“Go home,” she told him. “And don’t come back to the island for a while. It might not be safe for you here.”
éminence Grise
Jo’s phone pinged just as she set it down on the front desk at Furious Fitness. A text message had arrived from Claude.
Got the surveillance video of the Harding house. I just pulled up outside the gym. Can we talk?
Jo glanced out the window. Sure enough, Claude was sitting in a car across the street, holding up what looked like a thumb drive. Jo eagerly waved her over.
“You okay?” Jo asked as Claude pushed through the door. She barely resembled the woman Jo had come to know. Her skin was sallow and her eyes swollen.
“I didn’t sleep last night,” Claude said. “You were right. Rocca was at the Harding house a few hours before Spencer crashed. Have a look at file number one.”
Jo immediately inserted the drive into her computer. It contained two video files labeled “ONE” and “TWO.” When she clicked on file ONE, she saw black-and-white footage of the street-facing side of the Harding house. Three kids sped by on bikes and a woman in a gray uniform walked through the frame in the direction of the nearest neighbor’s house. A time stamp in the lower right corner read JUNE 9 19:00.
“The files are twelve hours long. Spencer Harding’s helicopter went down just before midnight on June ninth, am I right?”
“Yes,” Jo confirmed.
“So you’re looking at seven o’clock. Fast-forward to 21:38.”
Jo slid the cursor to the right point and pressed play. A man in a polo shirt and shorts appeared on the sidewalk and turned down Harding’s drive.
“That’s Rocca, isn’t it?” Claude asked, tapping the screen.
Jo moved the cursor back a few seconds and paused on a frame where the man’s face was visible. If she’d passed him on the sidewalk, dressed casually and out of context as he was, she might not have recognized him. But the gait definitely belonged to Chief Rocca.
“So he was at Harding’s house three hours before the helicopter crash.”
“He was,” Claude said. “And did you notice which direction he came from?”
Jo studied the still image. “It looks like he was coming from the direction of Jackson Dunn’s house.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Claude said. “So I had a look at a few other files. Open the one labeled ‘TWO.’”
Jo clicked on the second file. This time, the camera was facing the Dunn home. At 21:32, Chief Rocca exited the house. He walked briskly and with purpose. Even from a distance, the scowl on his face was unmistakable.
“Do you know what happened forty-eight minutes before Rocca decided to pay Harding a visit?” Claude asked Jo. Jo thought for a moment, then shook her head. “A forty-three-minute-long special episode of the podcast They Walk Among Us was released—the same episode in which you and your friend accused Spencer Harding of murder.”
“So Rocca was with Jackson Dunn that night. As soon as the podcast was over, he headed to Spencer Harding’s house. Three hours later, Harding’s helicopter crashed in New York Harbor. An hour after that, the Mattauk police officially arrived on the Pointe.”
“Yes,” Claude said. “And now you have proof that Rocca let Spencer escape.”
“And some pretty compelling evidence that Jackson Dunn was involved, too.”
“Yes, but it’s too late to make Jackson pay for his crimes. It hasn’t made the news yet, but he died yesterday.”
“Bees?” Jo asked.
Claude nodded. “He was on his roof deck when it happened. One of the staff members witnessed the whole thing. She told me that a swarm swooped down out of nowhere. Jackson was stung hundreds of times, but she wasn’t touched. The poor woman was so traumatized that I had to give her the rest of the weekend off. She said Jackson suffered horribly.”