“Don’t!” Luke Motto bleated.
“I got five bucks says we break two hundred today.”
“And I got a C-note and a free shrimp hoagie says you cut me some slack.”
“If you had half a brain, Luke, you’d spend that money on an exterminator.”
With every click of the counter, Yancy dropped another dizzy roach into a large Ziploc baggie. Lombardo hadn’t instructed him to preserve the insects as evidence, so he didn’t. Customarily, after presenting his inspection report to the disgruntled owner, Yancy would dispatch the roaches by placing the baggies under a tire of his car and flattening them on his way out of the parking lot. It wasn’t an authorized technique for disposal, but so far none of the restaurateurs had lodged a complaint.
“You can’t just barge in here and shut me down!” Luke Motto protested. “This ain’t Nazi Russia!”
Yancy tuned him out while completing the order for a temporary suspension. He offered the phone number of a Marathon pest control company and told Big Luke he’d be back in three days for a re-inspection. Then he squashed the roaches with his Subaru and drove to Duck Key to view the condominium belonging to Eve and Nicholas Stripling.
The building superintendent gave up the key as soon as Yancy displayed his health department credentials. For a weekend condo it wasn’t bad. The living room featured a balcony view of the Atlantic, while the bedrooms overlooked a polyp-shaped swimming pool with a slightly discolored kiddie pond. In the closets of the condo Yancy found men’s and women’s outdoor clothes, fishing rods, spearguns, flippers, dive masks, snorkels and a roll of clear Visqueen poly sheeting of the type used to protect carpet and furniture from splatters while a room was being painted—or a human body was being chopped to pieces.
The second scenario occurred to Yancy after he spotted a hatchet, scoured clean, inside the dishwasher. It made sense that if a woman was involved, the hatchet would have been rinsed of gore before being placed in a dishwasher rack amid wine glasses and salad bowls. Yancy reached into the opening of the garbage disposal and carefully probed the movable blades. All he recovered was the fractured chip of an olive pit.
Next he went to the double shower in the master bedroom and unscrewed the drain cover. He employed a bent coat hanger to explore the pipe, which yielded a clot of jet-black hair. Ensnared in the yucky clump were three sharp-edged, whitish fragments no larger than kitten’s teeth. Yancy deposited the entire tangle in another baggie, locked up the condo, put the key under the mat and returned to his car. There he phoned Caitlin Cox and said, “I believe I know where they murdered your father.”
Her reply caught him by surprise: “Actually, Inspector, we need to talk.”
Yancy cranked up the Subaru’s fitful AC and waited.
Caitlin said: “Look, I was wrong about Eve. There’s no hot boyfriend in the Bahamas—she stopped there on the way home from Paris to visit one of her uncles. And Dad’s wedding ring? The only reason she swapped it out for a cheapo? She didn’t have the heart to leave it on his hand inside the coffin. She got a jeweler in Bal Harbour to hang it on a necklace and, God, I feel like such an a-hole. The more I think about it? Seriously.”
Yancy was miffed at himself for not seeing it coming. “Caitlin, listen to me. Eve bought that replacement wedding band in Nassau before anyone told her your dad was missing, much less dead, which means she already knew. And, just so you’re up to speed, the nonexistent boyfriend tried to kill me the other night. I’m pretty sure he was wearing your father’s wristwatch.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Okay, I made it all up. Because, truly, I’ve got nothing better to do.”
“Look, man,” she said. “I’m super sorry I got you involved, but I was so bummed about losing Dad I guess I didn’t want to believe the truth. He swamped his boat and drowned, end of story, just like the Coast Guard said. I mean, bad shit happens to fishermen all the time, right? The perfect storm, whatever.”
Yancy told her about the plastic sheeting and the hatchet he’d found in the condo. “And also some white bony fragments in a shower drain.”
“Oh please,” said Caitlin. “Broken stone crab shells, probably.”
“What about the hand axe?”
“Dad used the flat side to crack the claws. Just a couple of taps is all it took.”
Yancy knew he couldn’t bring Caitlin around, but he was curious to learn how the deal went down. “So you’re not mad anymore about Eve getting the whole two million from his life insurance?”
“No way.”
Then came the edgy pause. Yancy smiled and put the car in gear.
“Anyhow,” Caitlin continued, “turns out Eve and I are what you call co-beneficiaries. We split the money fifty-fifty. So I guess Dad wasn’t so pissed at me after all.”
“When did you find all this out? Because last time we spoke, you expressed the view—and I’m quoting more or less faithfully—that your ‘greedy slut of a stepmother’ was screwing you over.”
Caitlin said, “Because I was super upset, okay? I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“Until?”
“I saw Eve, and there was Dad’s wedding ring on her neck. Then she told me about the insurance policy and other stuff.”
“Other stuff?”
“You know. Inheritance stuff.”
Yancy thought: All that’s missing is a winning Lotto ticket. “And where did this healing conversation take place?” he asked Caitlin.
“She took me to lunch.”
“Yes, I can picture it. Where are you now?”
“At the courthouse.”
“Let me guess: Where you just finished telling the judge you totally agree with Eve—your dad should be declared legally dead.”
“Yeah, so?” On the other end, Nick Stripling’s daughter seemed to be clearing a chunk of cactus from her throat. After the guttural delay she said: “What the hell’s wrong with you, anyway? You never heard of closure? Families are supposed to come together, no matter what.”
“And nothing says closure like a million bucks.”
“Dad died when his boat sunk, just like they said. Let it go, dude.”
“Not possible, Caitlin. We’ll chat again, you and I.”
“Why? No, we won’t!”
“Then tell me his name.”
“Who?”
“The mystery uncle in Nassau.”
Caitlin said, “You’re such a dickhead.”
Yancy tossed down the phone and gunned his car toward a gap in the traffic, heading up the Overseas Highway.
Thirteen
When Yancy was younger, he’d briefly considered joining the U.S. park service, like his father. “Why didn’t you?” Rosa Campesino asked.
“I was too lazy. And the pay sucks.”
“Andrew, you’re full of shit.”
“Look at it this way. If I’d become a ranger in the Everglades, we would never have met.”
“Unless an alligator got you, and I was assigned to do the post.”
“Assuming there was something left of me,” Yancy said.
“Oh, there would be. Gators are sloppy eaters. By the way, you’ve healed magnificently.”
“I was hoping you’d notice.”
Rosa was massaging him on an autopsy table. It was half past midnight at the morgue and they were alone in the main suite, which had twelve forensic workstations. Each narrow table was made of eighteen-gauge stainless steel. Rosa had spread some towels, removed the headrest and instructed Yancy to lie still on his belly.
“What happens if somebody walks in?” he asked.
“Just play dead. I’m serious.”
She was wearing a lab smock, rubber-soled white shoes, and nothing else. In theory Yancy should have been wildly aroused, but the venue creeped him out. He’d made love to women in all sorts of odd places—with Bonnie Witt, of course, high on the tuna tower of her husband’s boat, but there had been other memorable trysts inside a windmill on a putt-putt golf course, the second-to-last car of a Metrorail train, an unoccupied toll booth on the Rickenbacker Causeway and a self-photo kiosk beside the manatee pool at the Miami Seaquarium. He understood the thrill of semi-public sex, but doing it among the deceased seemed more dark than daring.