Page 144 of Secrets Along the Shore

I resist the urge to politely ask Emily to fast forward to the part where things go sideways.

“Well…” Emily hesitates, apparently gathering her courage. “A month ago I heard back from the company that Fogerty sometimes did side runs for—those trips from Huntsville to Michigan?”

I recall from studying Fogerty’s travel records that he made one such trip about a month before Hailey’s disappearance and another one that summer. Neither of the trips constituted alibis for the first three murders.

“I remember.” Tasha circles her fingers, gesturing for Emily to move along.

“Right, well, they said they’d compiled the records incorrectly. They accidentally left out a span of about six months from last year. They’ve double-checked it, and now they say Fogerty actually made three trips during that time.”

Emily stops talking and stares at us, her gaze flicking from one person to the next. I’m not sure if she’s just scared to go on or waiting for us to guess what’s coming.

“And?” Tasha presses gently.

“And…I didn’t put them on the calendar.” Emily’s face turns crimson, and she starts sputtering like an engine that can’t turn over. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I was so busy with trial prep—we had such a full caseload at the time—and I was going on vacation the following week, and well, we’d already established when the three victims had gone missing and these new trips weren’t on any of those dates. So I didn’t log them! I thought it wasn’t critical because those dates weren’t at issue, that I’d get to it later, but I forgot.”

“What else?” I ask, knowing there’s more to it, and having a pretty good idea what it is.

Emily bites her lip.

Tasha’s shoulders sag. “What are the dates, Emily?”

Emily holds out a slip of paper containing rushed scribble listing three time periods of seven days each. The first two trips took place during the winter before Aria Benner was killed, well outside the time frame of Kamden’s murder.

The last one, though…it occurred during May of the prior year. The date Kamden Avery posted her last Instagram post falls dead in the center of it. If Kamden was taken that day—or even three days on either side of it—there’s no way Kurt Fogerty could have done it, because he would have been between Huntsville and Michigan at the time.

Which means Kurt Fogerty was telling the truth.

It also means another killer is hunting women in my county.

After a painful hourwith D.A. March explaining what Emily told us and how Fogerty is no longer good for Kamden’s murder—and talking him down from firing her for her oversight—I’m able to sit down across from Sheriff Vickers in his office, fill him in on what we learned from Emily, and have him bring me up to speed on Kurt Fogerty’s shooting.

“I wish I had better news.” Sheriff Vickers rubs a hand over his bald head. “But we’ve got very little on the shooter. Thanks to you, we got shoe prints quicker than we might have otherwise. We’ve sent them off to Huntsville for processing, but Gold says it’s a size 11, hiking boot tread, maybe? It’s something, at least. Ballistics should come back by tomorrow and that’ll give us more to go on. I hope.”

“Any CCTV footage?” I’m expecting the answer to be no. There’s generally no call for street CCTV in Riverview. But a few buildings do use it, and the courthouse is one of them.

The sheriff shakes his head, rocking forward in his chair to lean on his desk. “Nah. No luck there. His escape route kept him out of sight of the cameras. We’ve canvassed the area, but no one remembers seeing anything unusual—definitely no vehicles speeding away.”

“Should I switch gears today? Do you need my help with this?” The sheriff’s only full-time investigator, Mike Neeley, is perfectly capable of handling this on his own, but I’m often pulled into time-consuming or extended cases like the Perfect Princess Murders.

Or the assassination of a serial murderer with a suspect list as long as the Tennessee River.

“No. I want you focused on catching Kamden Avery’s killer. We’ve got this in hand. Deputy Investigator Neeley is pulling Deputy Hollis in to help him on this. Hollis has been itchin’ to get some investigative experience. Neeley’s due to retire in a few months, and it’s best Hollis put in some hours under Neeley while he can.”

“Let me know if they need help interviewing witnesses or persons of interest. Hopefully it’ll go quickly.”

“From your mouth…” He finishes by pointing to the ceiling. “It makes me sick to my stomach thinking that some relative of one of these poor women decided to take matters into their own hands.”

“Yeah…maybe.”

The sheriff’s eyebrows narrow and he tilts his head. “You don’t think so?”

I exhale wearily. “You know Fogerty refused to talk to me when he came back from the hospital?”

Sheriff Vickers nods. “I do.”

“I’ve got to wonder why. Why change his mind after that attack?”

“You’re thinking it was a message? Somebody telling him to keep quiet?”