Ball & Chain

Ty nodded, still frowning.



“And Ty. If he was murdered . . .”



“There’s probably a murderer on the island with us, yeah.” Ty nodded, his frown growing even deeper. “Do it.”



Nick raised both eyebrows, opening his mouth in surprise. He clutched his right hand to his thigh, making a fist with it. “Me?”



“You’re the homicide detective, right?”



“Not anymore.”



“Irish, just look at the fucking body and see if you think it’s a murder or an accident, okay?” Ty snapped.



Nick grunted in annoyance. “Aye, aye, Captain.”



“I’m sorry.” Ty swiped a hand over his forehead, closing his eyes. “Please.”



Nick huffed and brushed past him, stepping carefully in Zane’s footprints to kneel next to the body. There were no defensive wounds on the parts of his arms that were visible, but the dead man’s watch was cracked. Nick cocked his head to read the time. It had stopped at 3:48 am.



“Possible time of death here,” he said without looking up. He pressed his fingers to the man’s neck. He was cold. He tried to articulate the dead man’s fingers and they moved without resistance. Nick frowned. If he’d died just four hours ago, he would still be in rigor. The cold night could have sped up the cooling of the body, but the evidence was saying different things about when the man had died.



He looked around for pieces of the glass watch face, finally finding them in the mud next to a rock a foot away from the man’s head. The beach was littered with rocks and boulders, some smooth, some jagged. It was possible he’d slipped while walking and hit his head. Nick reached for one of the shards of glass, but his fingers were trembling again. He clutched his hand into a fist and pulled it back, swiping it across his thigh instead. He’d need someone to take photos of the glass shards anyway, so he left them there.



Footprints were impossible to decipher. The sand was too loose, and too many people had passed this way. He leaned far over the dead man, trying to see his face without disturbing the scene any more than it had been. What he found was a gaping wound at his hairline, so deep he could see bone and brain matter. The blood had mingled with the ocean and soaked into the sand. The absence of a blood pool made the brutal wound a shock to find.



“His skull’s been caved in,” he announced.



“Could it be from a fall?” Zane called to him.



Nick shook his head before he even gave the question real thought. “Wound like this, there was some real leverage behind it. Looks like someone brained him with a rock. Never saw it coming. Didn’t put up a fight.”



“He was murdered,” Stanton said under his breath, covering his mouth with his palm.



There was a shout from the pathway, and when Nick stood to peer past the others, he saw a man guiding one of the golf carts up the path, waving at them frantically as he swerved the cart all over. When he got closer he hopped out and sprinted toward them, leaving the golf cart to roll by itself down the incline. People shouted and hustled for it before it could hit the cliff and sail over the edge, but the driver didn’t notice.



“What the hell,” Ty said.



“They’re gone,” the man blurted as he ran toward them.



“What’s gone, Gillis?” Stanton demanded.



“The boats!” the young man named Gillis gasped out when he finally skidded to a stop in front of Stanton. “All of them. They’re all gone from the dock. Even the rowboats and kayaks. Mackie says the boathouse was hit by a tree and they’re all gone.”



“Gone,” Stanton echoed.



“You can see them, little dots out floating in the water.” The kid was still breathless. He waved his arm around. “The storm set them all afloat. The ones not still floating sank at the docks.”



Stanton’s eyes were wide when he turned back to Nick and the others. Nick felt his stomach drop as the realization sank in. They were trapped on the island with no way to communicate with the outside world, possibly for days. And there could very well be a murderer among them.



He took a deep breath and let it out, grumbling to himself. “I’m going to fucking die in Scotland.”



Chapter 5



Zane sat quietly in an office chair through a brief debate over whether the wedding festivities should carry on as planned, or if the guests should be told of the murder and the loss of the island’s launches. Ty and Nick argued first with the Snake Eaters and then with each other over which avenue would be most expedient for keeping everyone safe. Kelly was still with Livi and Amelia, or Zane was sure Kelly would have been able to keep things calmer. As it was, Zane just hung back.



