Wade squeezed again. “Think about this, man. Just think for a second. We’re over twenty miles from shore and nobody’s going anywhere. Who would be stupid enough to do this? Nobody’s getting away. There’s nowhere to run, Alex. Nowhere.”
Alex jerked to the side, but Wade held on.
“Stop. I’m telling you there’s an easy answer. Has to be, okay?”
Alex patted Wade’s arm, signaling his surrender. Wade granted him the release and spun quickly away and up to his feet as Alex writhed on the floor, gasping for air, spittle flying out of his mouth. He rubbed his throat and said, “We can’t trust anybody. I can’t trust you.”
Wade dropped down beside Alex, out of arm’s reach, but close enough to quietly reason with him. “There aren’t that many options. Seriously, use your head. Maybe we call in the Coast Guard, maybe we don’t.”
“If I were you, I’d say the same thing just so people wouldn’t suspect me.”
“That probably makes sense, but honest to God, I didn’t do it.”
Alex crawled over to the bed and pulled himself up. Moving away, stepping back once, twice, putting some distance between them. “Prove it.”
“I barely slept a wink. I hate boats, man. I hate them—”
“Then why’d you come?”
“Jenn invited me and…and…damn it, honestly, I had to get away from Cheryl for the weekend. That’s it; that’s why I came.”
“Doesn’t prove anything.”
“That’s what I was trying to tell you. I’m terrified of boats, like full-blown phobia, so I’ve barely been holding it together this whole time. I couldn’t sleep at all last night and—”
“And what?”
“Okay, Jesus. Just don’t tell Jenn, okay? Not that it matters anymore, but I was up…I was up talking on the phone, talking to Linda.”
“Linda?”
“This woman I’ve been…seeing. I—damn, just don’t tell anybody, please? I don’t want it to get around. We talked until about four in the morning, that’s all I can tell you. The cops, the Coast Guard, whoever, they can check my phone records. They’ll talk to Linda and confirm it. And from the looks of it, it’ll match up against whatever her time of death was. Looks like she’s been dead a lot longer than that.”
“How can you tell?”
Wade, hands on his hips, looked up to the ceiling, and exhaled heavily. “Because I used to be a cop, ages ago. And I’m only telling you this so you’ll believe me. That’s something I wanted to walk away from, indefinitely. Mental health stuff, but not a word of it to anybody else, understood?”
Alex nodded, but hesitantly.
Pointing at Erica’s body, Wade said, “I got tired of seeing shit like that all the time. Worse things. Unimaginably worse things. This is a cupcake compared to some of the things I saw, and I just couldn’t handle it anymore. It was getting into my dreams—so depressing. I was clinically depressed. We had a shrink on staff who tried to talk me through it, you know, to give me some help, but nothing worked. Not drugs, not therapy. I put a gun to the side of my head and pulled the trigger, but it misfired. I’m telling you, that empty click sounded like a cannon going off. Talk about a wakeup call. I walked into the station and quit that day.”
“So just because you used to be a cop, I’m supposed to believe your story.”
“The evidence—evidence, Alex—it’ll prove it. And right now, I’m about the only friend you’ve got on this boat, and you need somebody on your side, because you’ve got a dead body on your yacht.”
“You’re blaming me?”
“Blame, no. Acknowledging responsibility, yeah.”
“I didn’t do it.”
“Maybe not, but you better believe that they’ll come looking at you, being your yacht and all.”
“Why? Tell me why. Would I be stupid enough to kill her on my yacht, in my own bedroom?”
“That’s what they’ll look at first. You were in here with her for a while last night, after you brought her down.”
“I was fixing her damn head, Wade.”
“We all went to bed. Remember? Did anybody see you leave?”
Alex clasped his hands, wringing them together. “No.” Jenn hadn’t waited on him like he’d asked, and they hadn’t had a chance to talk about what happened between her and Erica.
“Exactly. Your yacht, your bedroom, and nobody saw you leave. I have an alibi. You don’t. Where’d you sleep, huh? Where were you all night?”
“I went up to the cockpit to think, and about twenty minutes later I passed out. That’s where I woke up. So, no, nobody knew where I was, and nobody saw me go up there.”
“Which means you need a friend.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“There’s no guessing about it, man, and honestly, I have no reason whatsoever to believe a word you’re saying, but I will. I’ll trust you. For now. That leaves…one, two, three…Sharon, Laura. Seven. Seven people. Process of elimination. We start narrowing it down, and once we figure out who did it, we’ll keep an eye on them until we can get the authorities here to make sure they don’t hurt anyone else. Sound like a plan?”
“And how’re we supposed to figure that out?”
“We start with motive.” Wade crossed his arms, tilted his head to the side, avoiding eye contact on purpose. “I hate to say it, but you know where my mind’s going first.”
Alex understood immediately. “Don’t. No. She wouldn’t.”
“We have to. It’s the most logical place to start.”
“I don’t care. There’s no way. She couldn’t do something like that.”
“You saw her up on the table, saw what she did. We all saw it. What was that about, huh? I mean, damn, she practically growled before she threw Erica off there.”
“I don’t—no, just no. They’ve been friends for almost thirty years.”
“One second everything was fine, and then she got all crazy-eyed. I hate to say it, but Terri’s probably right—there was a lot of territorial anger there. It was brutal. You saw it.”
Alex looked at Erica’s dead body, the slit across her throat, and tried to see it happening in his mind—Jenn sneaking into the room, finding Erica face down on the bed, passed out. Jenn grabbing her by the hair, pulling her head back, sliding a sharp blade across the model’s petite neck. Could Jenn do something like that? Was she capable? What if she’d found out about him and Erica? Was there any way she could’ve known?
Maybe—yeah, was that it? Maybe Jenn had come in to check on her friend, to apologize, and Erica had admitted to cheating. She’d wanted to tell Jenn for some time.
Still, no matter how much it made sense, he couldn’t see Jenn reacting with such violence. She was calm, quiet, and kind. A bit of a prude, as far as he was concerned, and slightly manipulative—he was completely aware that she’d been stringing him along for the last year, using him for trips, gifts, and expensive dinners. He hadn’t minded, not at all.
And then Erica happened. It was passionate, dirty, lustful sex, but that was it, and only because he couldn’t get it from Jenn. His heart was in one place, his hormones in another.
He’d never seen anything from Jenn like he had the night before. That one single instance of pure, raw, outrageous jealousy had seemed totally out of character and far from the woman he’d been chasing since he met her at a bar down in Key West.
No, it’d been a different person up there on the table, different, but the same.
But not different enough to murder her best friend.
And yet…
“Jenn,” he said, in little more than a whisper. “I don’t see how. I can’t. I can’t see it.”
“What happened last night? Those two are closer than sisters. Why would she do that?”
“The reason’s dead.”
“What?”
“Erica.”
The realization spread across Wade’s face with wide eyes and an O-shaped mouth. “Ooooh. You and Erica? But I thought—how long?”