Page 141 of Secrets Along the Shore

Fogerty is laid out on the ground beside the van, his arms bent across his chest, where blooms of bright red stain his orange jumpsuit. Raindrops splash in the blood pooling on the pavement, carried away by rivulets created by the downpour. He is unnaturally still.

Soaked through, my hair plastered to my head by the rain, I stand there, staring.

When Fogerty held my gaze in the courtroom, I thought his eyes were devoid of life. Thatnothingwas behind them. Now I think I was wrong.

I think what I saw…was the presence of evil.

Because looking into his eyes now, the difference is undeniable.

A chill flutters down my spine.

These eyes…these dead eyes…truly hold nothing, and that measure of eternal void is terrifying to behold.

Tasha,Keel, and I sit around the war room table. Their faces are taut, bleary-eyed, and bear the same stunned disbelief wracking my insides. D.A. March paces at the front of the room, as tense as I’ve ever seen him. He pauses every so often to spin toward us, as if about to say something, then grunts and resumes pacing.

Finally, he squares up to the table as if it’s challenged him to a fight. “How does this happen?! How doesthishappenwith the sheriff’s departmentright there?!”

It’s a fair question, but I don’t have an answer. At least not one I want to say out loud. The bottom line is, the sheriff’s department likely dropped the ball. I say likely because tighter security measures mightnothave prevented this, but they definitely would have made it harder to accomplish. In short, they underestimated the risk posed to Fogerty by people who wanted to makecertainhe got a death sentence—no matter what the jury decided.

March pounds a fist on the table. “He was about to be sentenced. He wasliterallyhours from receiving the death penalty!”

“Probablyreceiving the death penalty,” I counter. March’s laser eyes nearly cut me in two, and I make a mental note to rein in the sarcasm.

Keel clears his throat. “So what are we thinking? A victim’s family member wasn’t willing to leave Fogerty’s fate up to twelve strangers? Took the shot when he could…it would have been hard to get to him after sentencing,” Tasha muses.

“Mr. March?” A young secretarial assistant sticks her head inside the room. Her petite frame is drawn in on itself, her face scrunched apologetically.

His head snaps to her. “Yes, Emily?”

“Sheriff Vickers is here to see you.”

March strides out of the room without a word, sucking the air out of the room as he goes.

Tasha locks eyes with me. “This is insane. After everything, after all these months, after getting a guilty verdict…”

I understand how she’s feeling. An assassination isn’t the same thing as true justice. It’s as if something has been ripped away from us. I can’t imagine how the families of the victims feel. Or how low one of them must have sunk to take matters into their own hands—if that’s what happened.

Ifthat’s the case, this whole situation just became even more tragic. Someone with a connection to the victim will end up in prison for murder—a person who never would have found themselves in that position, if Fogerty hadn’t taken their loved one’s life first.

It also doesn’t escape me that, now, I won’t have the chance toquestion Fogerty again about the Kamden Avery murder. I’ll never get to confront him about his assertion that he was innocent and ask who we should be looking at, if not him.

The urge to shift gears grasps me. “Tasha, where’s the paperwork on what we pulled from Fogerty’s place?”

She points to a stack at the end of the table. I walk over and begin leafing through the records and photographs, searching for anything to connect Fogerty to Kamden.

“What are you doing?” Tasha asks.

“I can’t just sit here and wait for March to come back and scold us some more.”

“I’ve already been through that.” Keel ticks his head at the materials spread in front of me. “Don’t waste your time. I didn’t find anything relevant to Kamden Avery.”

My heart dips, but still I pull out the inventory of items we collected from Fogerty’s trailer, including the objects identified as tokens he kept from the first three murders—Aria’s ring, Hailey’s earring, and Teresa’s earring. I don’t need to review the notes to know we found Aria’s ring under his mattress, Hailey’s earring in his nightstand drawer, and Teresa’s earring at the back of a dresser drawer.

I scan the list for the hundredth time during this case. Like Keel, I don’t come across anything that jumps out as potentially being related to Kamden. No unaccounted-for jewelry or suspicious items screaming “murder token.”

Keel stands at the window, peering through the blinds. “Wow. It’s a circus down there. Even more reporters than before.”

Tasha steps over to join him. “This is not good.”