She had added five items to the list:
Chief Redbone was right: Pretty thin.
De Seroux had no criminal record. He didn’t own a motor home. And as Victor had pointed out, anyone could have downloaded Dorrance’s picture from the Internet.
Laura stared at the picture of de Seroux she had photocopied. The deadness in his eyes didn’t translate to the dark photocopy, or it could be that she had attached too much significance to it. A lot of people looked dull. Her conviction that he was Jessica’s killer was starting to evaporate.
To cheer herself up, she went out and treated herself on her own money to a good dinner. Oysters, crab cakes, and Merlot at the Owl Cafe. The place was small and intimate. The rest of the diners were all couples.
Usually, she wasn’t bothered about dining out alone. But tonight she felt self-conscious, as if people were looking at her. That wasn’t true—one glance at the other diners told her that. They were too concerned with each other.
Maybe that was it. She pictured Tom opposite her, their heads bent together over wine glasses. Pictured them walking out on the marina dock set in a plain of marsh and sawgrass, holding hands and watching the sun set on the water. Or on the porch at the Gibson Inn, listening to the night sounds, making out if no one else was around.
In the king-sized bed.
His presence, the way he looked at her, the quiet way he talked. Never, ever in a hurry. His life just the way he wanted it. Something to be said for that.
Except his life wasn’t exactly the way he wanted or else he wouldn’t want her.
As a cop, she always worked with a partner. Someone to watch her back, an ally. Not being alone …
It always came as a surprise to her that she didn’t have any family. There were relatives back east, people she hardly knew. She doubted they would welcome her intrusion and she didn’t want anything from them. She was used to being alone; only children were, as a rule, self-reliant.
Still, she’d always thought she would find someone. She had thought that Billy Linton would solve all her problems, that he could wipe out the idea of her parents dying by gunshot at close-range. Of course that had not worked. She and Billy didn’t have the stuff to sustain even a normal relationship, let alone one that was that had been banged up from the beginning. Ever since, all she had to show for a personal life was a string of failed relationships.
Now Tom was asking her to give it a try one more time. Living together wasn’t marriage, but it was a commitment. She couldn’t even think about getting married again, but she could think about sharing her house.
She paid her check and walked back to the Inn, decided to prolong the night by having another drink out on the gallery. She walked into the bar, glancing up at Jimmy de Seroux’s publicity photo.
She’d seen him before … well, of course she had. She’d studied that photograph more than a few times in the last two days. But there was something else.
Then it came to her.
Where she had seen him.
32
“What a day,” Victor said when he finally got back to Laura that night. “We really thought he was going to take a plea, but he backed out at the last minute.”
“Lehman? What did he say?”
“Nothing. He demanded to talk to his lawyer in private and that was it, man. Never came back. Is Cruller pissed!”
Roger Cruller was the county attorney.
“I knew—
Laura wondered about Lehman’s attorney, Barry Glass, who had a reputation for winning big cases. Why had he called the meeting if he didn’t want to work out a deal? Only if Lehman himself got cold feet.
“And the bad thing? We don’t have enough to arrest him at this point. The forensics on the computer could take
She let him rant for a while before changing the subject. “Did you run my guy’s name through NCIC?” she asked.
“I’ve been so busy, I must’ve forgot. You still want me to do it? I’ll get to it first—”
“That’s okay, we ran him at the PD here. He doesn’t have a criminal record.”
“Well, I guess that’s it.”
