Kirstie studied him. “How much time did you and Jack spend here, anyway?”
“Oh, about four days a summer, three summers in all. Maybe twelve days, total.” He shook his head. “Doesn’t seem like much, does it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve had love affairs that were briefer.”
“None recently, I hope.”
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”
They were cruising along the seaward side now, past a narrow beach composed of broken bits of coral, pebbly and coarse, over a solid coral foundation. Palms and the imported Australian pines called casuarinas fringed the beach, swaying gently as if to unheard music.
Near the southern tip of the key, the motorboat Pice had promised came into view, bobbing in the shallows. It was moored to a small dock at the end of a pathway twisting down from the house between landscaped beds of poinsettias and yellow jasmine.
The dock was new to Steve. It hadn’t been there when he and Jack explored the key. Neither had the path, for that matter, nor the flower beds. A lot had changed. But the important things had remained untouched, unsullied-a small but precious part of his life that had never been tainted.
The boat glided toward the dock. Anastasia was barking again. Pelican Key waited, silent and calm.
Abruptly, Kirstie turned to him, her face almost solemn. “Steve. I
… I hope this works out for you. For both of us.”
“What does?”
“The trip. The time we spend here. I hope you find… whatever it is you’re looking for.”
The words touched him in a tender place. He reached out, stroked her hair, soft and golden, and she did not pull away.
“I don’t need anything more than what I have right now,” he whispered.
It was the right thing to say. But he no longer knew if it was true-or if it could be true for him, ever again.
3
At eight-fifteen on Saturday morning, a tenant of Saguaro Terraces was unlocking his Jeep Cherokee in the carport when he noticed the ceiling light in a Toyota Paseo glowing dimly, the passenger-side door slightly ajar.
He found a young woman lying in the driver’s seat, which had been levered back to a nearly horizontal position. Her dress had been lifted above her hips, her panties shredded.
“Miss?”
He rapped on the windshield and, when that failed to rouse her, reached through the open window and shook her gently.
She listed sideways in her seat, her pretty face turning toward him as her head rolled. Through a net of blond hair, her eyes stared at him and through him, their blue gaze fixed on death.
After that, things happened very fast.
Phoenix P.D. was on the scene by 8:27. A senior homicide investigator, Detective Robert Ashe, arrived soon afterward. Examining the body with gloved hands, he found the needle mark at the side of the throat.
Ashe was a twenty-year veteran, eligible for a full pension and thinking seriously about taking it, but he was still conscientious enough to read the bulletins that crossed his desk. He recognized the pattern.
“Better call the feds,” he told the watch commander.
It was nine-fifteen by then, and already Phoenix was getting hot.
Two special agents from the Denver field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were on the ground at Sky Harbor Airport three hours later. A Phoenix agent met them at the flight gate and introduced himself as Ramon Pena.
“I’m Peter Lovejoy.” The tall, pale Denver agent shook Pena’s hand and sneezed. “Don’t worry. Nothing catching. Only allergies.”
Tension and fatigue were recorded on Lovejoy’s thin face. His high forehead was prematurely lined, his eyes tired and angry. It was obvious that the long investigation had worn him down.
“You’ll like Phoenix,” Pena said, trying for a light note. “Whole environment is hypoallergenic.”
Lovejoy’s partner smiled. “Don’t count on it. Peter’s nose has the extraordinary ability to sniff out individual pollen grains five hundred miles away.”
She said it with affection, but Lovejoy looked nettled anyway. “Possibly a slight exaggeration,” he muttered, then blew wetly into a crumpled Kleenex.
Pena wasn’t looking at him. The woman held his attention now. She was slender and poised, her skin the color of dark rum, her brown hair close-cropped in a skull-tight Afro. The sculptured planes of her face captured a regal quality that made him think of carved likenesses on ancient monuments.
He supposed she must be worn out, too, and as frustrated as her partner, but she didn’t show it. Though she wore the Bureau’s trademark navy blue jacket, white shirt, and beige slacks, she conveyed the austere glamour of a model on a fashion runway.
“I’m Tamara Moore,” she said as they started hiking down the concourse.
“Tamara, huh? Nice name.”
“I’ve been told it means ‘date palm.’”
“A date palm in the desert. You’ll fit right in.”
Moore smiled, and Lovejoy sneezed again.
Guiding the government sedan onto 1-17 with the air conditioner on high, Pena asked how long they’d been after Mister Twister.
“Eight months,” Lovejoy answered. “Since he did a girl in Denver.”
“How’d the Denver office get involved in a homicide?”
“The victim’s body was dumped on Trail Ridge road in the Rocky Mountain National Forest. Federal jurisdiction.”
“And you tied it to some earlier murders?”
“Yes.” Lovejoy honked into a tissue. “In our judgment, there were two relevant unsolved homicides, one in San Antonio, the other in Albuquerque. Each case was handled locally, and nobody’d made the connection.”
“What is the connection? What pattern do you look for?”
“Within certain parameters, he follows the same M.O. each time. Bar pickup, lethal injection in the neck. Always on a weekend-Friday or Saturday night. And always the same victim profile: attractive woman, mid-twenties to mid-thirties, blue eyes, blond hair, fair complexion, slender build.”
Pena caught a strong whiff of the bureaucrat’s cover-your-ass mentality in Lovejoy’s answers. In our judgment… within certain parameters…
This guy will go far, he thought with a mixture of amusement and bitterness. “So there’ve been three victims since?”
This time Moore answered. “Not counting the latest one. Las Vegas, Dallas, San Diego. Add Phoenix to the list, and you’ve got seven in all.”
“He keeps busy, doesn’t he?”
“Too damn busy. Murder is a compulsion for him. He won’t stop till he’s caught or killed.”
No equivocations or qualifications for her. She was a straight-shooter.
“Guess you’ve got a lot of people working this thing,” Pena said.
“Over sixty law enforcement agents full-time. It’s a multijurisdictional task force, and somehow we wound up in charge. Well, actually Peter did.”
Lovejoy shrugged. “I had seniority, so the Denver SAC made me task force leader. But from my perspective,
