“She is elegant,” I said. “In great shape.”
“With a lotta help. Plastic surgeons have had at her like a Sunday roast.” She glanced across the room and abruptly changed subjects. “Any brainstorms ’bout our weddin’ gift for Angel and Rooney?”
I followed her gaze. The betrothed had finished dining at a table across the cafeteria. Rooney, in his security uniform, reached out to steady the small blond as she struggled to her feet. Her belly bulged like that of a baby whale.
“Ain’t they sweet?” Lottie said. “That baby’s ready to see daylight any damn minute. Look at her, she can hardly waddle. You in on the office pool? She’s already a week overdue.”
“Stop looking at them.” I wrapped the second half of my grilled-cheese-and-tomato sandwich in a paper napkin for later.
“Why?” Lottie reluctantly wrenched her eyes from the happy couple.
“They might come over.” I drained my cup.
“Well, ain’t you Miss Congeniality.”
“I swear, Lottie, it’s a disaster every time that woman crosses my path.”
“Pshaw,” she said, waving greetings their way. “That’s all over. They’re as happy as clams at high tide. Angel’s got her act together now.”
Our strategy, we decided, was to ambush Broussard at the airport. Until then, I returned to my desk to wrap up the story on the bulldozed tourist, who was still in surgery. Police had arrested the operator for marijuana possession, accident charges were pending, and he had been suspended from his job. Reached at home, he had no comment.
I called Marsh to thank him for the tip. “I saw you,” he said playfully.
“I know, I know. I waved. Did you see me wave?”
“Oh, yes. In fact, I got it on tape. My new video cam arrived. The quality of the playback is excellent. I can count the buttons on your blouse.”
Oh, swell. I grimaced. Why did the most innocuous conversation with this man always make me want to take a shower?
He asked about the Jordan story. “Looks like she was married,” I confided, “living out west, with a couple of kids. The husband’s flying in to make the ID. But don’t repeat this to anyone till it’s confirmed. Okay?”
He agreed, and I said I’d keep him informed. News sources love being kept abreast as a story develops.
I called Rothman, Kagan’s private detective, and talked to his answering machine. The phone directory listed no street address. He probably worked out of his house. I also tried a second number, a beeper, then called Kagan’s office and left my number on his emergency line.
Rothman called back almost immediately.
“Who is this?” His voice was loud, his brusque tone abrasive.
“I need to talk to you about Kaithlin Jordan,” I said, and identified myself.
“You need to talk to me about who?” he said, even louder.
“Kaithlin Jordan.”
“Don’t know ’er.”
“That’s odd.” I sounded confused, always easy for me. “I understood differently. I spent some time with Martin Kagan earlier today.”
“He gave you my name?” He spoke the words distinctly and very slowly.
“Where else would I get it?” I said blithely. “I’m working on the story, this whole thing is about to hit the fan—”
Gloria signaled that I had another call.
“Whoops,” I said. “Important call, another new development, have to get back to you.” I hung up.
Good timing is rare. This was one of those golden moments. It was Kagan on the other line.
“What do you want?” he said rudely, realizing it was me.
“I’m working on the story,” I said cheerfully. “The Kaithlin Jordan thing we talked about.”
He gave a quick sigh of annoyance. “I told you. I never met her, never talked to her.”
“I guess that’s because you knew her by a different name,” I said sweetly. “Shannon Broussard. From Seattle. Does that refresh your memory?”
“No idea what you’re talking about,” he said coldly.
“Well, that’s odd,” I said, perplexed. “See, I was just talking to Mr. Rothman.”
He hesitated. “Who?”
“You know, your private eye, the Digger. You hired him to do some work on the case—”
“He told you that?”
“Well.” I hesitated. “I’m sure I didn’t misunderstand. I just spoke with him, not five minutes ago. He said that you—uh-oh, have to go now, the news meeting just started. Get back to you later.”
The news meeting had just started, editors assembling in the glass office. As usual, I was not among them. Reporters are not invited.
Broussard’s flight was on time, the airline said. Lottie and I left early. Miami International Airport was always bedlam at the height of the season, with parking spaces so rare that distant offsite parking lots use trams, trains, and buses to transport people to MIA from miles away. With patience and luck, we eventually snagged a spot in a short-term garage on actual airport property.
The cacophony of foreign languages added to the chaos and confusion as horns blared, exhaust billowed, and cabbies battled. There are those who are overwhelmed by it, those inured to it, and those who thrive and prosper: the pickpockets, the sharp-eyed thieves who loiter near airport phones to rip off credit card numbers as owners use them, and those who deliberately splash mustard, ketchup, or a drink onto startled travelers so they can profusely apologize, elaborately “assist,” and otherwise distract them while accomplices steal their valuables.
Northern-bound travelers in heavy winter clothes rubbed shoulders with island-bound vacationers in shorts and T-shirts, as we staked out the concourse, hoping Broussard didn’t change flights at the last minute. This one arrived thirty minutes late. The first to disembark strode by, rushing to make connections. The weary followed, loaded down with carry-ons, pulling hand carts, carrying babies.
“Over there, bet that’s him!” I said. He resembled the man in the photo at the Easter-egg hunt. Tall and slender, with wavy brown hair and glasses, he looked about forty, distracted and fatigued. He wore a rumpled gray wool sports jacket over a white shirt open at the neck. His tie was loosened and he needed a shave. He seemed confused, almost a bit of a nerd, totally unlike R. J.
Though startled, he seemed relieved to be met by someone, even strangers eager to pick his brain. When I offered to drive him to his hotel, he agreed. He did not protest or even seem to notice when Lottie shot a few discreet photos. Instead, he eagerly asked questions, propounding his own theories.
