I meet Luz outside the nondescript brick building that smells faintly of old coffee and low tide.
The parking lot backs onto one of the less glamorous corners of the harbor, where the water laps against concrete instead of yacht hulls. No glassed-in boathouses out here, no donors’ names etched on brass plaques. Just salt air, a flickering streetlamp, and the soft thump of bass drifting all the way from the waterfront bars where Crescent Bay’s golden people drink under framed photos of regattas and Prom Throwback nights.
“You sure this is okay?” I ask, hugging my jacket tighter around me. The fabric still carries a whisper of Harrow Island’s damp.
Luz jangles a set of keys, eyes flicking toward the darkened windows. “He owes me,” she says. “And he likes puzzles. You brought the drive?”
I pat my bag. My fingers brush the slim plastic case holding the digitized microcassette, the party’s ghost preserved as ones and zeros. “Yeah,” I say. “And the school board audio. And the morning show clip.”
“Good.” She blows out a breath, condensation smearing the air between us. “Then let’s go turn a tech bro into a waveform.”
The audio lab looks like the inside of my editing laptop exploded and formed a nest.
Cables loop across the floor. Two big monitors glow in the half-dark, throwing pale light over foam-padded walls and a sagging bookshelf full of manuals with titles about signal processing and evidentiary standards. A cold coffee cup sweats on the desk next to a bowl of stale pretzels. The place smells like burnt dust, old takeout, and the faint metallic tang of overheated electronics.
The analyst swivels his chair around when we walk in. He’s older than I expected, gray at the temples, glasses perched halfway down his nose. His T-shirt says Silence Is Golden, Tape Is Silver.
“Navarro,” he says, standing to bump her fist. “You look like trouble, which means you brought me something good.”
“Good is relative,” she answers. “This is Mara Lane.”
His gaze lands on me with a flicker of recognition. “The podcast,” he says. “My kid listens. I get lecture recaps at Sunday dinner.”
My stomach tightens. “Hopefully the fact you still invite him to dinner means you don’t hate the show.”
“I appreciate clean edits,” he says, deadpan. “I’m Rafi. You got the files?”
I pass him the drive. He plugs it in with practiced, unfussy hands, then gestures to the two extra chairs. Luz takes the one closest to the door; I slide into the other and pull the headphones hanging from its back over my ears, leaving one cup off so I can still hear their voices in the room.
“Okay,” Rafi says. “Navarro told me this is off the books for now. That means my conclusion is an expert opinion, not an official report. Understood?”
“Understood,” I echo. My foot bounces under the desk, heel tapping chords against the metal chair leg.
Luz nudges my ankle with her boot. “Let him work,” she murmurs.
Rafi opens a folder on the screen. Colored bars stack neatly in the file window: Harrow_Island_Tape.wav, Harrow_Panel_Audio.mp3, CB_SchoolBoard_Elliot.wav. My throat goes dry at seeing Elliot’s name in that list, lined up right next to Juliet’s last night like a setlist.
“We’ll start with the known sample,” he says. “Recent, high quality, confirmed identity. Then we overlay the disputed one.”
He drags the school board clip into his software. The waveform spills across the screen in jagged blue lines, peaks and valleys like a flatlined Everest range.
Elliot’s voice fills my headphones a second later, crisp and infuriatingly confident. “…and to be clear, the Prom Throwback fundraiser is about healing,” he tells a room I can’t see. “We honor Juliet, we honor our community, and we move forward together. That’s what Crescent Bay does. We take broken things and make them beautiful.”
Rafi scrubs back and forth, isolating certain words. “Hear that?” he says. “The way he breathes in before ‘to be clear’? Consistent. Little uptick on ‘clear’ too. That’s his voice smoothing out the important phrase he wants people to remember.”
My hand finds a pen on the desk. I click it in and out in a restless rhythm that tries to match the peaks on the screen.
Luz leans forward. “We’ll never get him for saying dumb things at a fundraiser,” she says. “Play the other one.”
“Patience,” Rafi answers. He drags the Harrow Island file into a second track. The new waveform looks fuzzier, degraded, a shaky echo of the clean one above. “Different recording conditions, different devices, lots of background noise. But the human voice leaves a mark.”
He syncs the timelines and hits a button. The screen shifts; vertical hairline markers appear at intervals. “I’m going to line them up on pitch contour and timing,” he says. “Listen to the rhythm more than the words.”
The room narrows down to the headphones, the two waveforms, and my pulse.
First the old tape: the high, chaotic sound of teenagers on the water, laughter, sloshing, a bass line bleeding through from some boom box. Then a male voice saying, “Calm down,” muffled and distant.
Over it, Rafi layers a stripped-down piece of Elliot’s speech: mid-sentence fragments, clipped and rearranged. Not content, just sound. “…down… down… clear… here…”
“I’m going to ghost one under the other,” Rafi says. “Top track is darker blue, bottom is green. Watch.”
He hits play again. The two voices overlap. Their peaks rise and fall in tandem, tiny mountains marching across the screen with unnerving precision.
My grip tightens around the pen until the plastic creaks.
