At four-thirty, the red Formula full of husky boyfriends roared up. Stranahan was reading on the sun deck, paying little attention to the naked women. The water was way too shallow for the ski boat, so the boyfriends idled it about fifty yards from the stilt house. After a manly huddle, one of them hopped to the bow and shouted at Mick Stranahan. “Hey, what the hell are you doing?”
Stranahan glanced up from the newspaper and said nothing.
Tina called out to the boat, “It’s okay. He lives here.”
“Put your clothes on!” hollered one of the guys in the boat, probably Tina’s boyfriend.
Tina wiggled into a T-shirt. All the boyfriends appeared to be fairly agitated by Stranahan’s presence among the nude women. Stranahan stood up and told the girls the water was too low for the ski boat.
“I’ll run you out there in the skiff,” he said.
“You better not, Richie’s real upset,” Tina said.
“Ri chie should have more faith in his fellow man.”
The three young women gathered their towels and suntan oils and clambered awkwardly into Stranahan’s skiff. He jacked the outboard up a couple notches, so the prop wouldn’t hit bottom, and steered out toward the red Formula in the channel. Once alongside the ski boat, he helped the girls climb up one at a time. Tina even gave him a peck on the cheek as she left.
The boyfriends were every bit as dumb and full of themselves as Stranahan figured. Each one wore a gold chain on his chest, which said it all.
“What was that about?” snarled the boyfriend called Richie, after witnessing Tina’s good-bye peck.
“Nothing,” Tina said. “He’s an all-right guy.”
Stranahan had already let go, and the skiff had drifted a few yards beyond the ski boat, when Richie slapped Tina for being such a slut. Then he pointed out at Stranahan and yelled something extremely rude.
The boyfriends were quite surprised to see the aluminum skiff coming back at them, fast. They were equally amazed at the nimbleness with which the big stranger hopped onto the bow of their boat.
Richie took an impressive roundhouse swing at the guy, but the next thing the other boyfriends knew, Richie was flat on his back with the ski rope tied around both feet. Suddenly he was in the water, and the boat was moving, and Richie was dragging in the salt spray and yowling at the top of his lungs. The other boyfriends tried to seize the throttle, but the stranger knocked them down quickly and with a minimum of effort.
After about three-quarters of a mile, Tina and the other women asked Stranahan to please stop the speedboat, and he did. He grabbed the ski rope and hauled Richie back in, and they all watched him vomit up sea water for ten minutes straight.
“You’re a stupid young man,” Stranahan counseled. “Don’t ever come out here again.”
Then Stranahan got in the skiff and went back to the stilt house, and the Formula sped away. Stranahan fixed himself a drink and stretched out on the sun deck. He was troubled by what was happening to the bay, when boatloads of idiots could spoil the whole afternoon. It was becoming a regular annoyance, and Stranahan could foresee a time when he might have to move away.
By late afternoon most of the other boats had cleared out of Stiltsville, except for a cabin cruiser that anchored on the south side of the radio towers in about four feet of water. A very odd location, Stranahan thought. On this boat he counted three people; one seemed to be pointing something big and black in the direction of Stranahan’s house.
Stranahan went inside and came back with the shotgun, utterly useless at five hundred yards, and the binoculars, which were not. Quickly he got the cabin cruiser into focus and determined that what was being aimed at him was not a big gun, but a portable television camera.
The people in the cabin cruiser were taking his picture.
This was the capper. First the Mafia hit man, then the nude sunbathers and their troglodyte boyfriends, now a bloody TV crew. Stranahan turned his back to the cabin cruiser and kicked off his trousers. This would give them something to think about: moon over Miami. He was in such sour spirits that he didn’t even peek over his shoulder to see their reaction when he bent over.
Watching the sun slide low, Mick Stranahan perceived the syncopation of these events as providential; things had changed on the water, all was no longer calm. The emotion that accompanied this realization was not fear, or even anxiety, but disappointment. All these days the tranquility of the bay, its bright and relentless beauty, had lulled him into thinking the world was not so rotten after all.
The minicam on the cabin cruiser reminded him otherwise. Mick Stranahan had no idea what the bastards wanted, but he was sorely tempted to hop in the skiff and go find out. In the end, he simply finished his gin and tonic and went back inside the stilt house. At dusk, when the light was gone, the boat pulled anchor and motored away.
4
After quitting the State Attorney’s Office, Stranahan had kept his gold investigator’s badge to remind people that he used to work there, in case he needed to get back inside. Like now.
A young assistant state attorney, whose name was Dreeson, took Stranahan to an interview room and handed him the Barletta file, which must have weighed four pounds. In an officious voice, the young prosecutor said:
“You can sit here and make notes, Mr. Stranahan. But it’s still an open case, so don’t take anything out.”
“You mean I can’t blow my nose on the affidavits?”
Dreeson made a face and shut the door, hard.
Stranahan opened the jacket, and the first thing to fall out was a photograph of Victoria Barletta. Class picture, clipped from the 1985 University of Miami student yearbook. Long dark hair, brushed to a shine; big dark eyes; a long sharp nose, probably her old man’s; gorgeous Italian smile, warm and laughing and honest.
Stranahan set the picture aside. He had never met the girl, never would.
He skimmed the statements taken so long ago by himself and Timmy Gavigan: the parents, the boyfriend, the sorority sisters. The details of the case came back to him quickly in a cold flood.
On March 12, 1986, Victoria Barletta had gotten up early, jogged three miles around the campus, showered, attended a 9 a.m. class in advanced public relations, met her boyfriend at a breakfast shop near Mark Light Field, then bicycled to an 11 a.m. seminar on the history of television news. Afterwards, Vicky went back to the Alpha Chi Omega house, changed into jeans, sneakers, and a sweatshirt, and asked a sorority sister to give her a lift to a doctor’s appointment in South Miami, only three miles from the university.
The appointment was scheduled for 1:30 p.m. at a medical building called the Durkos Center. As Vicky got out of the car, she instructed her friend to come back at about 5 p.m.and pick her up. Then she went inside and got a nose job and was never seen again.
According to a doctor and a nurse at the clinic, Vicky Barletta left the office at about 4:50 p.m. to wait on the bus bench out front for her ride back to campus. Her face was splotched, her eyes swollen to slits, and her nose heavily bandaged-not exactly a tempting sight for your average trolling rapist, Timmy Gavigan had pointed out.
Still, they both knew better than to rule it out. One minute the girl was on the bench, the next she was gone.
Three county buses had stopped there between 4:50 and 5:14 p.m., when Vicky’s friend finally arrived at the clinic. None of the bus drivers remembered seeing a woman with a busted-up face get on board.
So the cops were left to assume that somebody snatched Victoria Barletta off the bus bench moments after she emerged from the Durkos Center.
The case was treated like a kidnapping, though Gavigan and Stranahan suspected otherwise. The Barlettas had no money and no access to any; Vicky’s father was half-owner of a car wash in Evanston, Illinois. Aside from a couple of cranks, there were no ransom calls made to the family, or to the police. The girl was just plain gone, and undoubtedly dead.