Page 66 of Fire Harbor

Things were looking up. But Smuggler’s Bay was still a mess. People were still recovering from their injuries. Callum Riggs had yet to be caught. And there was still a serial killer out there somewhere.

Because the town was on edge, Brent Cody let the FBI and ATF handle the marina explosions while his team focused on catching Riggs. It made sense, especially since he believed that Riggs had detonated devices that set off the fires allowing him to kidnap Alice. The three agencies were essentially looking for the same man but with increased manpower.

During the hunt, rumors spread like wildfire. As law enforcement combed through leads, Brent’s team followed up on tips from concerned citizens. One claimed Riggs had been spotted near the lighthouse on the cliff overlooking town, but that turned out to be a false alarm.

Brent knew only one thing: Riggs had not returned to his home in Los Gatos, a mere fifty-minute drive from Pelican Pointe. The FBI had staked out that location for days, but there had been no sign of him coming home. As long as he remained free, the town would continue to feel threatened.

But thanks to information from Lake and Linus, Brent learned that Callum Riggs had served in the Army as a munition specialist, a man more than capable of building his own explosive devices.

As people tried to go about their business as usual, whispers circulated about the killer’s next move. The speculation made for sleepless nights. Trying to piece together clues became a twenty-four-seven effort. And Brent knew things wouldn’t get back to normal until they’d captured Callum Riggs.

Since Alice’s abduction, Brent had felt the weight of responsibility on his shoulders. Even as he led his team through the labyrinth of clues and dead ends, each false lead felt like a step backward, a taunt from the elusive fugitive.

He spent his evenings gathered around a cluttered conference table strewn with case files that belonged to the Sheriff’s Department but had been shared out of necessity, gruesome crime scene photographs of the remains found under the bridge, and takeaway cartons from lunch and dinner. As each new piece of information became known, he would tack it to the whiteboard behind him. But nothing new had come to light for almost forty-eight hours. Not even from the posters they had put up around town. It was beginning to look like Callum Riggs had vanished into thin air.

On Saturday night, after his shift ended at nine, Linus met Lake at the pier for a long walk around the harbor. The crumpled boats from the explosion had been lifted out of the water and carted off to a junkyard on the other side of town, and the bay looked less blackened by the fire. Yet, a smoky odor from burned metal and wood remained in the air.

“It’s been a crazy week,” Linus noted as he plopped down on one of the benches. “Not that it matters under the circumstances, but Eastlyn postponed the cookout for a later date.”

“With everything going on, that’s probably a good idea.”

“I tried to get away sooner so we could at least watch the sunset together. But it’s been a three-hour marathon of overtime since six o’clock. Everybody seems to think they’re having a heart attack when it’s nothing more than a bad case of indigestion.”

“That’s gotta be a good thing, right? Indigestion versus heart attack,” Lake quipped as she joined him on the bench, handing him the cup of coffee she’d brought. Looking across the bay at the sun sinking below the horizon, she grinned. “It’s a comforting thing that you know the difference between a heart attack and heartburn.”

He cut his eyes back to her. “I’d be a sorry excuse for a paramedic if I didn’t. Thanks for the coffee. I didn’t even get time to eat.”

She reached into a paper sack and brought out a cheeseburger and fries from the diner. “Will this do? Max made it special before he closed the kitchen.”

“You read my mind,” Linus said, reaching for the bag. He began to munch on the fries before ripping the wrapper off the burger. “Thanks.”

“No problem.”

While he ate, she rested her head on his shoulder. “This whole thing with Alice hit too close to home. Everyone’s scared half to death. That’s all anyone talked about today. No wonder people are complaining about chest pains.”

In between bites of food, he pointed out, “The ER was backed up most of the day with panic attacks. As a certified physician’s assistant, I saw most of the overload. I’ve never seen this kind of fear or anxiety—call it what you want—but people are afraid this guy will come back for someone else.”

After taking the last bite of his burger, he crunched up the wrapper and tossed it into a nearby trash can. He pulled out a worn notebook from his backpack and began flipping through pages. “In between patients, I jotted down everything I knew about the victims from 2014 to Gabby. Theo happened to be one of the patients I treated. I can’t tell you why he came in, but we started talking about Gabby’s case. Theo told me that on the night she went missing, Gabby sent a Snapchat photo to one of her friends. The subject of the photo was the bridge with a black SUV clearly visible in the background.”

“Wow, that’s huge. Can you make out the make and model?”

“Unfortunately, you can’t. All you can see is that it’s a black SUV type vehicle.”

“Hmmm. Does that mean Gabby got out of the car to take the picture?”

“That’s what would make sense to me. If she did get out of her car, the guy in the black SUV would have been lurking around the bridge. He must’ve killed her right there on the bridge, then dragged her to the beach where I discovered her skull.”

“Which means he didn’t necessarily need to pretend to be a cop. He just needed to persuade them to get out of the car for some reason. Maybe he pretended to have car trouble or something.”

Linus looked up and noticed an elderly man walking by and then stopping in front of them. He nodded at the fisherman he knew as Genzo Tanaka, who had been fishing these waters and mooring his boat in Smuggler’s Bay for more than forty years. He saw that Mr. Tanaka carried one of the posters about Riggs in his hand. “How’s it going, Mr. Tanaka?”

Genzo waved the paper toward Linus. “I was out at sea when the fire destroyed my harbor,” he rasped, his voice weathered from a lifetime spent battling the rough seas. “I seen ’im,” the old man added. “I seen Riggs, the guy that took that girl. He did this to my harbor, did he not? He kidnapped that young girl. I seen ’im headin’ out towards Crab Shack Cove.”

Linus sat up straighter. “When was that, Mr. Tanaka?”

“Maybe an hour back, staying on one of those fancy yachts, two million at least. He’s a bad man, that one. You catch ’im. I’ll help you.”

“What was the name on the boat?” Linus asked. “What type of vessel was it?”

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