I stood on the deck as the Nautilus chugged across the Channel. A low mist was covering the sea, giving the impression that if you stepped off the boat, you’d just keep falling forever.
Spits of seawater splashed up into my face as I leaned over the edge and looked into the darkness, straining to see the black mass on the horizon that was Eastleigh Island. Inside the boat, Jamal sat at the helm, surrounded by several empty cans of Red Bull. He’d been a little unsure about helping me at first, but when I told him how I’d taken the search warrant from Forrester’s office, he figured he owed me one.
“Can’t this thing go any faster?” I shouted to him through the plexiglass window of the cabin.
He shrugged back at me and mouthed, “What?” Shaking my head, I went inside, and Jamal swiveled round to greet me.
“How long now?” I asked.
“Twenty minutes,” he said. “Sorry, water’s choppy and she’s a bit rusty. I’ve never taken her this far out before.”
I leaned against one of the servers and chewed my gum loudly. Rocco was curled up on the desk, warming himself against a softly humming hard drive.
“Where’s your detective friend?” Jamal asked.
“Um, okay, Jamal, full disclosure: I’m kinda, like, on the run right now,” I said. “The police think I’m Parker.”
“But you’re not, right?” Jamal said slowly. “Parker is on this island, and now you’re going to confront him? Am I getting this right?”
“Listen,” I said. “You ever hear that old riddle? Where’s the best place to hide a book?”
“What, we’re doing riddles now?” he said. “No, I don’t know it.”
“A library,” I said.
“Right—the book would get lost amongst all the others,” he said. “I get it.”
“So where’s the best place to hide a murder?”
“What?”
“We were looking for a reason someone would want to kill all of these guys,” I explained. “But what if someone only had a reason to kill one of them? And just made it look like they had a grudge against every dickhead who’d taken me on a terrible date?”
“I get it.” He nodded slowly. “You’ve been wasting your time chasing a serial killer, trying to figure out a pattern. But really there is no pattern, he’s just trying to cover up the one murder he has a real motive for.”
“Right,” I said. “Hiding the book in the library.”
“But why your exes? Sorry. Not exes. Just guys who—”
“Who I dated. Once,” I said. “To throw suspicion on me.”
“Who would want to frame you for murder?”
“Someone who’d lost everything,” I said. “Because of me.”
We were interrupted by the jagged white cliffs of the island slowly coming into view. As Jamal slowed the boat and guided it up to a decrepit wooden pier, I leaned over to the fruit bowl and picked out the final banana.
“One more thing. You know the guys’ profiles we showed you before? Is there any way of cross-referencing who they matched with on Connector?”
“You mean, can we see if they matched with any of the same people?” Jamal asked.
I nodded, slowly peeling the banana. Somehow Parker had managed to get Rob, Freddie, Josh, Dev, and Seb back to the locations of our dates. And there was only so far you could get dragging someone along the street with a knife to their throat before you get arrested. So I figured they had to have gone willingly.
“All right, watch the helm for a sec,” Jamal said, reaching for his laptop. “Well, with this many profiles, it would be unusual to get a lot of crossover. But let’s have a look.”
Jamal tapped away for a couple of minutes.
“Oh, so there’s only two. You, of course, and…”
He screwed up his face and took another sip from his can of energy drink.
“Weird,” Jamal said. “This profile is called Parker too.”
“Another Parker?” I asked. “Can I see?”
He hit Enter, and a profile flashed up on the screen. Deep down, I knew what was coming, but when I saw the photos, my stomach still turned. The name said Parker, but the face was one I knew very, very well.