ht have been valid.” I look at Dalton. “Émilie did talk to Mathias. She’d asked about recent arrivals and whether any seemed suspicious. That conversation, though, took place yesterday afternoon. When I saw her creeping about, I believe she was coming from an apartment near Mathias’s house. Searching a residence she knew would be empty.”
“Jay’s,” Dalton says. “Fuck.”
“Yep, convenient that he knew Danish, right?”
April frowns. “But he arrived before Sophie.”
“I don’t think Jay came here because of Sophie. I think he was just a second prong of the Danish mission. Send four agents into the woods to investigate the hostiles. Send Jay here to monitor us. He speaks Danish because he is Danish. It was pure luck for them that he was already here when Sophie arrived.”
“He offered his help so he could mistranslate. Redirect your investigation if necessary.”
I nod. “Then her mind cleared enough for her to realize he was mistranslating. That’s why she flipped out. It’s also why she targeted him. She might have still been confused, recognizing him as a fellow employee but not necessarily an ally. Or she was thinking just fine and blamed the firm for her colleagues’ deaths.”
“Either way, she knew he wasn’t an innocent guy caught in the cross fire.”
“No one was innocent here.” April’s gaze turns toward the other room, where we’re storing the evidence. “Except those poor settlers.”
“Yes,” I say, “but unfortunately, while their killers are dead, this has snowballed into new problems with other innocent victims: Felicity, Edwin, and the pilot who came for the Danes.”
As I rise from my chair, I look toward that room April had glanced at. The repository for our evidence. We’d need to decide what to do with Sophie and the items we’d brought from the dead settlers. Also the foot of Sophie’s lover.
Or maybe Victor hadn’t been her lover. Jay could have embellished their relationship to support the tourist theory and add an extra layer of pathos to the story. Victor had been something to her, though. She’d snapped when April brought in his boot.
Wait. Had she actually snapped? We’d interpreted her reaction as grief. Knowing she wasn’t an innocent tourist, I replay that scene and see strategy. We bring in the boot, and she feigns a fit of grief, which throws us off guard and allows her to strangle Jay.
I tell Dalton my theory that Sophie used the boot to distract us.
“Yeah,” he says. “Makes sense.”
“But the whole reason we presumed that foot belonged to the fourth tourist—her lover—was her reaction. That clinched it. Without that…”
“Fuck.”
I pause, seeing him thinking and piecing it together. Then he mutters another “Fuck.”
“April?” I say. “The guy we found, the pilot. He was blind.”
She blinks at me. “While I know there have been immense strides taken to improve accessibility—”
“Not when he flew. Afterward. He was blinded by the attack. No apparent damage to his eyes, but he’d been struck on the head.”
“All right…”
“Can that cause blindness?”
“Total blindness? In both eyes?”
The incredulity in her voice answers the question. “That’d be a no, then.”
“It’s not impossible, but without damage to the eyes, the most likely cause of total binocular blindness would be a clot, unrelated to the attack.”
Colin isn’t blind, and Petra didn’t take him anywhere.
He took her hostage.
Colin Berger is Victor, the fourth Dane.
* * *