Andrew was all smiles as he extended a hand. “Still working on the old hulk, I see.”
Roger grinned as he pumped Andrew’s hand. “She’ll be ready for canvas soon. With any luck, I’ll have her in the water before the docks come out.” His chest puffed proudly as he hiked a thumb over his shoulder. “I even got around to naming her.”
It was a smallish boat, not more than thirty feet, with a single mast and a faded blue hull. Lizzy squinted to make out the letters stenciled across the stern. SLEUTH JOHN B. It was a play on the old Beach Boys song, and fitting given his profession, though it was hard to imagine a man of Coleman’s considerable height folding himself into what would have to be a very tiny cabin.
Lizzy brought her eyes back to Coleman. She dipped her head when Andrew introduced her, unable to muster a smile as she extended her hand. She caught a whiff of polished shoes and freshly ironed cotton, which fit perfectly with a by-the-book detective. But there was something else, a faint trace of wet leaves, that felt at odds with the rest. It was a dark, slick smell, one she’d always associated with grief or sadness, but when she forced herself to meet his gaze, she saw nothing that hinted at either. Perhaps her radar was off.
“Thank you for agreeing to see me, Detective.”
Coleman studied her with eyes that were neither silver nor green, but somewhere in between. Lizzy remembered those eyes: sharp and unsettlingly steady, in no hurry to move on until they’d taken full measure. “Roger,” he corrected evenly. “It’s just Roger.”
He invited them inside and poured them each a glass of iced tea, then gave Lizzy a quick tour, pointing out the renovations Andrew had completed two years ago. The wall he’d knocked down between the living room and kitchen, the pass-through window out onto the porch, the bank of skylights in the living room.
When the pleasantries were complete, they wandered out onto the deck. Behind the house, the bay stretched lazily in the afternoon sun, silvery and still at nearly high tide. Lizzy lifted her face, grateful for the breeze coming in off the water.
“So,” Roger said when they had all settled into chairs. “Andrew tells me you’re on a mission.”
Lizzy glanced at Andrew, who was swirling the ice in his glass and gazing out over the water. He had set up the meeting and agreed to accompany her, but it was her show now.
“Yes, I suppose that’s what you’d call it.” She paused, not sure how to begin. “My grandmother didn’t hurt those girls,” she said finally. “But someone did, and if there’s a way to find out who it was, I want to try.”
He studied her again with those gray-green eyes. “You realize the odds of turning up anything new are slim—that all you’re likely to do is remind everyone what they thought, and why they thought it?”
“I do.”
“And you still want to do this?”
“I do.”
“Even if you learn something you don’t want to know?”
She knew what he was asking. In his mind, there was a chance that in her search for truth, she might actually uncover evidence that implicated Althea rather than exonerating her. But he didn’t know what she did—that Althea was incapable of harming anyone, let alone a pair of young girls.
“I won’t.”
He nodded coolly, willing for now to accept her at her word. “Well then, what do you want to know?”
“Why did you leave the department?”
Roger blinked back at her, clearly surprised by the question. “Because it was time.”
It was evasive, a polite way of telling her it was none of her business. But if she was going to trust him, she needed to know his story, and understand what had prompted him to walk away from what had surely been the biggest case of his career. “So you retired?”
“Officially? No.” He squinted out over the water, where a red-and-white sailboat bobbed lazily at anchor. “I quit. Because I was no longer able to be effective.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means Chief Summers and I had different ideas about the department’s responsibility to the public. He wanted to make the Gilman case go away, and I wanted to keep digging until we solved it.”
Coleman’s matter-of-fact tone surprised her. “You don’t think he wanted to solve it?”
“In the beginning, maybe. When he was getting tons of press. Big man with his name in the paper, always available for an interview. Then the coverage turned ugly, and he slammed on the brakes. He started cutting man-hours, hamstringing us on resources, wouldn’t sign off on sending stuff to the state lab because it wasn’t in the budget. And the press was strictly off limits. All statements had to be cleared by him. It felt funny. He’d always been a bit of a tyrant, but this felt like something else.”
“What did it feel like?”
“Like there was something going on that the rest of us didn’t know about.”
“Did you confront him?”
“You don’t confront Randall Summers. But I did voice my concerns.”
“And what happened?”
He shrugged. “I bought a sailboat and went to work for my brother.”
“Ah . . . right.”
“Don’t get me wrong. I like the work I’m doing now. It’s useful. But law enforcement was in my blood. I know it sounds corny, like I’m some kind of Boy Scout or something, but it’s how I’ve always felt about the job. I think it’s how most of us feel. We’re proud of what we do. Because we believe we’re making a difference.” He paused, looking back
