Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

Bob: “Who’s Patty?”

Snow: “Patty Pittman.”

She pushed the note toward Lucas, who turned it around so he could read it. Patty Pittman had an address in the town of Islamorada.

Snow said, “Patty . . . disappeared. A couple of months ago, I think, like in September. Her mother called some of us who knew her—not me, because we weren’t close—but a couple of the other girls. I heard about it from these other girls. The police say it looks like she moved away with a boyfriend, maybe to get away from her mother. Her mother thinks she’s been kidnapped. Or worse.”

“She knew the guys on the boat?”

“That’s what I heard . . . another rumor from the other girls in our class,” Snow said. “That she’d dated one of them. Then she vanished. It was in the newspapers in the Keys, I guess. Some of the girls saw it. I didn’t connect her disappearance to the boat guys, though. I don’t think the cops did, either. I mean, this was a couple of months after the boat party.”

“You know where her mother is?”

Snow shrugged, but said, “I assumed she’d be down around Islamorada. I don’t really know.”

“Do you think your friend Meredith might know? Ms. Duffy?”

“Oh. Nooo . . . She and Patty weren’t friends at all, hardly. Patty was ditsy. Is ditsy. Meredith is like the last thing from ditsy. Patty was friendly with a couple of other girls . . . Let me write down their names and numbers . . .”

She punched up her phone again, got her note back from Lucas, copied out phone numbers of Sandra Klink and Karen Loftus. “I know they’ve moved around, so I don’t have addresses for them and we weren’t close anyway . . . But I bet they kept their phone numbers.”

She pushed the note back to Lucas.

Lucas asked, “You saw the guys on the boat close up . . . Could you pick them out if we showed you some mug shots?”

Her forehead wrinkled and her eyes slid away from his, then she said, “Maybe. If you didn’t tell anybody that I did it.”

“Good. We appreciate it,” Lucas said. “We’ll have a couple of FBI agents come around to talk with you.”

“They do the clerical part of our investigation,” Bob told her. “The paper stuff, instead of the street investigation.”

She bobbed her head: “Okay.”

They talked for a few more minutes, but Snow had nothing more of interest. As they stood to leave, Lucas asked, “Where’s this Islamorada place? Somewhere by Miami?”

“Oh, no, it’s like these islands, it’s probably halfway down the Keys. Maybe . . . a hundred miles from here? Maybe more. It takes quite a while to get there.”

“Okay.” Lucas thanked her, gave her his card and asked her to call if she remembered anything more. He told her to expect a call from the FBI.

Outside the salon, Bob asked, “We’re not going after this Patty?”

“Not if the cops are looking for her and haven’t been able to find her and it’s a hundred miles from here. Sounds like a fine task for our friends in the conservative suits,” Lucas said. “I’ll call Weaver and unload this on him. They’ll need to talk to whoever runs the hairdresser school, plus all the classmates, plus Pittman’s mother and whatever local cops have been looking for her. Take us a week, it’ll take the feds a day.”

They sat in the car and Lucas called Weaver, told him what they’d done and gave him the names and phone numbers they’d gotten from Snow. “If you have your boys get on this, they’ll probably be able to dig up some women who could identify the shooters, if you’ve got mug shots of them, and you probably do, if they’re really in the Mafia.”

“Lucas, this is terrific,” Weaver said. He’d been in the FBI too long to actually sound excited, but he was. “We’ll get all over it, starting tonight. What are you doing?”

“We’ll talk to one more of these hairdressers, named Meredith Duffy, then . . . mmm . . . we got another guy we want to talk to, but I don’t think we’ll make it today. He’s down in Miami.”

“Okay. Thanks again,” Weaver said. For the first time, he seemed to have a little hope in his voice.

When Lucas rang off, Bob said, “I feel kind of bad about that. They’ll find something good and guess who gets the credit?”

“Life sucks and then you die,” Lucas said. He looked both ways as they rolled out of the shopping center into heavy traffic. “Get on your phone and find the fastest way to this Bombshell place.”

Bob started tapping on his phone but said, “Life sucks and then you die, so you better take the credit where you can. You know the feds. When it comes to credit, they’re always the first in line. Look what happened with that 1919 guy you killed. I never even saw your name in the newspapers.”

“There’s still newspapers?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah. Nobody knows I was involved but a bunch of U.S. senators,” Lucas said. “Who would you rather have on your side? Some bureaucrat halfway up the ranks of the FBI? Or a U.S. senator who sits on the Finance Committee and can fund a new machine gun for you?”

“You got a point,” Bob said. “Let me get this address.”

The Bombshell was in another crumbling mall and apparently aimed at a younger crowd. What Lucas thought of as soft rap was playing in the background, for the half dozen customers and hairdressers.

Lucas showed his badge to a woman at the reception desk, who said, “Yes, Meredith is here, she’s working at the moment . . .”

“We only need to talk to her for a few minutes . . .”

“I’ll see what I can do.” She walked down the line of hairdresser chairs and spoke to a tall dark-haired woman who looked over at Lucas and Bob, then said something to the receptionist, who came back and said, “She’s finishing a color touch-up, but she can’t stop now. Give her ten minutes.”

Meredith Duffy looked like she knocked off a 10K road race every morning before work; dark hair close-cut, no fat anywhere, long legs, her arms showing some gym muscle. As she left her chair and walked toward them, Bob muttered, “She moves like Rae.”

Duffy took them to the salon’s back room, a narrow rectangle with shelves on both sides filled with bottles and pieces of hairdressing equipment, and which smelled like vinegar. A small square window penetrated the wall at the far end, letting in some light; the window had two bars across it.

“I didn’t interact with those men,” she said, when Lucas explained that they were looking for witnesses who might recognize the men on the Mako. “They were not my type. At all. They were sort of porky and red-faced, like they might drop dead of a heart attack five minutes from now. Like they live on surf ’n’ turf and tequila. I don’t think any of them could have run a block.”

“There was a girl named Patty Pittman . . .”

“I heard rumors about her from a friend,” Duffy said. “She disappeared, but this was way after the boat thing.”

“You heard about her from Alicia?” Lucas asked.

“Yes, have you talked to her?”

“A while ago,” Lucas said. “She couldn’t identify anyone, either. We need to get to somebody who spent some time with these guys. We heard that some of the women from the boat may have dated them.”

Duffy’s eyebrows went up and she said, “Uh, you, uh, I . . . Um, I really haven’t stayed much in touch with the class, except for Alicia. I’d be perfectly happy to look at photos, if I thought I might help, but . . . I don’t think I can. I didn’t care about those guys. I was socializing with the other girls. I haven’t seen any of them since then—the girls, I mean.”

“Except Alicia.”

“Yes, except Alicia.”

They pushed her on exactly what she’d seen on the boat, and how she’d avoided the men from the Mako. She stubbornly insisted that she simply hadn’t paid attention to them. When they’d hit a dead end, Lucas gave her his card. “If you think of anything that might help, call us. These are bad people and they need to be taken out of circulation.”