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shirt over the spot where the students’ faces peered up from the dirt, then, out of solidarity, laid her own shirt atop Faye’s. The two of them stood vigil together, in their brassieres, until the sheriff came.

Chapter 5
    The afternoon heat, the boat’s side-to-side wallow, and the fact that she hadn’t eaten since breakfast had combined to bring Faye to the point of seasickness. It had been an interminable day and it wasn’t over.
    Sheriff Mike McKenzie and his investigation team had worked efficiently through the morning, herding everyone on Seagreen Island onto a patch of sand near the dock before sending a search crew to fan out over the island. From her vantage point, she had watched technicians lifting fingerprints off the storage shed and searching Magda’s crew boat.
    Her nerves had stretched a little thin when they searched her skiff, not so much because she thought the killer might have concealed any evidence there, but because she had things of her own to hide. Would they wonder why she kept topographical maps of all the Last Isles stashed, along with her navigational charts, in coolers to keep them dry? Would they notice the shovels and trowels and sieves and brushes and dental picks stored aboard her skiff, and wonder why she didn’t just use the tools the university provided? What if a tiny antique bottle or rouge pot that she’d dug out of the ground had rolled up behind the coolers and lodged there, waiting for the investigators to find it and wonder why she took her work home with her? It seemed that none of these questions struck the searchers. They poked through her skiff for a few short minutes, then moved on.
    They had rifled through the audiovisual equipment on the TV reporters’ boat with more care, then turned their attention to the sleek speedboat that had carried Senator Kirby and his entourage. Faye figured the searchers were focused on finding the missing laptop and data loggers, but they were empty-handed when they stepped onto the dock the last time.
    About noon, she saw Sheriff McKenzie turn to the undersheriff and heard him say, “It’ll take all day to do a complete search of this island, probably longer. We can’t hold all these people that long, and it’s ill-mannered to make them wait in this blasted heat. You take charge here. I’ll take the witnesses back to the office and make them comfortable while they wait their turn to be interviewed. No way our boat can hold them all, so we’ll use theirs.”
    Faye did as she was told, but it had felt wrong to leave Sam and Krista to the tender ministrations of the forensics investigators. It had felt wrong to allow herself to be herded onto the university’s rented boat along with Magda and her coworkers and ferried back to land. The students accepted their enforced cruise easily, since they rode the same boat to and from work every day.
    From its deck, Faye watched Seagreen Island and her skiff recede. Without her skiff, she had no way to get back to Joyeuse tonight, but she had ignored it. She didn’t like to call the investigators’ attention to the fact that she didn’t ride to work with the others. They might then begin to wonder where she lived that made a mullet skiff more convenient for commuting than an oversized power boat.
    Faye, Magda, the students, the sheriff, his chief investigator, and their staff overwhelmed the tiny convenience store and grill at Wally’s Marina. The shabby little place was just the same, but the events of the day made its seediness surreal.
    Faye had spent many hours at Wally’s, but today the shiny colors of the potato chip bags hit her wrong. The greasy odor of the morning’s bacon was off. The faces around her—Liz at the grill, the hobby fishermen poring over bait, the teenager eating a late lunch—were mostly familiar, but they were nonetheless strange. Somebody had shot two vigorous young people dead that very morning, and that somebody could be in this room. Or in any room.
    Wild