“Do you know of any more relevant detail that might help us?” Nate asked. He must have noticed how green Charlie was looking too.
“Not that I know of,” Charlie said. “I told everything to the Sheriff, anyway, but that was all I could tell him. Whoever did this was gone when I got here, and I wasn’t even close enough to see her properly, you know? The rest is up to your people, I suppose.”
Our people, Laura thought wryly, nodding at him. As if they were going to really get any cooperation at all from this lackadaisical Sheriff and his group of lads. “Thank you, Charlie,” she said. “You’re free to go home.”
Charlie nodded gratefully and left, clutching a weathered hat in his hands and waving it by way of farewell. He disappeared down toward the walkway, off the ship, and Laura turned thoughtfully to watch him go. She took in the whole view—the ships all lined up, the sea on one side and the town on the other.
A town, she had no doubt, which had many secrets—but she wasn’t going to see any of them from here.
“Let’s pay the coroner a visit,” she suggested, and Nate nodded in agreement, turning to lead the way.
***
“So, what was that about?”
Laura looked at Nate, her hand on the passenger side door handle. She’d been about to get out of the car now that they were parked outside the coroner’s building, but Nate had stopped and was looking at her expectantly.
“What?” she asked, floundering. Was she supposed to know what he meant?
“Sheriff Landyn,” Nate said. “I saw how you reacted to his handshake. You looked like you were going to throw up. And I know you don’t have a problem with water.”
Laura looked away for a moment. She’d said she would be honest with him, hadn’t she? It was still hard to remember that. To remember that he wasn’t expecting her to lie or come up with some innocent explanation that would allow him to keep his blinkers on. The blinkers were off, and they were staying that way.
“The aura,” she said. “The shadow of death. It’s on him.”
Nate’s eyes widened. “Like you said I had on me?”
“Yes.” Laura took a breath, swallowed. It was hard to talk about. Hard to think about. “It was powerful. I think he’s going to die soon.”
“As part of this case?”
That was the one thing Laura wished she could answer. “I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t have a vision. Just the aura of death. Unless I get more details at some point, I don’t know what’s going to happen to him. It could be anything. He might have undiagnosed cancer.”
Nate nodded. “I guess we’ll take it under advisory.”
Laura reached for the door handle again. “Shall we go?” she asked, feeling like she was asking permission and not liking the feeling very much.
“Yeah, sorry,” Nate said. He got out of the car, too, allowing Laura to consider the matter closed as she shut her door behind her. She didn’t want to dwell on it. The aura of death made her feel so unwell whenever she encountered it, and it was laden with bad memories: the death of her father, the time she had spent running after Nate and trying to do everything in her power to prevent the death she felt coming for him. She would much rather leave it alone and never feel it again. That would be better.
Sheriff Landyn wasn’t someone she loved. Someone she would feel the loss of. Maybe it was her responsibility to save as many people as she could, due to her work, but sometimes that burden felt too heavy to bear. And touching him again, putting herself through that black sickness again, in the vain hope of seeing a vision that might not come or might not even help…
Maybe she wouldn’t be able to handle it.
They walked into the building, Laura barely noticing her surroundings as she wrestled internally with the dilemma. She simply followed Nate until he stopped and looked up to find that they were standing in what was clearly the local morgue.
Only, there was no one else in sight.
Nate sighed.
“Hello?” he called out, glancing around as if expecting someone to pop out of one of the drawers. “Hello?”
There was resounding silence.
“There’s a log on the table,” Laura suggested.
Nate walked over and grabbed it from beside a switched-off computer, flipping through the pages. “Drawers five and seven,” he said, glancing up to see the matching drawers on the wall. “Should we…?”
“I guess,” Laura shrugged. The place was deserted, and no one had stopped them from coming in. It wasn’t as though they had hours to spend waiting for someone to come along. They needed to get on with the case, after all.