“Try signing on again.”
She did.
The response was the same: Invalid password.
“Someone’s changed it,” she said. “That’s the only explanation. Someone had to. Which means it had to be my mom.” Her voice gathered a little energy. “So that’s good, right? It means that she’s near a computer and she’s still… that she’s still okay.”
Tomlinson was patting her shoulder, comforting her but also asking her to move. “Tell you what, let me dig into the folder that Doc’s hipster friend sent. Maybe it’s got the juice to find the password, recover the old files, the whole works.” He glanced at me. “Your buddy said everything would be self-explanatory, right?”
I had my arms crossed; stood there trying to picture someone with a computer on a sailboat in Colombia. But yeah, why not? There were phone lines and notebook computers everywhere. I said, “I told him you’d done some of your own programming, that you knew all the basics. He said no problem then.”
To kill time while Tomlinson worked, Amanda walked me through the house. The furniture was draped with white sheets. Her old bedroom was pink with flowers, neat as a museum. There were trophies on the shelves: tennis and softball. An athlete. One big window looked out onto the screened pool and the canal beyond.
“See all those Australian pines across the Intracoastal? That’s Birch State Park. At night, when I was, like, a sophomore or something, I used to sneak out and paddle our canoe across. I’d have the beach all to myself. Not too far from here, you look across and you can’t see anything but condos. Bahia Mar, where Frank and his little soulmate moved. Places like that, there’s no skyline, just buildings. The people there, you got these old men the color of bagels, plus all the yachties and the beach bunnies.”
Playing tour guide while Tomlinson worked.
I noticed that the closet door was wide and the boxes therein were open, scattered, as if someone had recently ransacked them. She replied to my quizzical expression: “I was looking for more photographs. While I was waiting for you guys to get here.”
“Why? You already sent the ones of your mom and Merlot. That’s all I wanted.”
“I know, but I started wondering after you asked me. The pictures of me when I was a little girl? I thought I’d piled them all in the same box. Now I can’t find the box. My mom must have put them somewhere, someplace she thought was safe.”
“You can’t find them.”
“No, but it’s okay. Mom probably hid them. She knows how sensitive I am about how… about, you know. How my eyes looked.”
Like she was kidding, Amanda said, “Mom was probably worried I might burn the whole bunch.”
It took Tomlinson slightly less than three hours to nail the password and recover the lost correspondence between Gail and her E-mail friends. Three intense nonstop hours, during which he shouted orders and updates to us from the study:
“Beer! Bring me beer! My fluids have been sapped. I need to rehydrate!”
“This fucking computer can kiss my ass on the county fucking square! Killing’s too good for it! Burning this noxious bitch would be a kindness. Where’d your mom GET this piece of junk?”
“Amanda, dear? Ahum-m-m. Oh-h-h-h-h Aman-N-N-N-da? Would you mind very much if I, uh, have a smoke in your mom’s study? Now… before you even answer, I know what you’re thinking but you’re wrong: It’s not tobacco, so you’ll hardly even notice the smell.”
She said yeah, sure, he could smoke a joint.
That surprised me.
Dressed in her power clothes, she was still coming across as a much different person than she’d been at Dinkin’s Bay Marina. We were the guests here and she was comfortable with being in charge. Wasn’t self-conscious, not at all reluctant to show little bits and pieces of herself.
Every now and then, she’d flip open her cell phone like it was some kind of Star Trek communicator. I’d listened to her say, “Larry… Larry, I realize the woman’s a pain in the ass and I realize what she’s asking is unfair. But it’s her hospital and it’s a major account and I want you to do whatever it takes to make her happy…” I listened to her say, “Kath? Amanda. Look, girlfriend, about dinner tonight… I’m up to my ass in work and I don’t think I’m going to be able to get away.” She gave me a sly glance before she added, “Yeah, I’ve got company, but they’re a couple of gorgeous hunks, so it’s okay.”
Once her cell phone rang and I listened to her say, “Steve, I’m going to make this short and sweet. I don’t want you calling anymore. I don’t want you leaving any more messages. I’m sorry, but I don’t feel that way about you and there’s nothing you can do about it. No… no more of your idiotic lines from Casablanca. We never crossed the Broward County line, so don’t even fucking talk to me about Paris.”
After that, she stomped off toward the study and came out a few minutes later, exhaling smoke.
Behind her, I heard Tomlinson say, “Pretty good shit, huh?”
I said, “Dope fiends, I’m surrounded by dope fiends. Jesus.” And I watched her smile at me.
She had removed her blazer. Through the white blouse I could see that she wore a gauzy-half bra. It showed her washboard body like a relief map. I pretended that I didn’t notice. It was an old buddy’s daughter, for Christ sake. Which was probably why she was going out of her way to show me that she was now an adult woman making adult decisions.
Mostly we sat around and waited.
I used her cell phone to make a couple of calls. She gave me the number and the name and I reached Deputy Melissa Grendle at the general investigations desk, Broward County Sheriff’s Department. Amanda had already told Grendle about the money that had been withdrawn from her mother’s accounts, but I decided to give it a try myself. Grendle was still uninterested, unimpressed. Polite indifference is a common buffer mechanism and she used it.
I hung up disappointed, but not surprised. Law enforcement may be the most demanding yet thankless job in America. Cops are underpaid, overworked and held up to public inspection and public ridicule to a degree that no other profession would tolerate. Which may be why the demarcation between outstanding cop and incompetent cop is becoming increasingly wide. The good ones, the really good ones, do it because they love it and they are intelligent enough to accept the job’s drawbacks philosophically. The bad ones do it because it answers some tough-guy film fiction they have chosen to portray, and they are too stupid or lazy to actually do it well.
Officer Grendle was one of the lazy ones. Perhaps one of the stupid ones, too, although I didn’t speak with her long enough to pass judgment.
When I clicked off, Amanda gave me a look like: See? I told you.
FBI agent Mitchell Wilson, however, was neither stupid nor lazy. “It’s like I told the daughter, Mr. Ford, we’ve got a copy of a written report, the local sheriff’s department, saying the woman stated that she planned to leave the country willingly. That’s not kidnapping, no matter what the daughter thinks. Now, okay, this other business, the money, all those withdrawals, yeah, I agree, it has an odor to it. Maybe it stinks. I want you to keep me informed about it because you sound like a reasonable guy and, like I said, what’s going on has an odor. A little bit of a smell; something may not be right. But we don’t know enough yet to warrant an investigation. Understand what I’m saying?”
I understood.
The last call I made was to Frank Calloway’s Lauderdale office where the hardworking Betty Marsh confirmed that Mr. Calloway hoped to meet with me tomorrow afternoon in Boca Grande, but that, yes, he would call me personally to confirm.
“Thursday,” she said, as if double-checking an appointment book. “In the late afternoon. He said something about you coming by boat?”
I said, “Yep. But have him call me early, just in case the weather’s bad and I decide to drive.”
I gave her Amanda’s cell phone number as well as my home number.