"No ma'am."
Brannon was already going. She watched his back, his orange life vest, recede up the dock at a jog. She looked down at her arm. Through the thin cotton of her long-sleeved fishing shirt she could see the beginning of it already, a reddening, four marks in a row on the inside and one on the outside where his thumb had been. By tomorrow it would be purple. She knew exactly how it would look by tomorrow; she had seen the arms of patients after they'd been restrained, and the arms of the elderly where somebody had held on too hard to help them out of bed.
Tuan was looking at it too.
"Ms. Pettaway," he said under his breath. "Are you—"
"I'm fine. Do you still have your phone?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Is it recording?"
He hesitated. "It's been recording since the patrol boat turned in," he said. "From the fuel dock. I put it on the pump housing. I didn't—I don't know how much it got. The wind."
"Good," she said. "Don't stop."
Shuford heard that. He looked at Tuan, at the phone sticking out of the chest pocket of his rain bibs, camera side out. He didn't say anything about it. Up in the half-empty parking lot, a white Chevrolet Tahoe was coming through the gate too fast and pulling crooked into a handicapped space at the head of the boardwalk.
"That'll be him," Shuford said.
Lawson Tillery came down C dock the way he did everything at Halyard Point, as if he were walking through a building he was thinking of buying. He was fifty-two years old, tall, with his father's long jaw and none of his father's weather, in khaki trousers and a navy quarter-zip with the logo of his company, Tillery Coastal Properties, embroidered small on the chest. He had Costa sunglasses pushed up on his head despite the rain and a blue folder in a Ziploc bag under one arm.