“Seychelle, get real. Do you think that matters? Cops are too damn busy today to worry about whether they’ve got the right person for the crime. They just need a person. They need to make the arrest. If the evidence points to you right now, they don’t have the time to be out there looking for any other suspects. There’ll probably be another couple of murders tonight to add to Collazo’s caseload.”
“You’re scaring me.”
“What I found out about this Daggett girl scares me.”
“You know something about Ely?”
“Like I said, I made a few calls. Asked for a few favors. The whole thing was really stupid and sloppy. These guys were total fuck-ups when it came to trying to hide a body in the river. Stupid assholes like these scare me worse than smart ones.” He slapped his hand on the stub of leg that protruded from his cutoff jeans. “They’re unpredictable. Too often they just can’t control their impulses.”
He stared at his leg for several seconds, then seemed to shake off the memory.
“They’re pretty sure it was heroin. We’ll know for sure when the report comes in, and my friend’s gonna call me.”
“Heroin? No way.”
“The M.E. at the scene found the injection site.”
“No way. She’d never do that. Even when Ely was on the streets, she wasn’t into anything that involved sticking needles in herself. If she could smoke it, yeah. Grass, crack. But injecting heroin? No way.”
“That’s not all of it. She didn’t die of an overdose. It was strangulation . . . there were marks. It may not have been intentional.”
“What the . . .” I struggled to comprehend what he was saying to me. “How do you strangle someone accidentally?”
“She was probably so out of it from the drugs, they didn’t know she was dying. The people who are sexually stimulated by that sort of thing sometimes get carried away.”
“Mike, what are you talking about?”
“There was evidence of sexual activity, Sey. Nasty, rough, ritualistic stuff. There were rope marks on her wrists, and she was tore up pretty bad—inside and out. Probably gonna find semen from several partners. The people who enjoy bondage are like addicts. They need more and more. This time your friend’s extracurricular activities went too far.”
“Elysia?” I knew she hadn’t had a boyfriend since she’d come off the streets and cleaned up her act. “No way. She’d never—”
“My sources said she’d had one prior arrest for prostitution in ninety-seven.”
“Yeah, but that was before she got cleaned up. Her life had changed. Totally. She had a job. She was clean.”
Elysia into bondage? Tough as she was in other ways, the girl cried if she got a paper cut.
“Mike, if what you’re saying is true, she didn’t do any of it voluntarily. I know that for sure. She was forced. Shot full of drugs like that, she probably didn’t know
what the hell was happening. But why? And how did she get back out on the street without anybody over at Harbor House noticing anything?”
“She couldn’t have. Not from how you describe their check-in procedures at Harbor House. Either you’re lying or they are. Simple as that. That’s how the cops see it. Question they’ll ask themselves is, which of you stands to gain by telling a lie? Which one of you is already under suspicion for another crime?”
XI
Everything kept coming back around to Harbor House. As I drove down Sunrise, headed for the beach, I told myself that my real reason for going over there was to find out what sort of funeral arrangements were being made for Ely. If nobody else was going to step forward, I’d figure out a way to take care of it somehow. At least that’s what I’d tell them over at Harbor House. But at the same time, I tried to remember exactly what Elysia had said about James Long. She’d said something about how Patty had fooled even James. What had she meant by that? I wanted to find out if he was the one doing the lying or if he was being lied to.
The door buzzed when I was still several steps away, and I hustled to grab it. Inside the lobby area, I was struck by the similarities to the police station: the glass booth, reception desk, locked doors leading to the inner areas. I wondered, briefly, if they were trying to keep people out or in.
Behind the reception desk, a young woman sat in the chair and an older woman was looking over her shoulder at a paper.
“Can I help you?” the older woman asked looking up at me.
“Yes, I don’t know if you remember me, but I used to come here to visit Elysia Daggett, and I spoke to you several times about her. You are Minerva, right?”
Her face took on a practiced expression of grief. “Oh, yes, I remember you. Yes. We’re just devastated here. Really, we’re so sorry, and we want you to know we share your grief. She had been doing so well. It’s doubly hard to lose them when they’ve been doing so well.”
She wore her long, gray-streaked hair pulled back in a tight bun. She looked the epitome of the spinster schoolmarm, and I wondered how she could possibly strike up a rapport with these street-hardened girls. As she spoke, I made the appropriate nods and sad smiles, but her words didn’t convey any of the true heart-rending ache that I felt. There was a void in my life where Ely had been, but it was more than just emptiness. I couldn’t stop asking myself if I had done something wrong. Could I have visited her yesterday or taken her home with me last night? Could I have changed the course of events?
“I was wondering if I could talk to the director about her. I’d like to know what arrangements are being made, and I have some questions about her actions last night.”
“Well, Mr. Long is a very busy man. He’s in a staff meeting this afternoon.”
“Minerva, this is very important to me.” I was not about to give up easily. “Ely was like a sister to me. She told me everything about her life.” I tried to look very knowing, though I hadn’t a clue what it was I was pretending to know. But someone in this place was lying and had made me look like both a fool and a liar. I was determined to find out why.
“Well.” She sighed loudly. “I’ll see what I can do.” She picked up the phone and dialed an extension. I wandered across the lobby and gazed at the photos, press clippings, and posters on the far wall. Across the lobby, Minerva turned her back to me and spoke in hushed tones. I couldn’t understand much, but I did hear Elysia’s name.
There was a framed clipping on the wall from the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel with the headline “Runaways Find a Safe Harbor.” A large color photo showed three girls clustered around a tall black man outside the building, standing next to a wood sign that read Harbor House. They were gazing up adoringly at him, and it was understandable; he had the high cheekbones, strong jaw, and cleft chin of a professional model.
He appeared again in the next photo, a color glossy taken the night of a fund-raising ball. There were three couples in the picture, and it almost looked like a put-up job to demonstrate the multiethnic South Florida population: a black couple, a white couple, and a Hispanic couple. The handsome black man stood next to a woman with a gracefully long neck and big dark exotic eyes. The white couple looked like the typical old Florida monied socialites, big hair and a bad toupee, whose pictures always grace the society pages. The Hispanic man was just plain ugly. With a big nose, small eyes, and bad skin, he was several inches shorter than the brassily beautiful Cuban on his arm. The bronze plate at the bottom of the glass read Harbor House Gala 1997.
At that moment, the door leading to the inner sanctum opened, and the tall black man I had been admiring in the photos walked through the door.