35
It was after midnight when the news media filed their last salacious reports of the day, pulled out of Ponce Marina, and went to roost wherever vultures go at night. After the last satellite truck left, I walked Max across the marina and down an oyster-shell road leading to the beach. We could hear the breakers rolling across the dunes and beyond the sea oats, a high tide rising under the bright moonlight. I wondered where Courtney Burke was at this very moment. Was she in a safe place? If Isaac Solminski, the ‘Guesser,’ knew where she was, did Carlos Bandini believe Solminski could tell him? Would Bandini force him to talk?
Earlier in the evening, I’d looked in my coat pocket and found the handkerchief that I’d let Andrea Logan use to wipe her eyes. In the morning, I planned to call Detective Dan Grant to see if he’d run DNA tests on the samples in the handkerchief and my DNA, too. But now the immediate job was finding Courtney and getting a sample from her.
What if she is my daughter? I have no living family. The little dog walking at my feet is my sole dependent. I thought about what Nick said, his reference to Courtney resembling Andrea and me. And then I considered the message that Courtney had asked Isaac Solminski to give me. Did he get it right? Did he leave something out? If Andrea Logan was truthful, if she never had contact with the child after the adoption, how would Courtney know about the birthmark? What was the missing puzzle piece? How close was I to finding it? If I did find it, would it be in time to help a girl who might be my own flesh and blood?
I scooped Max up and walked over to one of the larger sand dunes facing the Atlantic Ocean. We sat and watched the breakers roll ashore across a deserted beach in the moonlight. The breeze blew in from the east, bringing the scent of saltwater and schooling fish leaping through the crashing waves.
Max uttered a low growl. Moments later, a sea turtle crawled from the rolling surf and slowly made her way up the beach, beyond the high tide line. “Shhh, it’s okay, Max. No barking.” We sat on the dune and watched the large turtle crawl to less than twenty-five feet from us.
She began using her back flippers to dig a hole in the soft sand. I knew she’d lay close to one hundred eggs, cover them up, and trudge back to the sea, never seeing her young. Maybe two or three turtles would survive out of the entire hatch to make it to adulthood. And if at least one was a surviving female, she’d eventually return home, to this exact same beach years later to lay her eggs.
Courtney Burke was a survivor. But what did she have to return to? What warm memories did she have of her home? Were her parents adoptive or biological? Were they attentive or indifferent? If they were attentive, then how was she subjected to abuse? Or had one of them been the abuser? If Detective Dan Grant is right, if she’s a cold-blooded killer, when was the seed planted? And could I be partly to blame?
Enough.
Max and I watched as the green sea turtle began laying her eggs, her head turned toward the sea. I could see where the digging had flung loose sand against her head and face. Under the bright moonlight, it looked as if she was crying as she laid her eggs. I attributed the wet streaks coming from her eyes to the sand on her face, possibly in her eyes. Maybe I was wrong. All I knew at the moment was that Max and I shared a small plot of beach with a sea turtle, and perhaps, just somehow on this windswept, empty beach, we shared a link that was without biological boundaries.
Twenty minutes later, Max and I walked down the oyster-shell road and returned to the marina parking lot. I noticed a motorcycle in the lot that wasn’t there when we’d started our walk. Kim Davis’ white Honda was still parked, as was a second car I recognized, a Chevy owned by the Tiki Bar cook. But the Harley-Davidson wasn’t there at midnight. Now it was near 1:00 am. I made a mental note of the license plate number and the blue gas tank with a skull and crossbones painted on it.
The Tiki Bar door was locked, so I looked through the glass door and saw Kim doing paperwork at the bar, the cook sitting and nursing a cup of coffee. All the customers were gone. I tapped on the door. Kim looked up, smiled, and walked over to open the door. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, her caramel eyes still animated after the end of a shift. “Did Max find you or did you find her, or are you both out for a midnight stroll?” She grinned and let us inside.
We followed her to the bar where the cook sat, shoulders slouched, his eyes heavy, white T-shirt blotched with food stains. He looked up at Kim and said, “I’m heading out. See you tomorrow night.”
“Goodnight, Bobby.” Kim turned to Max as the cook left and said, “Sorry, Miss Max, all the food’s gone for the night. Will you take a rain check?” Max sat on the wooden floor near a barstool and cocked her head, her nostrils in seek ‘n eat mode. “So, Sean, what brings you here a half-hour beyond closing time?” Kim reached in the cooler and popped the tops on two bottles of Corona, setting one in front of me, the other she held up and said, “To you Sean, you helped the Tiki Bar have its best business day ever. Those reporters eat as much as they talk.”
“I’m not so sure that bringing that business to the Tiki Bar is something I’d want to raise a glass to, but I will take the beer. Thank you. We couldn’t sleep, so Max and I went for a walk along the beach.”
“You have every right to be sleepless in Daytona. Your face is all over the news. Those so-called reporters are saying you and the wife of Senator Lloyd Logan had a child together. The whole Republican presidential primary election is turning upside down. Can imagine you’d have some restless nights. Sean, we have a history together and you know I’d never do anything to violate your privacy, but tonight it looks like you could use a friend.”
I smiled and sipped the cold beer.
She said, “I feel really bad for you. It has nothing to do with Senator Logan’s presidential campaign. It has to do with the daughter you never knew you had. It wasn’t fair to you.”
“Who’s to say what wasn’t fair? I don’t blame Andrea Logan. We were both kids, twenty-something. She was scared. She could have aborted, but she chose not to. And I know it wasn’t easy for her to give the baby up.”
She was quiet a moment. I heard the motorcycle in the lot start and pull away. “Sean, I don’t want to pry, but that girl, the one who came into the Tiki Bar and asked me for directions to your boat, the girl police are hunting for … is she your daughter?”
“I don’t know. She was walking on County Road 314 late at night when I found her. So it’s not as if she was looking for me. She wasn’t some kid trying to reconnect with a father she never knew. Maybe it’s purely by chance.”
“I remember you telling me, when you were a detective, you didn’t believe in coincidences.”
“When it came to crime, I didn’t. In the cycles of life, maybe.”
“But we’re talking about crime here, too, right? She’s wanted for killing those men at the fairgrounds.”
“She’s wanted for questioning in their deaths.”
“But you don’t think she did it, right? Is it because of what Nick overheard from those two drunk carny workers that night?”
“That’s part of it. It’s also the way Courtney Burke responded from the first night I saw her until the last time I saw her. Just a feeling in my gut.”
“Or maybe your heart.”
“Maybe. She knew about a tiny birthmark on my shoulder. It looks like an Irish shamrock, a four-leaf clover. Andrea used to call it God’s tattoo. But how did Courtney know?”
“Someone told her.”
“No doubt, but who? It’s not common knowledge even among my friends.”