“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.”
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.”