The restaurant is a shabby BBQ spot. It’s busy inside, but the older hostess breaks into a big grin and offers Detective Patrick Germain a warm hug. She looks to Clare with the curiosity of a nosy aunt. Germain shakes his head to stave off her implied question.

“Work meeting,” he says.

When Patrick Germain smiles, he looks almost bashful, his strong and squared jaw still somehow boyish. He is taller than Clare by only an inch, and though he’s made detective, he can’t yet be thirty. The hostess laughs, then leads them to a small booth at the back, empty, as if she’d been waiting for Germain to arrive. They sit and Germain hands Clare a menu.

“The ribs are the best in five hundred miles.”

“It’s not even nine in the morning,” Clare says.

“Never too early for ribs. This place is open twenty-four/seven. You a carnivore?”

“I guess so,” Clare says.

Germain sets the menu flat on the table to study it. Clare spots a small tattoo on the inside of his wrist, a sideways eight. The infinity symbol. The waitress comes over and Germain orders for both of them. Ribs, coleslaw, water.

“So.” Germain opens a notepad. He copies her name from the card she’s given him. “Clare O’Kearney. What’s your date of birth?”

“Why do you need my date of birth?” Clare asks. “We’re just talking.”

“It’s standard procedure.”

“With a witness maybe,” Clare says. “Or a suspect.”

“Okay.” Germain clicks at the tip of his pen. “But not with”—he studies the card again—“not with an investigator?”

“Listen,” Clare says. “I appreciate you meeting with me. I know you haven’t had the best of luck with this case.”

Germain leans back in the booth and lets out a long sigh. Clare has come to understand that the greatest puzzle in this work is deciphering what to share with whom. She knows better than to trust just anyone. In their phone call yesterday, she’d told Germain the basic facts of her relationship with Malcolm. Still, her guard will stay squarely up. Germain raps his fingers against the grainy wood of the table.

“The way I see it,” Germain says, “this case was given to me as a hazing ritual. A murder five years cold, a missing woman gone eighteen months with zero leads or clues. Two cases that shouldn’t even be on the same file but are. And the woman’s husband, the prime suspect, gone too. Malcolm Hayes’s trail has been as cold as ice, until you show up and say you’ve been playing PI with him for the past few months.”

“I’m trying to be honest with you from the get-go.”

Germain eyes her. “I appreciate that. Because, let me tell you, it feels like the witnesses change their story every time you sit them down. And the early police files are… thin.”

“Thin as in you don’t think your fellow officers were doing their jobs?”

“I make a point to never speak ill of my colleagues. But one guy who worked the case was an old boyfriend of Zoe’s. He knew Malcolm too, for chrissake. That kind of stuff is bound to happen in a small place like Lune Bay, but this one had conflict of interest written all over it. Lots of rumors that that particular cop was dirty too. There were other lead detectives too. Let’s just say a few old-timers were offered very convenient retirement packages around the time the case started to go cold.”

Clare nods. In her hometown these sorts of rumors plagued the local department, the notion that certain cases could get pushed aside if the suspect had the right connections. Even Clare had been a beneficiary, avoiding formal arrest on drug charges because her father was friends with the officer’s brother. She sips at her water. Germain seems almost at odds with himself, a day’s growth on his beard, the tattoo, nails bitten to the quick, but then a pressed shirt and a tie. He seems more a miscast actor playing the part of detective than the young phenom Lune Bay’s public relations team declares him to be.

“So,” Germain says. “You call me out of the blue and tell me that Malcolm is your employer—I guess that’s what you’d call him, right? And you’ve seen him as recently as last week, which means he’s alive, unless he drove off a cliff in the meantime. And you’re a private investigator working alongside a police officer from wherever. That’s a mouthful.”

Clare smiles. Germain is studying her closely. Before leaving the hotel this morning, Clare had taken advantage of the well-stocked bathroom, the fruity shampoos and fancy hair dryer. She’d taken time she never takes anymore, putting effort into the curl of her hair, applying mascara and lip gloss she’d picked up in a drugstore along the way. Selecting jeans and a black sweater. Those looks of yours are currency, Clare’s mother used to say. Spend wisely.

“I said I worked for him, yes,” Clare answers. “Now I’m looking for him, yes. And that police officer from wherever? She’s a detective. Just like you.”

“And you really saw him a week ago?”

“Roughly a week ago. Yes.”

“He’s wanted in connection with the disappearance of his wife. You’re aware there’s been a warrant for his arrest in place for a long time?”

“I’m aware now,” Clare says. “I wasn’t a week ago.”

“And your detective friend wasn’t aware either?”

“By the time she was, he was gone,” Clare says.

Clare clears her throat and again takes Germain through an abridged version of her history with Malcolm. His hiring her, the cases, the relationship with Detective Somers that Clare formed on the last case. The story flies from her like a rock skimming over deep water, all the details about her escape from her marriage nine months ago, about her husband, Jason, and her own demons, left under the surface.

“Why does Detective Somers want you here?”

Clare shrugs. “I guess she doesn’t like unsolved cases.”

“Hm. Okay.”

Before Germain can continue, the waitress arrives and sets an oval platter of ribs and coleslaw between them. She returns seconds later with napkins and wipes, plates and forks, then the cutlery, everything dropped in front of them unceremoniously. Germain busies himself arranging the food for them, his face locked in a concentrated frown. Clare attempts to nibble a rib without streaking her face with sauce.

“I called you,” Clare says, “because my guess is that you haven’t had a real lead in a long time. I figured maybe we could help each other.”