“Those stressed syllables?” Rafi taps the display with his pen. “Same placement. And watch this consonant cluster.” He zooms in. The jagged lines become intricate squiggles. “He hits the ‘cl’ in ‘clear’ and the ‘cl’ in ‘calm’ with the same little spike at the end. That’s signature.”
“Could another guy hit consonants like that?” I ask. “I mean, statistically?”
“Sure,” he says. “It’s not a fingerprint. This isn’t magic. But when you add in timbre, pitch, breath timing, and language habits, you start stacking odds.”
Luz tilts her head. “Language habits?”
“Listen for his crutches,” Rafi says. He plays the school board clip again, isolating a portion. “…that’s what Crescent Bay does. We take broken things and make them beautiful, right? We take—”
He hits a key; the waveform jumps. “…we honor our community, and we move forward together. That’s what Crescent Bay does. We—”
On the island tape, buried under the wind and drunken hoots, I hear the younger version say, “We fix this, okay? We fix it. That’s what we do.”
Rafi glances at me. “He loves that ‘we do X’ structure,” he says. “Positioning himself at the center. Even drunk, he’s building a story.”
The glass roses in the old gym lobby flash through my mind—the way the PTA moms arrange them under perfect lighting for photo ops during charity balls and throwback dances. We honor, we heal, we move forward. We put crime scenes on centerpieces and call it closure.
Rafi sits back and steeples his fingers. “On voice characteristics alone,” he says, “I’d call this a high-probability match. North of ninety percent. If I were testifying, I’d say the unknown speaker is highly likely to be Elliot Harrow.”
My pen stops clicking.
That’s the sentence I’ve been writing in my head for months, only now it’s coming from someone who doesn’t know Juliet’s smile or the treacherous rock shelf under the cliffs, just the math of sound waves.
I swallow. “High probability,” I repeat. “But not absolute.”
“Nothing in my line of work is absolute,” he says. “That’s why lawyers love and hate me in equal measure.”
Luz shifts forward. “Show us the part you cleaned up,” she says. “The argument.”
Rafi pulls up a narrower section of the island tape. On the waveform, the party chaos falls away; only a jagged ribbon remains, shadowed by a gray shape that he labels noise print.
“This is the segment you pointed to,” he says to Luz, nodding at a notation she made. “Where Juliet’s voice spikes, then we get the disputed male line, then that splash. I ran it through a couple of filters to strip out the worst hiss and wind. I’m going to slow it to seventy-five percent too. It’ll sound a little warbly, but your brain will have more room to separate syllables.”
My palms go slick around the headphone cups. I press them tighter over my ears, shutting out the lab’s hum.
He hits play.
Juliet’s laugh comes first, distorted and wobbling, but still bright. “I’m not your secret anymore,” she says, a line I’ve heard enough times to predict in my sleep. Then another male voice in the background, someone I’ve never cleanly ID’d. Then the voice that matches Elliot’s waveforms, pitched lower by the slowing.
“You can’t ruin—me, Jules,” it says.
Even stretched, the rhythm is unmistakable. He clips the ‘ruin’ in a familiar way, swallowing the second syllable.
My heart stutters. Rafi pauses the audio.
“Again, with a little more reduction,” he says quietly. His fingers dance over the keys. The waveform tightens.
“You can’t ruin me, Jules,” the voice says. “I can make this disappear.”
The words hang in my ears like thick smoke.
In my head, they stack on top of other things he’s said to me: stories needing “gentler framing,” deals that could “make all this go away,” his assurance that “the town doesn’t need all the gory details to heal.” Different vocabulary, same thesis. He decides what exists. He decides what disappears.
My throat closes. I lower the headphones, letting them rest against my collarbones, the plastic cold through my shirt.
“You heard that?” Rafi asks.
“Yeah,” I say. My voice croaks; I clear it. “Yeah, I heard it.”
Luz doesn’t look away from the screen. “You’re confident that’s not artifact? Combination of other sounds mashed together?”
“I can never say never,” he says. “But that would be an extraordinary coincidence, especially given the match on his speaking patterns from the other clips. I can show you the spectrograph if you like; the formants line up with a single human voice, not digital chop.”
“And the content,” I cut in. “A guy who grows up to be Mr. Crescent Bay brand management telling a girl he can make things disappear? That’s… on brand.”
Rafi’s mouth twitches. “I’m not here to judge his PR choices,” he says. “Just his vowels.”
Luz turns to me finally. Her eyes look sharp in the monitor glow. “This gives us motive and intent, not just presence,” she says. “He’s not just there. He’s trying to shut her up.”
I grip the edge of the desk. “What does this get us, legally?”
She exhales through her nose. “Depends how brave my bosses feel. A private consultant’s analysis, combined with that line, makes it harder to pretend he was just a bystander. But they’ll want corroboration. Other witnesses from the island. Physical evidence from the dock. And they’re going to ask how we got this tape in the first place.”
“You mean they’ll ask whether a podcast host and a sidelined detective cracked the case on their own,” I say.
“They’ll ask whether you contaminated it,” she corrects. “Chain of custody, security, whether any edits were made for, say, dramatic effect.”
