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A shudder ran down Jon’s back. That word sat wrong with him too.
“Eric is already on our radar. I’ll tell Mason. Thanks, Henry.” Annie touched her ring. “And thanks so much for this.”
“I enjoyed doing it, Annie.” He turned to grab another box of jewelry and went back to work.
When Jon and Annie stepped back into the sunshine, he took her hand. His assumptions about their morning might need to be reassessed. “You still want to go look at property with me, or do you need to talk to Mason?”
She glanced at her watch. “Let’s go. It will give Mason time to drink all his horrible coffee, and there won’t be any left to offer to me.”
Jon chuckled. “We can stop at the coffee shop and get you some real stuff so your hands are full.”
“Not a bad idea.”
They walked on down toward the water. The roar of the growing waves increased, and whitecaps threw themselves against the rocky shoreline. There wasn’t much of a beach at theend of the street with the incoming storm, just a thin layer of sand.
Jon gestured to a freshly painted storefront. “This must be it.”
“And there’s Fiona.” Annie waved at the stocky brunette unlocking the door to the building.
Jon hadn’t met Fiona Edwards, but she owned several properties in the downtown area. She’d been the driving force behind the revitalization of the Victorian architecture. In her forties with carefree curly hair and no makeup, she didn’t strike him as a real-estate mogul but as a soccer mom.
“Jon Dunstan.” They shook hands, and he liked her easy smile and firm grip.
“I’ve heard a lot about you from my dad, Ben Eckright.”
That raised her higher on his list too. “Your dad is a gem.”
“He is,” she agreed. “Come on in, and I’ll tell you about the place.”
Within minutes he knew the place was perfect. There was a great area for a waiting room and four exam rooms as well as an office and multiple places for supplies. Patients would have to get X-rays and tests at the hospital, but they were used to that aspect of small-town life. And because Rock Harbor needed an orthopedist, she pitched him a price half of what he thought he’d have to pay.
It would all work out.
Twenty-Five
Quarry. The women who had survived men chasing them had mentioned that word, and Annie shuddered every time she heard it. It brought back the memory of Sean calling the girls he’d murdered “quarry.” Was he the mastermind behind everything? He was dead and useless to them for information.
Mason’s coffeepot was blessedly empty, but Annie carted in a cup of coffee from Metro Espresso to be on the safe side. She settled in a chair and pointed the other chair out to Jon as they waited for Mason to get off the phone. Jon had his phone out with his weather app on the screen. Rain lashed the window behind Mason’s desk, and the building shook with thunder.
Mason ended the call. “We have an ID on the body you found yesterday. It’s Ella Anderson.”
Annie sagged against the seat back. “Oh no. Cause of death?”
“Pending an official autopsy, it appears to be a gunshot wound to the back of the head. Almost execution style.” He rubbed his forehead. “I have to notify her family. She was only eighteen.”
“The Coast Guard should know who owned the boat that crashed offshore of my dad’s cabin,” Jon said.
Mason nodded. “It belonged to Eric Bell.”
Annie absorbed the news. They’d suspected him all along. “Saturday was Ella’s parents’ wedding anniversary. It won’t be a day they like to remember now.”
“No.”
“How many dead tourists does this make?”
He leaned back in his chair. “Depends on how you look at it. I suspect Sophie Smith and Penelope Day could have been the first victims.”
She absorbed the horror of that scenario. “This spans nearly a decade then, and we have a serial killer or group.”