Ty insisted keeping the guests in the dark would, at least for a little while, prevent a mass panic and allow them to try to find a solution in relative peace. Nick was adamant that people in danger deserved to know they were in danger, and steps could be taken to protect them and convince them to cooperate.



Zane felt like he was witnessing the core of why Ty and Nick had always made a good team. They were very yin and yang.



Finally, Nick pointed out that word would get around despite their attempts to keep it quiet because most of the island’s staff had seen the body. “Rumors are always worse than truth, and once they start, we won’t be able to get people to trust us when we try to start sharing truth with them.”



Ty and the Snake Eaters all grunted in unison, but none of them could come up with a counterargument to that.



Someone knocked on the door to the study, and a moment later they opened the door to see Kelly standing there. The bodyguards let him in and locked the door behind him.



“Is it true someone got stabbed in the ear with a broken seashell?” Kelly asked incredulously.



Nick held his hand out to Kelly, eyes on Ty. “See?”



Ty was massaging his temples, nodding. “Okay, you were right.”



“We make an announcement,” Zane said, smiling fondly at Ty.



Stanton didn’t look amused, though. “Agreed. I’ll make a call for all the guests and employees to assemble in the great hall. We can address the situation there. Who is with Amelia?”



“Korean dude who doesn’t talk,” Kelly answered.



“We need to set an investigation in motion in the absence of proper authorities,” one of the Snake Eaters told Stanton. It was the large leader of the private security force, a man named John English. He struck Zane as a little too cocky, but he seemed efficient and mostly sensible.



“How are you going to do that?” Zane asked him. “We have no authority to question these people, or detain them, or search for evidence.”



English shrugged his huge shoulders. “They don’t know that.”



“Which will be handy later on,” Ty added.



Zane grunted, beginning to grow annoyed with the attitude of the Snake Eater crew. It was disturbing to him on several levels how easily Ty fit in with them. He often wondered how close Ty had been to taking the mercenary road. He definitely set foot on it here and there.



Stanton started to pace, chewing on a cigar. “We’ll make it clear it’s an informal inquiry, being performed merely to keep everyone safe. There is a murderer roaming the island, after all, people deserve protection. Anyone who wishes not to participate will be . . . locked in their room for the safety of others.”



“Still not really legal,” Zane advised.



“Neither is murder,” Theo Stanton snapped. They were the first words Livi’s brother had uttered since the meeting had started.



“These are extraordinary circumstances, I’m afraid.” Stanton turned to Nick, cheeks pale and eyes drawn. “Rick, isn’t it? You’re a police detective? You’ll do the investigation.”



“Excuse me?” Nick said, not even bothering to correct his name.



“You have no blood connection to either family, nor to the business. You’re as neutral a party as we’ll find and you’re trained to do the job.”



Nick glanced around at all of them, looking like he wanted to argue, but the logic was sound. Zane nodded encouragingly when Nick met his eyes. Nick sighed and jerked his head to the side. “If I can have the doc assisting me, then I guess I don’t have any objection.”



“Whatever you need,” Stanton agreed. He shook Nick’s hand distractedly. “What do you need?”



Nick hesitated before shrugging one shoulder. “Well, it’s an unusual situation in that our pool of suspects is static, so gathering alibis would be the first step. But that’s something we’d need to organize everyone for. If I tried to do it quietly, word would get around and people would be able to coordinate their stories. It would make it pointless. So we tell people we’re trying to discern a timeline, to see if anyone out of place was on the island.”



Stanton nodded and absently handed his cigar to Nick, who took it and looked at it like he’d just been handed a unicorn as Stanton walked away. Nick glanced at Kelly, who was biting his lip and trying not to smile.



“We don’t have any way of telling time of death, though,” Theo argued.



“Without definitive evidence, we’ll have to go by his broken watch,” Zane provided.



Nick shook his head, turning to Kelly. “I need you to confirm it for me.”



