Cass held his gaze for three long seconds, acutely aware of Deputy Harris lingering near the patrol cruiser with an evidence clipboard. The wind off the Blackwood cut sharp, carrying the scent of river mud, sulfur, and diesel fumes from Wes's truck.
"Get your boat in the water, Wes," Cass said, keeping her voice flat and strictly professional. "We need the grate dragged before the current shifts the silt. But don't leave town when you're done. I'll be at the yard by noon."
A flicker of something complex—half relief, half challenge—passed over Wes's face. "I'm not going anywhere, Cass. Never did, remember?"
The barb hit harder than she wanted to admit. When she had packed her bags at nineteen, swearing she’d never look back at Millhaven’s dying smokestacks, Wes had stood on the front porch of his father’s shop with his hands in his pockets, refusing to ask her to stay. Seeing him now, shoulders broad against the gray sky and eyes full of unspoken years, she felt the old friction spark beneath her ribs like dry tinder.
She turned back to the crime scene, forcing herself to focus on the cold reality of Arthur Vance. While the county coroner’s van backed down the muddy access road, Cass knelt again by the body. She bagged the scrap of braided nylon rope. The weave was three-strand twisted polyethylene core with a high-tenacity polyester jacket, rated for salt and brackish river moorings. She noted the crimp marks on the brass clip—crushed with a heavy mechanical swaging tool, the kind found in industrial boatyards and rigging shops.
Like Calloway Marine.
By eleven-thirty, the morgue transport had cleared out, and the riverbank fell back into eerie silence. Cass drove her unmarked sedan two miles downstream, where the river widened into the marshy shallows of the south channel. The wooden sign for *Calloway Marine & Boat Repair* hung crooked over the gravel drive, faded by sun and road salt.
The yard smelled of cured fiberglass, motor oil, and damp cedar. Inside the main corrugated steel shed, a 22-foot center-console sat up on dry docks. Beneath the hull, Wes was working a ratchet against an engine mount, his knuckles smeared with grease.
Cass let the heavy screen door slap shut behind her. The sharp sound echoed off the metal rafters. Wes didn’t flinch, but his ratchet paused mid-stroke before he slid out on a creeper dolly, wiping his hands on an oily rag.
"On the dot," he said, sitting up. He wore a dark navy henley with the sleeves pushed up to his forearms, revealing the faded ink of a compass rose on his right wrist—a tattoo he had gotten the week before she left for the police academy. "Coffee's cold in the office, but there's fresh water in the cooler."
"I'm not here for coffee, Wes."
"Right. The badge." He tossed the rag aside and stood, towering over her in the narrow corridor between the hull and the workbench. Close up, he carried the familiar scent of cedar shavings, tobacco, and clean sweat. It was disorienting how easily her body recognized him, how the five-foot space between them felt charged with fifteen years of unresolved silence.
Cass pulled the bagged rope fragment from her coat pocket and held it up between them. "Recognize this?"
Wes squinted at the blue-and-gold braid and the brass thimble. His posture stiffened almost imperceptibly. "Quarter-inch braided dock line. Solid core. I use it for anchor rodes on skiffs."
"And the brass sleeve?"
"Swaged with a bench crimper," Wes answered, his voice dropping into a careful rhythm. "Anyone with a heavy bench press can do that, Cass. Half the fishermen between here and Port Haven use the same rig."
"Vance had it caught in his zipper. And the coroner found blunt-force trauma on his temporal bone consistent with an iron mooring pin." Cass stepped closer, her eyes locked on his. "You told me you were here all night working on an inboard. What time did you finish?"
Wes leaned his hip against the workbench, crossing his arms over his chest. "Around one. Grabbed a sandwich at the diner down on Route 9, came back, slept on the cot in the office until Harris called at dawn."
"The diner on Route 9 closes at eleven on weeknights, Wes," Cass said softly, the words dropping between them like lead weights. "Has for three years."
A heavy silence descended on the shed, broken only by the distant hum of traffic on the bridge above. Wes looked down at his boots, a muscle working in his cheek. When he looked back up, the defensive sneer was gone, replaced by a raw vulnerability that caught her completely off guard.
"I wasn't at the diner," he admitted, his voice barely above a whisper.
"Where were you?"
"Out on the water. Taking my runabout up toward the old canal spit." He took a step toward her, his expression earnest, pleading in a way she hadn't seen since they were kids. "I couldn't sleep, Cass. I saw Vance’s rental car parked outside the Blackwood Motor Lodge yesterday afternoon. Seeing him back here... it made my blood boil. Knowing what he did to my old man, to this whole town. I took the boat out to clear my head. I didn't touch him, Cass. I swear on my father's grave, I didn't kill him."
"Did you go to the lodge? Did you talk to him?"
"No," Wes said, but his eyes darted away for a fraction of a second toward the dark corner of the workshop, where a rack of brass rigging hardware gleamed under a hanging bulb. "I stayed on the river. Between one and three in the morning, I was idling in the dark off the old loading docks."
Right where Arthur Vance’s body had entered the water.
Cass felt a cold knot tighten in the pit of her stomach. She knew Wes. She knew the fierce loyalty and the stubborn rage that ran through the Calloway blood. But she also remembered the warmth of his hands, the steady decency of the boy who had once pulled her out of the frozen river when they were teenagers.
He was hiding something about that two-hour gap. But whether he was hiding his own murderous revenge, or protecting someone else while being set up as the town's most obvious scapegoat, hung in the balance of what she chose to believe.