James Patterson - Now You See Her

But right there, among the cop cars, with tar sticking to my four-inch heels, my anger tipped the scales against my fear. I was tired of running. Tired of Peter. Tired of what I had become.

I wasn’t going to run. I wasn’t going to hide. I was going to do the right thing.

“Nothing’s inevitable,” I said as I finally stood. I held out my hand and helped Charlie back to his feet as well. “They won this battle. Now let’s go and win the war.”

AFTER WE FOUND the rental’s keys (Charlie had flung them under one of the Boca PD cruisers), we drove to the parking lot of a nearby Burger King, where I proceeded to go through Charlie’s messy files like I was possessed.

Alone and penniless, I had managed to raise a daughter in New York City with nothing but sheer will. I was pissed off now. I was going to straighten out Justin’s case if it killed me.

“What are you looking for now?” Charlie cried.

I pulled out a sheet of copy paper on which Charlie had typed, “HARRIS’S ALIBI INFO!” in big, bold letters across the top.

“This,” I said.

I read that Harris’s ex-fiancée’s name was Fabiana Desmarais. She was a Haitian immigrant who lived in Princeton, Florida, a few miles north of the Homestead Correctional Institution.

“How far away is Princeton from here?” I said. “We need to speak to Fabiana.”

“Wait one second,” Charlie said. “I tried that before the first habeas corpus appeal three years ago. Not only wouldn’t Fabiana’s mother let me speak to her, but she actually sicced her dog on me, a half-starved boxer with a bad attitude.”

“Hey, maybe you rub dogs the same way you rub people, Charlie,” I said. “I’d like a shot at her.”

“Oh, right,” he said. “We’ll use your secret weapon: charm. I forgot about the universal love all people have for pushy New York broads.”

We took the Florida Turnpike and about an hour and a half later, we zigzagged through some side streets until we pulled up in front of a sign that said HOMESTEAD MOBILE HOMES.

“No!” I said as we pulled up at Fabiana’s address. Beyond a rusty mailbox was an obviously deserted double-wide trailer with broken windows.

“I’m the manager. Can I help you?” called a very dark black man beneath the retractable awning of another trailer across the street.

As we stepped up, I saw that he was sitting on a faded wooden grapefruit crate and that he was working a paper or something in his dark, nimble fingers.

“We’re looking for Fabiana Desmarais,” I said.

“You cops?” the man said without looking up.

“No, we’re lawyers,” I said.

“I’d tell you even if you were cops,” the old man said with a yellow grin. “Fabiana and her snooty mother took off in the middle of the night about two years ago. No forwarding address.”

“You wouldn’t happen to have her social security number on file?” Charlie said, glancing at the rusted trailer.

“Since she owed me six months’ rent, I actually tried all that skip trace stuff. Number they both gave me was fake. Maybe they went back to Haiti like the old battle-ax of a mother kept threatening. Said America was an uncultured cesspool. America! I used to say to her, ‘How many illegal American immigrants they got paddling shark-infested waters into Haiti on tire rafts last time you checked?’ ”

“Oh, well. Thanks for your time,” Charlie said.

“You know what Fabiana’s mother reminds me of? This,” the old man said, holding up the piece of paper he’d been working. It was an origami cobra. He made a hissing sound as he twirled its tail between his fingers.

“Nice,” Charlie said. “Thanks again.”

“Well, at least we didn’t get bit,” Charlie said as we got back into the hot car. “Are you finished now, or do you need some more face time with the origami man?”

I scrubbed at my forehead with my fingers. “We need to speak to Justin again.”

“Up in Raiford?” Charlie said. “You were just up there.”

“If he doesn’t give us anything, then it’ll be on him,” I said.

IT WAS COMING ON THREE by the time our chartered Cessna twin-prop arrived in Raiford on Tuesday. All this flying was costing a fortune, but an innocent man’s life was at stake—and I was billing everything to my Global 100 firm. Charlie called and made arrangements with the warden as we were driving past the growing crowd of protesters outside the prison grounds.

Harris looked stunned as Charlie and I met him in the lawyer visiting room.

“Back again so soon?” he said to me.

“Hate to interrupt your reading,” I said, tossing him a bag of mini pretzels.

“Hey, thanks. They’re my favorite,” he said, actually sounding pleased. He ripped open the bag with his shackled hands, dumped the pretzels onto the interview table, and ate one.

“OK,” I said. “I got you something, Justin. Now you have to give us something. We need to speak to Fabiana, but she’s no longer living in Princeton. She left and didn’t leave any forwarding info. Do you have any clue where she might have gone?”

“You kidding me?” he said with his mouth full. “I haven’t spoken to Fabiana since she threw the engagement ring I bought her in my face a decade and a half ago. That bitch wants me dead, and she’s going to get her way. You’re digging a dry hole.”

“You know what I’m sick of, Justin?” I said, suddenly smashing one of the pretzels on the table with my fist. “You and your attitude. You don’t want me to try to save your life? That’s not macho, that’s just stupid. Or just come out and say it. Have the guts to say, ‘I did it! I killed Tara Foster!’ ”

He gaped at me with his open mouth for a moment before he closed it. “But I didn’t,” he said, spitting crumbs.

I held my hand to my ear. “Holy moly! Did I just hear someone actually defend himself?”

“Who’s running the show here, Charlie?” Harris said.

“Isn’t that obvious?” Charlie said, eyeballing me.

“Fine. Try her cousin Maddie,” Harris said. “She was the one who actually introduced us.”

“Maddie what,” I said, thumbing my iPhone.

“Maddie Pelletier,” Harris said. “She’s a teacher at the high school in Key West now. She was always pretty cool to me. She even writes sometimes.”

I thumbed the phone book app. “I got a Madeline Pelletier on Fogarty Avenue.”

“That’s her,” Justin said.

I stood. “We have to go, Justin,” I said. “But we’ll be back.”

“Yeah, for the execution,” Harris mumbled.

“No, dumbass,” I said, pointing at the barred gate. “To open that door and let your mother hug you again.”

“HEY, WHO WANTS A BEER BRAT?” Peter yelled, smiling, as he snapped barbecue tongs in front of his smoking grill.

With the festive smell of charring jerk chicken and chorizo sausage, the cries of running children and Neil Diamond playing softly from his backyard speakers, the barbecue seemed more like a birthday party or a christening than an event for the surviving family of serial killer victims.

It was an eclectic group: black, white, brown, rich, poor, even a gay Protestant minister. Death didn’t discriminate. Peter knew that firsthand.

The barbecue was actually one of several events planned for the group this week. Tomorrow, a chartered bus and plane from Miami would take all of them to the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee for a sit-down and some more press coverage, Peter hoped. Then it was over to Raiford on Friday for an all-day camp-out vigil before Harris’s midnight execution. An exhausting schedule for these poor folks but one that he hoped would provide some closure.