A motive I figured Randy of all people would understand. I just hoped he’d pass his new intel along.
By the time we got to the crime scene, the unis had it roped off and locked down. There were enough squad cars along the perimeter to patrol a small town, all with their lights flashing and sirens muted. Lookie-loos were gathered on the bridge above, faces pressed against the chain-link fencing. I hoped a good Florida rain would come along and soak them to the bone.
“You nervous?” I asked Randy.
“Me? Why would I be?”
“Let’s go find out.”
We got out of the car and walked over to the police tape. The boy in blue who greeted us was almost literally a boy: wiry from the neck down but with the last of his baby fat clinging stubbornly to his cheeks. When he spoke, his voice wobbled like a kazoo. I looked from him to Randy and had a sad thought for the future of Tampa law enforcement.
“What do we know?” I asked.
Randy shot me an I’ll-ask-the-questions look.
“Not much,” the infant cop said, pointing over his shoulder to a cadaver slumped against the underside of the bridge. “No ID, no witnesses that we can find. He must have been here all night. A jogger called it in.”
“Cause of death?” Randy asked.
“Well, it looks like someone—or someones—beat him real bad. Then, when he was down, they dropped a cinder block on his head.”
Randy looked past the tape while he slipped on his latex gloves and scrub booties. I looked with him. It wasn’t a pretty sight. Not for Randy, anyway. Not if he was hoping to clear his first case. A brigade of Tampa’s homeless had decamped in a hurry. There were beer cans and cigarette butts and liquor bottles scattered everywhere. Overturned shopping carts stood among the ruins of a cardboard city. It would take CSI days to sort through it all, and chances were every print they pulled would come back a hit. Young Randy was turning a little green around the gills.
“I’ve seen worse,” I told him.
He looked at me as if this was the world’s cruelest practical joke and he knew damn well I was behind it.
Chapter 23
“SHOULD WE go take a look at the body?” I asked.
Randy nodded, then shook himself all over like a diver about to plunge into icy water. But just as we started to duck under the tape, my phone rang. Somehow I knew before I checked: it was Vincent “Old School” Costello.
“Sorry,” I said. “I have to take this.”
If anything, Randy looked relieved: nobody wants a chaperone overseeing his first date. I walked back to the sedan, leaned up against the trunk, shoved my work phone into my front pocket, and pulled the burner from my back pocket.
“I’ve located her,” I said.
“Then why isn’t she sitting in front of me now?”
“I know where she is,” I said. “I mean, I know where she’s staying. I’m just waiting for the right moment to pick her up.”
“The right moment has passed, Detective. I understand why you didn’t bring Sarah to me. She’s your wife. There are demands even I can’t make. But the maid is different. I’ll give you until sundown, like in a western flick. If the girl isn’t in my possession by then, certain disquieting facts—facts that would put your fitness to serve in question—may become public knowledge.”
Reminding him that I’d collected certain disquieting facts of my own would have won me a one-way trip to the Everglades.
“I understand,” I said, but by then I was already talking to a dial tone.
I kept the phone pressed to my ear, sat on the trunk of the sedan with my feet on the bumper, pretending the conversation was still in full swing. I needed a moment to let the sweat dry. Sunset was a tight deadline, especially with a John Doe threatening forced overtime. And Vincent wasn’t the type to make idle promises. Whatever file he had on me would be in the hands of every local newscaster come morning. Vincent wouldn’t worry about my stink blowing back on him. He thought he was invincible. Maybe he was right: forty years is a long reign for a mob boss.
What I needed now was a reason to slip away, to leave Randy on his own for however long it took me to find Serena. But bringing Serena to Vincent wasn’t an option. As far as I knew, Sarah was Serena’s only friend in the US. I needed a Sarah ally in the box with Heidi, someone who’d swear up and down that Sarah and Anthony were on the best of terms. The only way I could square that with Vincent would be to hand him Anthony’s killer, or someone who could pass for Anthony’s killer—namely, Símon. Then Sarah would be off the hook all the way around, and I could go back to being a cop and nothing but a cop. There were a lot of moving parts, and all of them had to click into place before nightfall.
Impossible, I told myself. Ditch Randy now, and Heidi would sic Internal Affairs on me with an order to kill.
And then I finally caught a break. It came in the unlikely form of Marty the Mute, a vagabond I’d busted for drunken loitering almost weekly when I worked Vice. He was tugging on the hem of my blazer. I looked down at him. His beard had gone gray in the last decade, and his wino nose had turned a deeper shade of red, but the waiflike frame remained the same. Even wearing what must have been all the clothes he owned, he couldn’t have weighed more than a buck twenty. I mouthed a fake good-bye into the phone, then hopped down off the
