“Washington.”
“Get some ride-alongs with the Washington cops. Your guys can fix it. Get armored up and go with them. It’ll pay you back forever.”
“I’m gonna do that,” Parker said.
After another stretch of silence, Parker asked, “How did Elliot know to set you up?”
“Ah, Bob and I were going around town . . .” Lucas began, but then he trailed away.
“What?” Parker asked.
“Shut up for a minute,” Lucas said. He looked out the window, not seeing the concrete landscape sliding by. He and Bob had only touched Elliot once. Somebody must have gotten to him between the time they talked and Elliot went to the Miami attorney’s office. Had Elliot already known a name, and called that guy? Or had Lucas and Bob been tracked into Elliot’s place?
Lucas tapped his knuckles against the car’s window for a moment, then muttered: “They must have been tracking us. Me and Bob. We never saw them.”
“What?”
“They were . . .”
“How would they even know who you were?” Parker asked. “They could pick you up at the hotel, but how did they know what you looked like? I mean, they could look you up on the internet, I guess, but how’d they even know what your names were? It’s not like we posted them . . .”
“We talked to quite a few dealers down here, but . . .” He rubbed his forehead with his fingertips.
“What?”
“Most of them, we didn’t really introduce ourselves,” Lucas said. “There was an old guy we talked to down in Miami, in Coconut Grove, but he’s not connected to the Mafia guys in any way that we know about and he’s retired. Elliot never saw us again.”
Thinking about it some more, then, “Oh. Shit. Parker, we gotta get west. We gotta get to a place called Sunrise. A city. You know where that is?”
“My telephone would know . . .”
* * *
A half hour later, Lucas and Parker took the elevator to Alicia Snow’s floor at her Sunrise condo, looking out over the Everglades. Snow had taken a card from Lucas and in chatting with her, Bob had mentioned where they were staying. At her apartment, they knocked, but got no answer. Lucas went through his phone book, found the number for her cell phone and got nothing but dead air.
“Meredith what’s-her-name, Duffy,” Lucas said to Parker. “She’s here, down the way . . .”
They walked down to Duffy’s apartment, pounded on the door. A light came on, and then Duffy’s voice, from behind the door: “Who is it?”
“Davenport, the U.S. Marshal you spoke to at your shop.”
The door opened a crack, and Duffy, dressed in a black tank top and leggings, looked out at them, the chain still on the door. When she recognized Lucas, she said, “Let me get the chain,” and closed the door and took it off and opened the door and asked, “What happened?”
“Do you know where Alicia is?”
She put a hand to her throat. “Oh, God. Is she gone? Did somebody hurt her?”
“She’s not in her apartment,” Lucas said.
“She didn’t go to work yesterday,” Duffy said. “She called in sick, she told Maria that she had the flu and needed to take some time off . . .”
“Who’s Maria?” Lucas asked.
“She runs the salon. I went by last night after work to see if Alicia wanted to go out for a drink, but Maria said she called yesterday morning and canceled her appointments and said she’d be back when she got better. She never said anything to me. I knocked on her door last night but nobody answered . . .”
“When we talked to you the first time, you said you didn’t know who might have dated the guys on that fishing boat,” Lucas said. “I don’t think you were telling the truth, that you were trying to protect Alicia. Was I right? Was she dating somebody on the boat?”
Duffy hesitated, then said, “Yes. I think she was. I’m not sure. She told me she was seeing a guy, but he was married and she didn’t want to talk about it. And she didn’t. I don’t even know why I think it might have been one of the guys from the boat, but, the night of that class party, on the party boat, I know she went down to a Miami Beach hotel with some of the other girls and I think they were meeting those guys. I think she hooked up with somebody that night, because she didn’t come home.”
“You don’t know the name of the guy she hooked up with?”
“No, she didn’t talk about it.” She paused, and then said, “You know what I think? I think the guy had money, whoever he is, and she hoped something might happen with him. But I think the guy was just getting laid.”
Lucas pushed her, and she started to cry, but insisted she didn’t know anything else.
Lucas asked Duffy to sit on her couch, and he took Parker outside, out of earshot, and said, “Call Weaver. We need a search warrant for Snow’s apartment. Quick as he can get it. Tell them it’s a life endangerment situation, she could be hurt or injured in the apartment, but we also need to cover everything else. We want to go through everything in the apartment.”
“You think . . .”
“She’s gone. They’re cleaning up. Everybody who might know something, that we touched: they’re cleaning up.”
* * *
Lucas called Weaver and they agreed that he and Parker could enter the apartment on grounds that Snow might be inside, injured and unable to respond to their knock, but they wouldn’t be allowed to search the apartment until they had a warrant. Duffy didn’t have a key, but knew where the manager lived. The manager had a key, opened the door. The apartment was as empty, and as undisturbed, as Magnus Elliot’s house.
“It’s gonna be a couple more hours to get the warrant, it looks like,” Parker said. “What do you want to do?”
Lucas looked at his watch. 5:45. “I want you to stay here with Meredith. Make sure she’s not . . . interfered with. I need the car keys.”
Parker handed over the keys. “Where are you going?”
“I don’t know. Someplace quiet,” Lucas said. “I’ll be back for the search. Call me.”
Lucas went down to the truck, got in, wandered around, eventually crossed what looked like a major street, Sunrise Boulevard, and took it east. Thinking about Bob. A few hours earlier, feet up, laughing at Miss Congeniality; now Bob was gone, on a slab at the medical examiner’s office, to be cut open and . . .
He kept driving, eventually arrived at Fort Lauderdale Beach. He hardly realized what it was, when he got there; it took a moment. He turned north, parked, walked out on the sand, took his shoes off, and sat down.