Sea Change

“Christ,” Molly said. “You don’t drive the car, you hardly ever wear your uniform, you don’t use the department issue gun. What’s wrong with you anyway?”

“More than we have time to examine,” Jesse said.

“What’s up?”

“Two things,” Molly said. “One, the Lady Jane is in fact out of Miami, owned by Harrison Darnell.”

“Un-huh.”

“And, two, Detective Kelly Cruz of Fort Lauderdale PD

wants you to call her on her cell phone. If you’d been in the company car I could have patched her through to the radio.”

“How many kids you got, Molly?” Jesse said.

“Four, you know that.”

“And am I one of them?” Jesse said.

“Oh go fuck yourself . . . sir.”

“Give me Cruz’s cell phone number,” Jesse said.

Molly told him, Jesse wrote it down and smiled as he broke the connection. He dialed Kelly Cruz.

“Couple things,” Jesse said. “You guys got that tape dated yet?”

“No,” Kelly Cruz said. “Don’t have the budget for it.”

“Okay, you owed me,” Jesse said. “You got a date?”

“Lab found a date and time stamp,” she said. “March seventh, this year, at three-oh-nine in the afternoon.”

7 9

R O B E R T B . P A R K E R

“And I think I know where,” Jesse said.

“Really?”

“Cockpit of a yacht named Lady Jane out of Miami,” Jesse said.

“Cockpit’s appropriate,” Kelly said. “You know who owns the boat?”

“Harrison Darnell,” Jesse said.

“Address?”

“I’ll have Molly Crane call you as soon as we stop talking,”

Jesse said. “She’s got it.”

“Okay. You know where the yacht is now?”

“Here,” Jesse said.

“Mr. Darnell aboard?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll check on him,” Kelly Cruz said. “I got people I can call in Miami.”

“Appreciate it,” Jesse said. “Got anything else?”

“Talked to the parents,” she said.

“Mr. and Mrs. Plum?”

“Yes. They live in Miami.”

“Close at hand,” Jesse said.

“Sure, ’bout twenty miles from me. They didn’t know even where she was living, they said. They had no commu-nication with her, and hadn’t for a couple years.”

“Any, ah, precipitating incident?” Jesse said.

“Wow,” Kelly Cruz said. “Precipitating incident. Not really, they just, they said, were at the end of their tether. Her grandfather, guy that founded Plum and Partridge, left her a 8 0

S E A C H A N G E

ton of money in trust until she turned twenty-five. When she got it, they told me, she was pretty smart with the money.”

“So she got richer,” Jesse said.

“Yeah. She lived high up on the hog,” Kelly Cruz said,

“off the invested principal.”

“That an issue?”

“Yeah. She drank too much, did too much dope, fucked whoever stopped by. They think she’s some kind of bad seed.