Heat flares under my skin. “I didn’t touch it,” I say. “I digitized it. That’s it. No EQ, no cuts, no music beds. I treated it better than half the school board treats their ethics rules.”
Rafi raises his hands. “Hey, hey. I can vouch for a clean file,” he says. “Metadata checks out. No non-linear edits, no telltale compression. You did it right. Forensic labs use civilian recordings all the time. It’s just… high stakes.”
High stakes. I picture CPS reading that harassment complaint from Feld, Elliot’s lawyers printing it out on expensive paper, the PTA mothers whispering at meetings that I’ve weaponized “unstable fans.” I picture those same mothers dancing at the cliffs-themed Prom Throwback while glass roses glow on their tables, the real shards locked away in evidence boxes or still wedged into rock.
“So what now?” I ask. “I drop this audio in the feed and let the world hear him threaten her? Or I sit on it until the department decides whether Juliet’s worth pissing off the Harrows?”
Luz’s jaw tightens. “Don’t air it yet.”
The instinctive “Why not?” rises in my throat, but I swallow it. She hears the swallow anyway.
“If you publish first, you turn this from evidence into content,” she says. “His lawyers will argue you manipulated it for drama. They’ll say the whole analysis happened because you needed the next twist. Let me take this up the chain. Quietly.”
“Your chain is made of Harrow plaques and Calder’s old golf buddies,” I say. “They already paid my mother to rewrite one tiny line of truth. You think they won’t try to erase a whole sentence that ruins their golden boy?”
Rafi swivels away from the screens, giving us the illusion of privacy he probably hears through every panel.
Luz steps closer, close enough that I can smell her coffee breath under the room’s dusty electronics. “I’m not naive,” she says. “But this line? Coming from a vetted specialist? It’s leverage, Mara. In the right hands, it forces movement. Drop it in your RSS feed first and you hand them an excuse to dismiss it as another stunt.”
My fingers twitch toward my bag where my portable recorder lives, an automatic motion I hate myself for. This is exactly the paradox I built my life on: the microphone is both weapon and shield. Juliet’s voice reached the world because I hit publish. Katie’s story became real to people because it played between ads for mattresses and meal kits. And yet every time I turn pain into audio, someone accuses me of using girls’ trauma to buy my way out of my laundromat apartment.
I unclench my hand.
“Can you guarantee they’ll use it?” I ask. “That they won’t just sit on your report until Elliot finishes his next panel on ‘ethical storytelling’?”
Luz doesn’t answer right away. The hum of the computer fans fills the space. Out on the harbor, a foghorn bleats, reminding me that the water doesn’t care about regattas, or donors, or who gets to control a narrative.
“I can guarantee they’ll have to respond,” she says finally. “And that’s more than we’ve had in twenty-six years.”
Rafi clears his throat gently. “I’ll draft my findings tonight,” he says. “Navarro can loop me in formally when she’s ready. In the meantime, I strongly recommend you keep this file encrypted and backed up in more than one place.”
A chill slides down my spine. “I’ve already had one death threat about my backups,” I say. “You’re preaching to the choir.”
He smiles faintly. “Then you know the sermon.”
Outside, the air hits me with a briny slap. The lab’s door shuts behind us with a soft hydraulic hiss, sealing the machines and waveforms inside.
Across the harbor, the cliffs loom in the distance, dark against the cloudy sky. Somewhere beneath them lies that treacherous rock shelf where kids used to sneak cigarettes after dances, trusting that the town’s pretty stories would keep them safe. Crescent Bay still sells that view on postcards and charity ball invitations. Come dance where the prom queen fell. They never say what pushed her.
Luz stuffs her hands into her jacket pockets. “I’ll call you after I talk to my lieutenant,” she says. “No emails. No texts. Assume everything written is discoverable.”
“You really know how to sweep a girl off her feet,” I say, the joke landing flat between us.
Her mouth tugs upward anyway. “Get some sleep,” she says. “Hug your kid. Don’t open any more surprise emails from Harrow Media.”
“I already have one from them waiting,” I admit. “Subject line: ‘Inquiry re: recent allegations.’ Very soothing.”
“Don’t answer it yet,” she says. “Let’s see what my side does first.”
I watch her walk to her car, taillights smearing red streaks over the damp pavement. When she pulls out, the bass from down by the waterfront drifts over again, that endless Crescent Bay party echoing through the salt and exhaust.
I sit in my own car with the door still open, the island tape’s new sentence replaying in my head on a loop.
You can’t ruin me, Jules. I can make this disappear.
For twenty-six years, he did.
Now I have his voice on a thumb drive and a specialist ready to swear to its shape in court, yet I still sit there staring at my phone, thumb hovering over my podcast app.
Do I clip that line into an episode and blast it past the cliffs, into earbuds and kitchens and PTA carpools, forcing the town to hear what really echoed over Harrow’s dock?
Or do I close the app, drive home, and hand Juliet’s last argument back to the same system that once decided her story was worth less than a donor’s reputation?
I pull the door shut and let the question ride shotgun, knowing that whatever choice I make next will decide not just Elliot’s narrative, but mine.