Page 7 of Crosscurrent

Tom didn’t look away from his monitors. “That depends entirely on how emotionally flexible we’re being with the definition of running.”

Across the table, Reagan lowered her chamomile tea with the exhausted patience of a woman who had somehow become den mother to a collection of highly competent idiots.

“Tom,” she warned.

“What?” He finally glanced over. “I haven’t actually hit enter yet.”

Reagan pursed her lips. “That is not the reassuring legal distinction you think it is.”

The basement beneath Sugar & Salt had once held extra flour bins and broken shelving. Now it looked like a high-budget intelligence unit assembled by people with excellent intentions and deeply inconsistent respect for federal law.

Tom’s six-monitor workstation dominated the far wall. Wade’s disguised weapons locker sat beside a rack of charging drone batteries. Piper’s algebra homework occupied the far end of the conference table underneath three surveillance maps and half a bag of pretzel twists.

Nobody downstairs found this arrangement remotely strange anymore.

Gabe stripped off his damp jacket and tossed it over the back of a chair while Wade unlaced his boots near the stairs.

Rain hammered steadily against the small basement windows.

“Talk to me,” Reagan said.

Cara crossed quietly to the espresso machine before Gabe could answer. Thirty seconds later she slid a shot across the table toward him without asking how he took it anymore.

Perfect, as always.

Honestly, the woman was dangerous.

“Adult male,” Gabe said, settling into the chair facing the stairwell out of long-ingrained FBI habit. “Mid-fifties. Coast Guard recovered the body below the Overlook two hours ago now.”

“No ID?” Cara asked.

“None.”

Tom finally turned away from the monitors. “Accidental fall?”

Wade shrugged, but Gabe shook his head. “The geometry’s wrong.”

That got everybody’s attention.

He borrowed Reagan’s pen and pulled her legal pad closer, sketching the bluff trail quickly from memory.

“If somebody slips along the main trail here”—he tapped the page—“they hit the pine shelf halfway down.” Another line. “But the victim ended up here, farther north beneath the secondary rock line.”

He drew another line. “But this guy was in the surf, so he had to go off here.” He tapped the overlook spot.

Reagan pursed her lips. “Chief Vega would know that.”

“She's smart. She knows. But she's not going to confirm anything without evidence. No need. The coroner has the body. She'll get a finding by the morning. Maybe sooner.”

Reagan tapped her three-color pen against her legal pad. “And it's not our case.”

“It's not our case,” Gabe agreed.

“There is no client. There is no missing-persons inquiry.” Reagan ticked the points off on her fingers. “In actual point of fact, there is no reason for us to be looking at it at all.”

“There is one,” Cara said. She had been across from Reagan, going over Tom's morning notes, and now she looked up. “We're bored.”

The room sat with that.