Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

“How do you know she was a diver?” Bob asked.

“I don’t—but there were tanks on board the boat and her hair looked like she’d been in the water.”

“Okay,” Lucas said. “You got a good memory.”

“I wouldn’t have remembered any of this, if they hadn’t burned up that boat a couple days later.”

Quinn said he didn’t know how to get in touch with Beddy, or precisely where the Down East was, but he’d be on the internet, because that’s how he got his customers.

Bob asked him why his boat was called Big Mac’s You’re-In-and- Out instead of Quinn’s You’re-In-and-Out, and Quinn said, “I’m selling hamburgers. So . . . Big Macs.”

“Ah.”

“Don’t tell McDonald’s.”

They thanked him for his help and Javier ran them back to the Yacht Club. Half an hour later, guided by Bob’s iPad, they rolled into the Aventura marina, found the office, and eventually got pointed at the Down East .

The Down East looked like a floating condo. They parked and walked down to it, where they found Beddy working in the engine compartment below the back deck. Lucas knocked on the hull and Beddy’s head popped up and he said, “You’re not Carlos.”

“Nope. I’m a U.S. Marshal. Who’s Carlos?”

“He’s the guy who’s going to tell me why the port engine’s been running hot. So . . . what’s up with you guys?”

Beddy was a stocky man in a white golf shirt that had down east embroidered on the chest; he had white hair under a captain’s hat, a white bristly mustache and ample stomach, with skinny legs sticking out of his white shorts. He looked, Lucas thought, like a party boat captain. When he got out of the engine compartment, he poured some Engine Off on his hands, and cleaned off a smear of diesel fuel.

Beddy had no trouble remembering the hairdressers. Thumbing through a charter register, he found the boat had been rented by the Zizzorz Wizzardz hairdressers’ school in Hollywood.

“Not that Hollywood,” he said to Bob and Lucas. “This Hollywood is the first big town south of here.”

Bob nodded. “I saw an exit.”

“There were these two girls who organized the party. Real live wires,” Beddy said, flipping a page in the register. “They were wary of the guys on the boat, those two. A couple of the other girls were all over them. Maybe because of the Mako, which says money. One of the girls offered to cut one of the guys’ hair, right here on my boat. They didn’t, but they were getting along good.”

Lucas prompted him: “Do you have their names? The live wires?”

“Sure do.” He held the book away from his face, squinted at it and said, “Alicia Snow did most of the talking and arranging. The other one was Meredith Duffy.” He put the book down. “Alicia used to be a waitress, but she wanted something more professional, so she went to school to get into hairdressing. I remember that: she’s a cutie. The Meredith girl was quieter, she was an athlete of some kind before she went into hairdressing. Hell of a dancer, some old rock ’n’ roll tune came up on the radio and she danced her ass off with the other girls.”

“Anything else?”

“I got their phone numbers . . .”

Lucas technically worked for a supervisor in the Marshals Service’s Washington office named Russell Forte. Forte’s secretary did a good portion of her boss’s work. As they were walking back to the Pathfinder, Lucas called her and got her to run down the billing addresses for the two cell phones. She called back fifteen minutes later, as they were finding their way out of the marina. Both phones were on AT&T, and the bills went to the same address, but different apartments.

“What do you want to do?” Bob asked.

“Go talk to these two women,” Lucas said.

“Two is fine, but if we wind up having to talk to a bunch of them, the FBI guys could do it a lot quicker than we can. They could do all of them at the same time, if we give them the names.”

“True. But . . . I’d like to be the one who cracked the case. If we don’t get something solid from the two names we’ve got, we call Weaver and sic the FBI on the rest of the women, while we go down to Miami and find Magnus Elliot.”

“That’s a plan.”

The case was beginning to turn: Lucas could smell it.

Bob could, too; he chatted happily away as they headed west and north from Hollywood.

Snow and Duffy lived in the town of Sunrise, which butted up against the Everglades, in a six-story white apartment building with exterior walkways. From the walkway on the fifth floor, they could see the green/tan sawgrass plain of the ’glades, stretching away to the horizon, on the other side of an expressway that paralleled a levee that kept the water out of the town. A lone hawk hung over the sawgrass, hunting.

“Doesn’t look like much, does it?” Bob asked. “Doesn’t even look like a swamp.”

“But it does look sorta neat,” Lucas said. “If we get time, I’d like to go on one of those airboat rides. Scare up some gators.”

“And some of those giant yellow snakes they got out there, those Burmese pythons, twenty feet long,” Bob said. And he laughed, knowing Lucas’s attitude toward snakes.

“Yeah, fuck that,” Lucas said. “Gators good, snakes bad.”

Lucas led the way down the walkway to Snow’s apartment, knocked, got no answer, and then to Duffy’s, which was equally silent. He didn’t like to call interview subjects ahead of time because it gave them a chance to disappear. The two women were probably at work, but since they had no idea where, Lucas finally called Alicia Snow.

Snow answered and after a bit of back-and-forth about the investigation, admitted that she was working in a shop in the town of Plantation, south of the apartment building, called Salon de Elegance. Duffy, she said, worked in a different salon, but also in Plantation, called the Bombshell. “I’ve got a break before my last client, but if you could get here quick, before four o’clock, I could squeeze out a few minutes.”

“We’re on the way.”

The Salon de Elegance was located in a largely vacant strip shopping center with a payday loan office and a dog grooming center the only open stores, other than the salon. They parked and walked across the crumbling parking lot, and Bob said, “You know, this whole place, houses and apartment buildings and shopping centers, looks like it was built to last about twenty years. After that, good luck.”

The salon had a half dozen hairdresser stations, two of them occupied by older women, when Lucas and Bob pushed through the door. A Springsteen song was playing softly in the background, and a young blonde hurried over to them and asked, “You’re the marshals?”

“Yes.” Lucas nodded at her, tried out a smile, which she seemed to miss.

“Come on around in back; I’m Alicia. The owner’s out right now, we can use her office.”

The owner’s office was a beige cubicle with concrete floors, small metal desk, four file cabinets and three chairs, including the chair at the desk, taken by Snow. Lucas and Bob sat down and Snow took out her telephone, punched up her phone list and copied a name, address, and telephone number on a piece of notepaper.

As she was doing that, she said, “Now, I have to tell you. I never knew any of the guys on that boat. I was getting burgers from that burger guy and I never talked to them. I sure didn’t know they were involved in those murders. All I know about that Coast Guard thing was what I saw on television and that was only like one or two nights on the news. People get murdered here all the time and I didn’t pay attention. I’m sorry. I feel awful about it. I feel really awful now because of Patty.”