never seen Vincent drunk—the other man only ever had one beer when he came to the pub.
“I just slid on the road,” Vincent repeated as Will drove the rest of the way up the drive. “Misjudged how slick it was.” It almost sounded like he was practicing what he was going to say to his wife.
Pushing open the passenger-side door once the SUV had come to a standstill, Vincent looked over at Will. “Thank you. For doing everything you can to find her. She deserves that.” He shut the door on those words and walked up to his front door, in which a lovely blonde woman stood silhouetted by golden light.
27
Will wished he could see clearly through the rain that crashed against his windscreen—he’d be very curious to see the look on Jemima Baker’s face. Because if something had gone on between Miriama and Vincent at any point, the wife had to know. That was something Will had learned on one of his first cases as a detective—the wife almost always knew.
The only problem was, in a town as small as Golden Cove, the town also always knew—and not a single person had pointed Will in the direction of Vincent Baker. Right now, Vincent remained a “foolish married man” with a crush on a young woman who’d always flown free, in contrast to Vincent’s own mapped-out life.
As for the other wealthy man in town capable of affording that watch, he’d already proved willing to indulge in an affair with another man’s wife. Not many people knew that. Will only did because he’d driven a drunk Nikau home once, and the other man had angrily blurted out the truth.
It turned out that Nikau and Keira had still been living together in Wellington and trying to work on their troubled marriage when Daniel entered the picture. “While I was speaking at a conference in Paris,” Nikau had said, “that motherfucker was sleeping with my wife and selling her on a life I could never give her. I came back home to find her wearing a necklace she told me she’d bought on special from a local shop, and I was stupid enough to believe her.”
It wasn’t a stretch to imagine Daniel giving another woman jewelry as part of a new affair.
But though Daniel and Vincent made convenient targets, Will couldn’t afford tunnel vision. Miriama could as easily have met a rich tourist. There was also the slim chance that someone in town had more money than Will realized. Shane Hennessey, for one. The novelist had a habit of saying he worked for “love, not money,” but he’d had enough cash to tidy up the old Baxter place. Then there was the residency he offered. According to the listing on the creative sites, it came with room and board and a stipend.
Will would do nothing to narrow the focus of his inquiry yet.
He’d switched on the heat when he and Vincent got into the SUV, but he wasn’t appreciably warmer or drier by the time he turned the vehicle around and headed down the drive. The gate began to close behind him straight after he passed, so someone at the house had been watching the feed from the discreet security camera trained on the gate.
It was a fairly unusual thing in Golden Cove, that gate, but Will could understand Jemima’s need to keep her and Vincent’s kids from running out onto the main road. They’d have to get down a long drive to do so, but kids had fast little legs and could easily tumble out, and on these quiet roads, people didn’t always think to watch their speed.
The Bakers certainly didn’t begrudge anyone who wanted to walk the trails that cut through their sprawling property, only asked that any walkers or hikers remain outside the wire fences that marked the family’s residential area.
The trees were opaque shadows around him as he drove through the road unlit by anything except his headlights. The wind howled beyond, bending the trees as the rain began to batter the landscape in slashing punches.
Golden Cove seemed even more deserted when he went through this time. Only the police station glowed with anything but basic night lighting—Will had left the station lights blazing and the door unlocked so that if anyone got caught outside, they could stumble out of the rain and into shelter. He wasn’t worried about damage. The safe was empty, the filing cabinet was locked—and didn’t contain sensitive documents anyway—and his computer was hardly cutting-edge.