“I’d consider you a lead.” Germain bites at a rib. “I mean, hey. A stranger shows up with a glossy PI business card and tells me she was in touch with one of my suspects as recently as a week ago? A suspect who disappeared deep into the ether? A guy with big ties to the Westman family? That’s a monster lead, if you ask me.”

For a moment, neither of them speaks. Germain sucks on the bone in a way that turns Clare’s stomach.

“And this stranger,” he continues. “You, I mean. You claim you didn’t know who he was. That you had no idea that this guy you were apparently working with was a suspect in one of the biggest missing persons cases Lune Bay has ever seen.”

“Lune Bay isn’t exactly cosmopolitan. And he gave me a fake name.”

“He gave you his real first name.”

“There are a lot of Malcolms in the world,” Clare says.

“You think? Johns, maybe. Michaels. But Malcolm?” Germain scratches his head, feigning contemplation. “I don’t know about that.”

“Yeah.” Clare rips open a wet napkin and uses it to rub her hands clean. “I guess we’ve both had our failings with—”

“Don’t you read the news?” Germain interrupts. “Most PIs should. Zoe Westman is somewhat of a household name, at least around here. Not to mention her father was shot to death in a restaurant. Jack Westman? Surely you’d heard of him. One of the biggest developers on the coast? Lots of money coming in and out of strange places. A business partner in jail for tax fraud. Your friend Malcolm was in deep with what is essentially a local mafia family. A lot of people would have recognized him from the papers.”

“Not where I’m from,” Clare says. “And he’s obviously good at going undetected, or you’d have caught him by now.”

Germain frowns, allowing for a pause in the tempo of back and forth. He is not wrong, Clare knows. After his true identity was revealed to her, it amazed Clare how much information on Malcolm she could find online. A better sleuth probably would have uncovered Malcolm’s backstory, the Westman connection, without his full name at hand. Clare’s leg bounces under the table. At one point in this exchange, she’d felt almost confident. But now the effort to wrest control of the conversation is rankling her. He might be young, but Germain is a natural at cutting her down to size.

“Look,” Clare says, meeting his eyes with as steady a gaze as she can manage. “I’m the first to say that I’m new at this work. But I’m good at it. I’ve had success. I won’t get in your way. I can fly under your radar, or maybe we can help each other.”

The waitress returns and removes the platter and their dishes. Clare watches Germain closely as he chats with her, his easy smile, the effusive way he compliments the food, touches the waitress’s arm. He knows his charm is a useful tool, a way to get him what he wants.

“You were saying,” Germain says once the waitress has left. “About flying under my radar? I appreciate that, I do. But I think I’d prefer to keep you square in my bull’s-eye.”

“Or we just avoid each other altogether,” Clare says, arms crossed. “I’ve got other people I can align with.”

“You mean Austin Lantz?” Germain offers a hearty laugh and crosses his arms behind his head. “The self-declared expert on the Westman family. That’s funny.”

Clare’s jaw tightens. “Were you spying on me?”

“No. You called me, remember? He’s just the obvious guy to align with. It’s almost a cliché. The obsessed reporter.”

“He doesn’t have the best things to say about you,” Clare says.

“Because it bothers him that I won’t give him the time of day,” Germain says.

“He claims other women have gone missing too,” Clare says. “From Lune Bay. That it’s not just Zoe.”

“Right.” Germain leans forward. “That’s one of my favorite conspiracy theories. Of course he’s peddling it. Finds the name of a few women who had tenuous connections to each other—which everyone in Lune Bay has, by the way—women who left town for whatever reason. Maybe their overbearing parents filed a report because their daughters stopped taking their calls. And Austin tries to tack them on to the Westman case. Man, he’d love that to be true. He wants this all to be one big monster plot. Did he tell you that he used to be Jack Westman’s personal driver?”

“No,” Clare says. “He didn’t.”

“Yeah. See? So his whole ‘reporter’ thing is a little much. He’d tell you he was only driving to put himself through journalism school. Still, there’s a bit of shitting where he used to eat going on, isn’t there? He quit right before Jack Westman was killed. His brother hit the jackpot in the tech business, and now he funds Austin’s little reporter escapades.”

Clare fiddles with her napkin. She does not want to feel daunted by Germain, outfoxed.

“Well,” she says. “That’s good intel. Thank you.”

“We can be cordial, can’t we?”

When the bill arrives Germain hands the waitress his credit card without looking at it. He smiles, offering a détente between them, a declaration of his own victory. Clare knows her silence does her no favors, that Germain is all but toying with her now. But her exchanges with Austin turn over in her head, the whiskey that may have dulled her. She is angry at herself once again.

“Where are you staying?” Germain asks.

“Downtown.”

“Oh, come on. It’s not hard for me to find out where.”

“The Caledonian. Not easy to find cheap digs around here.”

“No, it isn’t,” he says, sliding out of the booth. “Clare O’Kearney. I hope we can keep talking.”

“I do too.”

Germain saunters to the front to engage the waitress again. Clare watches him. She’d figured on the upper hand in this exchange, but even a relative rookie like Germain is still more experienced than she is. The food has her tired though it is still early morning. She feels flustered, uncertain. But the day is young, and the list of leads to follow grows longer and longer. She must dig deeper on the Westmans. She must keep her focus at all costs, avoid distractions like the whiskey last night. As she follows Germain back through the restaurant and out to his car, Clare reminds herself to remain vigilant. You can still slip, she thinks. You are still you, and you always will be.