeks, and their time together had a purpose—namely, unraveling the mystery of the corpse at the campground.Whatever she felt or didn’t feel outside of that didn’t matter, regardless of his blue eyes or his slightly crooked smile or his ability to make her laugh about rogue possums in the middle of the night.
She poured her coffee and opened her laptop and logged in to the forum.
The thread had been active overnight.
Her excitement grew as she read through the most recent posts carefully, starting from where she'd left off. DeepTrace had posted a detailed breakdown of the victim's physical presentation—well-groomed, recent haircut, expensive watch, hands consistent with desk work. The post was structured and precise, the kind of contribution that moved a thread forward rather than adding noise, which was one of the things she liked best about DeepTrace’s contributions. He was a regular Sherlock Holmes—methodical, logical, precise?—
Her mind snapped back to Patrick—again. She’d calledhimSherlock, hadn’t she?
She reread DeepTrace’s post. Every one of those new pieces of information had been questions she’d shared with Patrick, right before asking him if he had a source at the police department. What had he said? Oh, right—I know a guy.And now here was that detailed information—information not in any public report, requiring inside access—posted to a private online sleuthing forum by someone with a handle she'd been reading for two years.
She sat back and considered that for a moment.
Then she kept reading.
The rest of the group was running with the victim details. The watch had been traced—a specific Swiss brand, limited East Coast distribution, the kind of timepiece that appeared in documented photographs of individuals connected to organized crime in the northeastern United States. Several members were now pulling that thread hard.
Morgan closed the laptop.
She sat at Frank's kitchen table and thought about how she didn’t believe in coincidences.
Her phone buzzed with an incoming text.