Chapter Three
Detective Cab Bolton didn't notice the Gulf wave riding up the beach until he felt salt water lapping at his two-hundred-dollar Hugo Boss loafers. The surf rose above his ankles like a margarita in a blender and soaked inside his shoes before he had time to leap out of the way. As the wave retreated, he squatted in the sand, removed the loafers, and peeled off his wet socks. He shook his head in exaggerated dismay.
'Every time I buy a new pair of shoes, we get a beach body the next day,' he complained.
Cab rolled up the trouser legs of his navy blue silk suit. With his hare ankles and size 13 feet on display at the bottom of his six-foot- six frame, he resembled a great blue heron. His long neck, spiky blond hair, and the ski- jump slope of his sunburnt nose contributed to the impression of a bird on stilts.
Lala Mosqueda, who was the lead crime scene analyst, didn't look sympathetic. 'It's Florida, Cab. You ever hear of flip-flops?'
'I'd sooner wear Crocs,' he said.
The damage to the leather was done, but he took a handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped the sand from his shoes and blotted the excess water. He hooked the shoes on the fingers of his right hand and let them dangle. With his other hand, he stripped off his amber sunglasses and squinted at the tower of the hotel.
'So what do we have in this place, five hundred rooms?' Cab mused. 'Maybe more? You'd figure somebody had to be up there staring at the beach at three in the morning. Somebody saw something.'
Lala shook her head. 'No way. Too far, too dark.'
Cab pointed a long, crooked finger at the floor-to-ceiling windows, where at least a dozen gawkers followed the activity near the water. 'Look at the binoculars spying on us right now. Beachfront voyeurs are always looking for people humping by the water in the middle of the night.'
'Well, we've got uniforms interviewing guests in the lobby,' Lala told him. 'It's Sunday, and half the hotel is checking out. We're trying to catch people as they leave.'
'Good.' Cab eyed the narrow strip of Gulf Coast sand, which stretched along the water like a ribbon for several miles in both directions. Even in the early morning, there were already bathers sunning themselves up and down the beach. 'If you strangled someone in the surf, what would you do next?' he asked Lala.
'I'd walk along the water and head up the beach where there are a ton of footprints in the sand,' she said.
'Exactly. I hate beach bodies.' He replaced his sunglasses on his face, covering up his sky-blue eyes. 'OK, Mosquito, what do we know so far?'
Cab saw her dark eyes flash with annoyance. He knew she hated it when he used her nickname, but he couldn't resist pushing her buttons. He'd never been a master of social graces; his mouth was always getting him into trouble. That was one of the reasons he'd gone from the FBI to the police to private investigative work and back to the police in half a dozen cities over the past twelve years. His colleagues also resented his born-in-LA style. Unlike most cops working for a pension, he had a bulging trust fund thanks to his Hollywood mother, and he did what he did because he enjoyed it, not because he needed a paycheck. That didn't fly with most cops, and particularly not in Naples, which was a sun-soaked resort town of rich snowbirds and spoiled spring break college students. If you had money, you were supposed to be on the other side of the social divide.
He wasn't fooling Lala with his jokes, though. He was deliberately keeping her at a distance, and she knew it. They'd had a brief affair not long ago that was the equivalent of a supernova: super-charged, blindingly bright, collapsing with a big bang. Their attraction hadn't gone away, but what was left between them was a black hole, with both of them fighting against the pull of gravity.
'OK,
She had a very pretty Cuban face, but there was definitely no light escaping from it now. Black hole.
'A jogger found the body before sunrise,' she told him. 'She was face down in the water, topless, with her bikini top wrapped around her neck. He pulled her out of the water and tried mouth-to-mouth, but she'd been dead for a while. Preliminary estimate on time of death is between two and four o'clock. From the ligature marks on the neck and bruising on the backs of the shoulders, it looks like someone held her down and strangled her in the water. The ME isn't sure yet whether asphyxiation resulted from the rope of the bikini top or the water itself.'
'But she didn't just get drunk and do a bellyflop in the surf?' Cab asked.
'No, she definitely had help. The girl had been drinking, though. We found an empty bottle of Yellow Tail near the body, and her teeth and tongue show discoloration from red wine. We won't know how much she had until we get the blood analysis back. Maybe she was drunk, maybe she wasn't.'
'Did she have sex?' Cab asked.
'She was still wearing her bikini bottom,' Lala replied in a monotone, 'and the fabric wasn't ripped or otherwise disturbed. There was no bruising, blood, or external injury consistent with vaginal or anal rape, at least based on a visual inspection.'
Cab wasn't convinced. 'You're talking about a teenage girl who's drinking and topless on the beach. That sure smells like sex was involved.'
'I'm not saying she didn't have sex, but there isn't any evidence yet of sexual assault.'
'Fair enough. I get it. Did you find anything else near the body?'
Lala gestured up and down the beach with frustration. 'We're combing the sand, but you've got a few thousand people along here every day. We'll bag and test what we find, but don't get your hopes up.'
'How about the body itself?' Cab asked.
'We're checking for DNA under her fingernails, but her hands were lying in the water. Even if she fought back, I'm not sure what we're going to find.'
'See, this is why I hate beach bodies,' Cab repeated.
Lala opened her mouth as if she had more to tell him, but he held up a hand to stop her as he let the details soak into his mind. His way of approaching an investigation was to add layers of fact to his brain like coats of paint. He liked to let one coat dry before slapping on the next one. Lala was different. She preferred to blurt out her whole report at once and sort through the puzzle pieces.
Lala was dressed all in black. Black T-shirt, black jeans, black sandals, all of it matching her shoulder-length black hair. She was in her mid-thirties, like Cab, and had spent her entire career with the Naples Police. She was intense about everything that Cab wasn't. Her Cuban family. Her Cuban politics. Her Catholic heritage. Her job. Her temper. She was fire; he was water, always flowing downhill, always running away. Still, she was about the only cop in Florida he considered a friend.
Not that he would ever say so to her face.
'Cab?' Lala asked impatiently.
'Yeah, OK, keep going. Do we know who this girl is?'
'We got lucky about that. Her name's Glory Fischer. Sixteen years old.'
Cab exhaled in dismay. 'She's just a kid.'
'Sixteen's older than you think these days.'
'Yeah, yeah, thirteen is the new eighteen, sixteen's the new twenty-one. How'd we make the ID?'
'Her sister and Glory's boyfriend were looking for her in the hotel grounds when we showed up. The sister said Glory wasn't in their room, and when they heard about the body, they both freaked. The sister confirmed Glory's ID from a photograph. We've got them with a policewoman now. A counselor's on the way.'
'What about a parent?'
Lala shook her head. 'The girls are from rural Wisconsin, an area called Door County. Mom's back home, Dad's deceased. The sister already called the mother and gave her the news. She's flying down here today.'
'Wisconsin,' Cab said. 'Remind me, that's north of Michigan, right?'
'No, the place north of Michigan is called Canada, Cab.'
'Same difference. What were these girls doing here anyway?'
'The hotel is crawling with college dancers,' Lala told him. 'There was some kind of competition this week