“Confirm it . . . how?” Kelly asked.



Nick winced. “With a turkey thermometer probably.”



“Oh gross, Nick.”



“I’m serious.”



“I know, that’s why it’s gross!”



Even Zane was a little disgusted at the thought, but Nick was probably right. It was much more accurate to check the body’s temperature by measuring the liver temp than assuming the watch had been broken in the fight that ultimately killed him.



Nick handed the cigar to Kelly and began writing down the information he would need to estimate the time of death from the body’s temperature, indicating that roughly every two and a half degrees it had dropped meant he’d been dead an hour. “Give or take a little because of the cold. I don’t trust the watch as time of death.” He ripped the page off the notebook and handed it to Kelly. “You have to hurry before he hits ambient temp, okay? And I need you to do it before we put the body in cold storage. Like, right now, as soon as we’re done here.”



Kelly nodded and took the slip of paper, nose curled in distaste. Stanton was still pacing, and Kelly held the cigar out for him to take as he walked by. Stanton plucked it from Kelly’s fingers and put it in his mouth without even seeming to realize he’d ever given it up. Zane found himself fighting back a laugh.



“If the temp puts time of death in range, we’ll assume the watch is correct,” Nick told them. There wasn’t much point in arguing with what little they had to go on.



“If the body and the watch are saying different things, is it possible he was killed elsewhere?” Zane asked Nick. He was the only one who’d been close enough to the body to see.



Nick was shaking his head before Zane could finish. “No. There were no signs on the body that it’d been moved.”



“You sure?” Zane asked.



Nick gave him a brief glare, then nodded. “Been doing this a long time, Garrett, I don’t need my hand held.”



Zane held up both hands and shrugged. He didn’t want problems with Nick, not now.



“If this is the first step in an escalation against the company, then we have motive,” Ty added. “That could narrow down the first wave of interviews, at least.”



“I’d like to search his room,” Nick told Stanton. “Get a hold of his laptop, phone, any papers. If we could lock that down ASAP to keep anyone from getting in there. In fact, Grady and Garrett could handle that while I’m interviewing people.”



“I’ll get you the key, but Grady and Garrett will be watching Amelia while you’re doing that, thank you,” Stanton promised. He headed for the door, gesturing for his men to follow him. “I’ll meet you gentlemen on the patio in ten minutes for the announcement. We’ll serve brunch and allow you to do your interviews while people are eating. Will that work?”



All eyes turned back to Nick, who was watching Stanton with a frown. When he realized the man was actually waiting for a response, he nodded, obviously flustered. “Yes, sir, thank you.”



Stanton nodded and left the room. The door clicked behind Theo, leaving the four of them alone in stunned silence.



Kelly sat on the back of the couch where Nick was leaning, brushing their shoulders together. “Is this what traveling with you guys is usually like?”



“Yes,” Ty and Zane both groaned.



“No,” Nick said with a sorrowful shake of his head.



Kelly wrapped an arm around his shoulders, hugging him. “It’s okay, Rick.”



Nick snorted. Zane chuckled, even though he felt guilty for laughing. Nick looked so distraught to have been singled out for the job, Zane had to wonder why. He’d been a detective in Boston for at least seven years, and from what Ty said about him, he was good at his job.



Ty sat on Nick’s other side and patted his knee. “You okay to do this?”



“Does it matter?” Nick asked.



“We got your six, man,” Kelly said.



Zane nodded immediately. “Piece of cake.”



Nick rubbed his fingers over his eyes. The very tips of his fingers trembled, barely noticeable. But Zane noticed it. He’d noticed it outside, too, when Nick had made to reach for something in the sand but then stopped. He’d noticed it last night at dinner when Nick had switched his fork from his right hand to his left and then clutched his right hand into a fist before hiding it in his lap. Nick was a lefty, so using his left instead of his right wasn’t unusual, but it had caught Zane’s attention nonetheless. The tremor in his right hand was the same type Zane had developed when he was coming off everything in rehab.