Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

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 suppositions about why Sam and Krista were killed had begun fouling the air before their bodies were even found. Burglary had been dismissed as a motive within minutes. The killer didn’t take enough stuff. Besides, a simple burglary gone wrong didn’t set the imagination aflame. Most of the students leaned toward a botched drug deal. Many of them used drugs themselves and harbored a healthy fear of the people their habits forced them to deal with. And those who maintained a more chemical-free lifestyle were attracted to any theory that blamed the victims for their misfortune and fostered their illusion of safety.
    Faye, who couldn’t have afforded drugs even if she’d been attracted to them, had no illusion of safety. However Sam and Krista died, whoever did it, the fact remained that someone had committed murder. No matter the reason for the crime, no one was safe in the vicinity of someone who had once violated that taboo.
    “The vans are here,” the sheriff announced. “There’s room for everybody. We’ll bring you back here to your cars as soon as we’ve taken your statements.”
    As Faye allowed herself to be herded once again, she scanned the faces of the people she passed. They all looked so ordinary. If she had to guess which of them was capable of murder, it would be the black-eyed man in the corner. He was just standing there, waiting for the cashier to ring up a loaf of bread and a can of potted meat, but he stood out among Wally’s rubber-necking patrons because he refused to rubber-neck. His casual stance was studied and he did not gawk at the grim-faced procession walking single-file and silent in the sheriff’s wake. There was a stillness to his face that did not speak well of him.

    Nguyen did not like the way the dark-skinned girl looked at him as she passed, as if she could hear what he was thinking and was appalled by it. He wished the cashier would quit ogling the sheriff’s parade of witnesses and take his money. He needed to get back out to Water Island and dismantle his worksite before somebody stumbled onto it. Even though he was working miles away from Seagreen Island, the Marine Patrol and the Sheriff’s Department would have cops crawling all over the Last Isles and he didn’t want to abandon his equipment or his finds. If he got out there quickly, the search wouldn’t yet have fanned out wide enough to catch him in its net.
    He watched the cashier amble over to the redheaded hag working at the grill, probably planning