Stranded

included pepperoni, ground beef, Italian sausage, pork sausage, and Canadian bacon. Maggie added a salad. Creed was pleased to see sweet tea on the menu. Tully ordered draft beer. Maggie asked for a Diet Pepsi, not trusting herself, not wanting to let her guard down.
    Tully filled them in on the recovery effort of Ethan’s body. The pizza arrived when Tully was pulling up the photo gallery on his smartphone. He slid the phone across the table to Maggie and Creed. It was a round bistro table that allowed the three of them their own space quite comfortably, but in order to see the smartphone’s screen Creed scooted his chair closer to Maggie. WhileTully served up the pizza, Maggie slid her finger over the screen, going from one photo to the next, taking in each gruesome discovery, just as Tully and Detective Lopez’s crew had.
    The body was a mess and at some point Maggie realized Creed had moved his chair back away to his original place. She remembered him telling her and Tully, when Grace alerted in the barn, that he didn’t help with the digging. But certainly he must have seen plenty of dead bodies, many of them brutalized.
    “You okay?” she asked.
    “Not my favorite part of the job.”
    He chugged down the rest of his iced tea and started looking for the waiter to order another. Maggie wondered if he wished the tea were something stronger.
    “Oh, hold on,” Tully said and took the smartphone back. “I have a picture of the boots they found in the garbage from the rest area. I showed the boots to Creed earlier,” he told Maggie as he searched for the photo. His finger swiped across the screen several times. “Lopez agreed to let me overnight them to Alonzo. So that’s what I did after I dropped Creed at the hotel.”
    Finally, he found the one he wanted and handed the phone to Maggie.
    They looked like ordinary, lace-up hiking boots, but on the toes she could see rust-colored splatters.
    “Blood?”
    “Won’t know till the lab tests it but it sure looks like it. Notice the white stain?”
    The bottom quarter of the leather was covered in a zigzag white powdery stain.
    “What is it?”
    “Creed said it looked like—well, you go ahead and tell her.”
    “My boots get that way after I’ve spent some time walking in brackish water.” He scooped up a slice of pizza in one hand and took a bite. Whatever squeamishness he’d had was thankfully gone.
    “Brackish?” she asked.
    “Mix of salt water and fresh water. Usually a bay where a river meets the ocean or the gulf.”
    “If the boots are Jack’s,” Tully said, “it could mean he lives someplace close to the ocean or the gulf.”
    “Are we sure they’re not Ethan’s?”
    “They’re not Ethan’s,” Tully assured her. “His feet are still in his sneakers. They’re just not attached to his legs.”
    “So Jack spends a good deal of his time in a coastal area. That doesn’t narrow it down much.”
    “Creed showed me the map you two were looking over.”
    Maggie almost choked on a bite of pizza. Her eyes darted to Creed and she hated that a flush was already spreading to her face. Tully, however, didn’t notice any of this. He was busy searching his pockets for a piece of paper and finally settled on a napkin, his second favorite thing to write on. He pulled out a pen, and Maggie, searching to get her mind on anything other than Creed and what had happened back at the hotel, pointed at Tully’s pen. This thing was fancy. Nothing like the cheap throwaway pens Tully usually had in his pocket.
    “Whoa, where did you get that?”
    “Gwen gave it to me for our anniversary.”
    “You guys have anniversaries that you celebrate?”
    He ignored her jab, pointed the pen in her direction, and smiled as a blue light-beam shot her in the face.
    “That’s not all,” he said and twisted the pen until it cameapart. He spilled out the contents hidden in the top section of the pen. Two X-Acto blades and a two-inch-long serrated blade. He turned the other section to show the now exposed stainless-steel screwdriver.
    “Wow! Just like James Bond,” Creed said.
    “So Gwen thinks you’re James Bond?”
    “As Emma would say, Bond is so yesterday. More like Jason Bourne.”
    “Oh right.” Maggie laughed. “That’s exactly who I see when I think of you.”
    “Wait, there’s more,” he told them as he put the pen back together again. He screwed off the very top of the pen and showed them the display.
    “A compass?”
    “Not a compass,”