Bone Island 01 - Ghost Shadow by Heather Graham

names of the female college students, then the two Matthews children. She was about to scratch out the names of Pete Dryer and his sister and brother-in-law, but she didn’t. Nor did she scratch out David Beckett’s name. She did scratch out Molly and Turk. Not only were they not local, but they were also listed as “senior citizens.” It was possible, of course, that they had been a pair of homicidal octogenarians. It simply wasn’t probable.
    She leafed through more pages, searching for the names of locals who had been questioned. Lily and Gunn Barnard, Tanya’s parents, were dead; Sam Barnard, Tanya’s brother, was alive and well and in Key West now. Danny Zigler had been questioned, and all the Becketts living in the Keys had been questioned, including Liam, who now worked investigation in Key West. Her own brother, Sean, had been questioned, along with many of those who had gone to high school with Tanya.
    Katie frowned, seeing Sean’s name. She had never realized that the police had questioned him.
    Bartenders up and down Duval had been questioned. Once again, Katie was surprised when she saw where Tanya Barnard had last been seen.
    O’Hara’s Pub.
    Her uncle Jamie had been questioned! Jamie, and Sean. She hesitated and wrote down their names.
    She was still so stunned by what she read that she jumped a mile when her cell phone started to ring. She frowned, looking at all the numbers on the caller ID.
    “Hello?” she said, feeling a strange sense of trepidation.
    “Katie, it’s Sean,” her brother’s voice said.
     
    “I was home because it was summer,” Sam Barnard said to David as they sat in the sidewalk bar. “I’d gone to college for a straight business degree, then decided I wanted a minor in marine sciences. It was going to take me five years to get my degree. I never went back for the last year. Doesn’t matter-I never wanted to breed trout anyway. I have a good business-I learned enough to keep up five charter boats and a Gulf-side house right on the water up in Key Largo. I was fishing with my dad during the day, and I saw Tanya around four when we came in. I think I told her she was a jerk. Because of the Ohio State guy. I was on your side, though, of course, now I know that none of us can ever tell anyone else what to do. But like I said, she didn’t tell me to fly a kite, kiss my ass or any other such thing. She said she knew she had messed up, but that if you didn’t want her, she was leaving. She asked me if I thought she was a bad person, not knowing until you were back-all in one piece-before thinking that she’d made a mistake. I told her, yeah, she’d kind of been a selfish bitch. She’d wanted everything-the parties, the good times and then the guy she’d cheated on. She didn’t even get mad. I was a jerk, and it was the last time I ever saw my sister alive.”
    “So she left the house after four that afternoon?” David said after a moment.
    Sam nodded.
    “Danny Zigler saw her at five at O’Hara’s Pub. In the police reports, Jamie O’Hara said that he served her a pint of Guinness, and that she was nervous. She smiled at him, and told him to wish her luck, stayed until around seven-and then she left, and no one saw her alive again,” David said.
    “You’ve seen the police reports?” Sam asked, curious and surprised.
    “My cousin is working it as a cold case,” David said.
    Sam pointed a finger at him. “I remember something. Your cousin, Liam, was one of the people who saw her at O’Hara’s.”
    “At least ten people saw her at O’Hara’s that night,” David pointed out.
    “The question is, which of those ten people weren’t seen in the bar after? Or, oh, hell, that would be the point here, huh? No one knows who saw her once she left that pub. Somewhere, in the next hour, someone found her and killed her. That’s nothing new, not really. I’m sure the police must have narrowed down the timeline when it happened. And, of course, the problem around