“Looking for something?” Zane asked. “Inside him?”
“Means whatever it is, it’s small enough to swallow,” Nick offered. He sounded positively ill. “Is his watch still on him?”
“No, it’s gone. O, get out of here,” Ty said, almost as desperate to have Nick leave as Nick probably was. When Nick raised his head, Ty hardened his expression. “Consider that an order if you must.”
Rather than getting pissy about Ty pulling rank on him, Nick gave him a grateful nod and retreated up the stairs.
Kelly stepped out of the freezer wearing a pair of black butcher’s gloves that went up to his elbows. He was holding a section of Milton’s insides. He showed it to Ty and Zane with a frown, then squeezed it between his fingers. Ty backed away from him, covering his lower face with his arm. Zane coughed and put a hand over his mouth.
“I don’t think they found what they were after,” Kelly concluded with another experimental squeeze. It made a wet, squishing sound.
“What is wrong with you?” Ty cried. “Put that down! Jesus Christ!”
Kelly looked from him to the gore in his hand. “What? I’m wearing gloves.”
Ty gagged and had to turn away. “I can’t,” he said pitifully, and made his way to the stairs to follow Nick’s retreat.
“Why don’t you think they found what they were looking for?” Zane asked Kelly as soon as they reached the top of the stairs.
“They cut open his stomach, which is probably where anything he swallowed in the last day would still be. Then they started on his intestines. But I can tell you right now, it wouldn’t have made it that far. I think they stopped because they were interrupted by the cook, not because they found anything.”
Zane curled his lip in disgust.
“Unless we’re dealing with a straight-up psychopath who likes playing with people’s insides,” Kelly added. “I mean, low probability, but it is you and Ty, so anything’s poss—”
Zane held up a hand to get Kelly to stop talking.
Kelly patted his shoulder in sympathy.
After Ty and Nick had both vacated the kitchen, Zane sent Kelly to go find Stanton. Night was falling, they now had two bodies on their hands, and one of those was the wife of the head butler. Deuce had been forced to sedate the man when he’d been told. The staff was a shambles, the members of the wedding party had all locked themselves in their rooms for the night, and the Stanton family was beginning to eye the Gradys like this was all somehow their fault. The Gradys, for the most part, were carrying on like it was business as usual. Two dead bodies at a family get-together hadn’t caused many of them to blink.
One thing he knew with certainty was that this would continue to spiral and more people would get hurt if they didn’t figure out how to get to the mainland somehow. He wasn’t even sure that getting to the bottom of it and finding out the whys and hows would help at this point.
Until they could get help from the mainland, though, they would have to handle this on their own. Zane asked Marley to video the scene, and the blond Snake Eater Ty had gotten friendly with, Frost, was taking photos. Every inch of the kitchen from top to bottom was being recorded as John English supervised. He had a solid alibi—he’d been watching Amelia and the other kids swim—and he was the only man on the island who could have lifted Milton’s body onto that hook alone. Zane wasn’t sure he necessarily liked the big Snake Eater, but he was an effective leader and his team all seemed to respect him. That said a lot about a person.
English was now treating Zane like his counterpart: the leader of the Grady/Sidewinder band. Zane wasn’t sure how that had happened, but he supposed with Nick and Ty both upstairs throwing up, and Kelly more interested in blood-spatter patterns than motive, Zane was the only one left.
He was fairly certain they’d lost Nick as the lead on the investigation, and he would probably have to take it over now. He’d have to sit down with Nick and find out what he’d learned, but it wasn’t his first priority right now. None of this was his first priority.
“Nick going to be okay?” he asked Kelly.
Kelly shrugged. “That was a new one for me. He’s never reacted like that to blood, not in front of me. Means whatever that was happened while they were gone this time. I don’t know. I’m beginning to understand why he refused to go back to work, though, and it wasn’t because he has a fucking tremor in his hand.”
“Ty’s been doing the same thing. Not to that extent, but . . . what happened to them over there?” Zane asked, voice hushed and edging toward desperate.