Burgers, yes, sure. There’s a band playing songs that Huck doesn’t recognize and a bunch of kids in their twenties dancing. Tourists, spring-breakers. Huck and Rupert are geezers in this crowd but it doesn’t matter, they’re having fun, Heidi is taking good care of them. Huck feels a hand on his back and he turns to see Sadie. She pulls Rupert up out of his chair, and he claps a hand on Huck’s shoulder, which is his way of saying he won’t be back, please cover the check, Rupert will get him next time.
Fine, fine, Huck thinks. Good for Rupert. Sadie is Huck’s favorite of the women anyway.
He should leave—but it’s been so long since he’s been out like this and it’s working like a tonic against the ache in his heart. He orders a beer in an attempt to sober up.
He sees a familiar-looking blonde across the bar. She’s one of the mothers from the Gifft Hill School, he figures out that much, though he couldn’t in a million years come up with her name. She’s waving at him like crazy, and he raises his beer in a way he hopes says, Yes, I see you, please don’t come over here.
The band plays one last song, and when it’s finished, the bar empties out somewhat. Finally, Huck can hear himself think.
Heidi comes over and says, “Woman over there wants to buy you another drink. Beer?”
“Please,” Huck says. “Which woman?” He assumes it’s the Gifft Hill mother whose name he can’t remember or never knew in the first place.
“Behind you,” Heidi says.
Huck turns to see a redhead in a pale green dress sipping what looks like a painkiller over at the side bar. She’s by herself, gazing out at the people drinking on the back deck. Is that who Heidi means? Well, yeah. She’s the only woman behind him.
The beer arrives. Huck takes a swallow, then checks behind him again. The woman is gone.
Huh, he thinks. Strange.
A second later, someone takes Rupert’s stool. It’s the redhead in the green dress. “Good evening, Captain,” she says.
Huck has had one—or a few—too many, perhaps. He has to back up a few inches to get a look at this woman. The mother on the boat today had red hair but no, no, no…this is…
The woman smiles.
Holy shit, he thinks. “Agent Vasco?”
“Colette, please.”
Colette. Tonight, she looks like a Colette. Her hair is sleek and shiny. The green dress has buttons down the front; the top button has been undone to reveal a modest bit of her cleavage. She’s wearing lipstick.
“Thank you for the beer,” he says.
“I’m happy I bumped into you.”
He wonders for a second if she followed him here. She’s an FBI agent; is any contact accidental? “Are we breaking the law?” he asks.
“I’m off duty,” she says. “And you’re not under investigation.” She orders another painkiller from Heidi. “I will break protocol to tell you a few things, though. First of all, those diaries didn’t give us enough to lock up Croft.”
Huck spins his beer by the neck. All that for nothing? “What about the stuff Russ told Rosie about the dummy driveways? About the illegal business dealings?”
“Hearsay.”
“What about the end, where Croft shows up at La Tapa to threaten Rosie?”
“It isn’t enough,” Colette says. “The person who’s implicated is Steele. And even Rosie. You turned over the cash you found in the dresser drawer, but I had to persuade my superiors not to go after the money in Rosie’s accounts. I made the argument that the amounts were consistent with what she might have saved from her job.” Colette takes a healthy pull of her drink. “But we could easily have called those tainted assets.”
She did him a favor, and he’s not ungrateful. He has that money to send Maia to college. “Thank you,” Huck says.
She dips her head and gazes up at him. “I don’t want you to think of me as the bad guy.”
“You’re just doing your job,” Huck says. “I get it.”
“Secondly, I got a call from the police in Charlotte Amalie. Apparently Oscar Cobb’s girlfriend reported him missing. We watched Oscar a few years back because we knew he was selling drugs aboard the cruise ships—though ultimately he was too small a fish for us to pursue. I was surprised, though, to see his name show up in Rosie’s diaries.”
“Oscar Cobb,” Huck says. “Not one of my favorite people. My wife, LeeAnn, wanted to disappear Oscar herself. He was terrible for Rosie—although I guess ‘terrible’ is all relative.”
Colette says, “The police were wondering if we had any leads, which we didn’t, but here’s the thing: the girlfriend admitted that Oscar actually went missing on January first. She said they were at a New Year’s Eve celebration and that Oscar left the party between two and three a.m., saying he had ‘work’ over on St. John.”
This gets Huck’s attention. He thinks about the black Jeep with the tinted windows—but no, it wasn’t Oscar driving, and that woman didn’t seem like a girlfriend of Oscar’s. She was old enough to be his mother and, as Huck had learned, Oscar preferred his women much younger. “Did she say what kind of work?”
“She wasn’t sure what he did exactly, but in the police report, she used the word ‘investments.’”
“So Oscar Cobb disappears the same day that Rosie and Russ die in the crash. Could be a coincidence. Rosie doesn’t mention Oscar again in the diaries and I haven’t seen him around here. Believe me, I would have noticed.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Colette says. “But I also don’t have anything that ties Cobb to Croft. I’ll follow up with the girlfriend—she said she didn’t report it earlier because she was scared, and I guess Oscar had a habit of disappearing for weeks at a time…”
Of course, he did, Huck thinks. He flashes back to the first time he laid eyes upon Oscar Cobb—at the Rolex Regatta in the