“I thought about it all through the flight,” he said, “wracking my brain. The dead woman isn’t Shannon. Definitely. I’m positive. Shannon’s jewelry must have been stolen and this other woman was wearing it.”
Lottie and I exchanged dubious glances. “Anything is possible,” I said reluctantly, trying not to encourage him. “Stranger things do happen.”
I was tempted to display for him copies of Kaithlin’s photos from the News library, in a thick manila folder tucked between the front seats. I didn’t. He would live with the tragedy forever. Let him live with hope, I thought, for one more night.
“I called the detective again, from the plane,” Broussard said, as I popped the trunk for his bag. “I have to meet him at nine A.M., at police headquarters. He said we’d go to the…to the morgue. We’ll know then.” His voice faded from hopeful to bleak.
We dropped Lottie off at the News building and drove across the causeway to the Deauville Hotel.
He checked in, asking me to wait while he went to his room. “I just need to call the kids,” he said, “and say good night.”
I sat in the bustling lobby wondering what it was like to learn the person you loved for years is a total stranger and gradually became aware that a disproportionate number of guests seemed to be statuesque African-American women in stiletto heels, short bright-red wigs, strapless tops, and neon micromini skirts. I remembered the hip-hop music convention in town as
they strutted by, music blaring, to their various events, as a band in a nearby ballroom played a rousing version of “Hava Nagila” for bar mitzvah celebrants exuberantly dancing the hora. Only in Miami Beach, I thought.
Preston Broussard reappeared in twenty minutes. He wore the same rumpled shirt and jacket, minus the tie.
“Sorry I took so long,” he said. “I hate leaving the kids again. I haven’t even been to the office since Shannon disappeared. I wanted to be with Devon and Caitlin every minute. Shannon always talks about how important these formative years are. I don’t want them to feel frightened or insecure, even if I do. Thank God my folks came up from San Diego to stay with them.”
He had no appetite and wasn’t thirsty, so we wandered out beyond the lighted pool area to the ocean beach. We sat on a wooden bench facing the starlit sea and a stretch of wet sand that smelled of salt and seaweed. Strolling couples laughed, and distant strains of music accompanied the tide’s retreat beneath a full moon.
“I’m sorry to be the one who brought—”
“No,” he interrupted. “I appreciate what you’ve done. I could have waited and come tomorrow, but I can’t take doing nothing. I feel more alive when I’m looking for her. New York was horrible. The police—” He grimaced. “They were polite but disinterested. They seemed to think she’d never arrived there, so it wasn’t their problem. And the Seattle police say she boarded a plane and left their jurisdiction, so it’s not their case. They all took reports, but nobody really was doing anything.”
Shannon Broussard’s Seattle–New York flight had a brief stopover in Chicago, he said. “But she had no reason to disembark there.”
If she did, I thought, she could have made a Miami connection without leaving the airport.
Shannon’s trip to NewYork was not unusual, he said, a routine formed early in their marriage when she took buying trips for a small boutique she owned and operated until the birth of their first daughter. When business permitted, Broussard accompanied her, he said, to take in the Broadway shows. Women friends occasionally joined her, but she made the last trip alone. He hadn’t been worried. “She’s a sophisticated traveler,” he said.
They met traveling, on a cross-country train ten years earlier. “I’ll always be grateful to Amtrak.” He smiled wistfully. “Heading home from Chicago on business, I like to take the scenic route, to see the big sky, reflect and recharge my batteries.”
Both were aboard the Empire Builder, which traverses Montana, winding its way into Washington along the Canadian border. She appeared troubled, alone and withdrawn, when he first saw her in the dining car. That attracted him. “I guess I always want to be the rescuer,” he said, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. “Even as a kid I brought home every sick stray animal, every sad-sack misfit from school. Of course, Shannon was no misfit. She’s an absolute knockout.”
She was reluctant but he persisted and they were soon in the club car, where picture windows curved up into the ceilings surrounded by Montana’s dramatic big sky, and he was pointing out the prairie dogs and silos, and then the stars. That’s how it began.
“I assumed she’d been through a bad experience and I was right,” he said. “It was obvious. She could scarcely speak about it. She was traumatized, shell-shocked by tragedy. She’d lost her entire family.”
Her name was Shannon Sullivan, he said, from Stanley, Oklahoma, a small community devastated by a catastrophic class-four tornado. Twenty-seven had perished. “I remembered reading about it in the news at the time,” he said. “A monster storm, a mile and a half wide, it left farm machinery twisted like pretzels.
“It was horrifying. Shannon’s sister had an infant son. The twister tore the baby out of its mother’s arms and killed them both. They didn’t find the baby for days. Shannon was left literally alone in the world. Lost her parents, sister, best friend, everybody who ever meant anything to her. That’s why family—our family—is so dear to her. That’s why she would never willingly do this, never leave us.”
They lived happily, he said, her past a tragic memory. Sometimes moody and melancholy, she always snapped out of it. He understood and supported her through the grief process.
I could see what drew Kaithlin to this sensitive and sympathetic man.
“Did you quarrel recently? Did she seem bored or restless?” I asked.
“Not at all.” His words rang with the certainty forged by years of intimacy. “She loves being a mom, loves our life. I know it.”
“Something must have changed recently.”
He sighed. “I’ve thought a lot about it,” he said.
“Early last summer, I saw something was bothering her. She seemed tense, less talkative, spent a great deal of time on the Internet. That’s not like her. Shannon’s a woman of action. Loves sports, taking the kids horseback riding, hiking, and boating. We live on Puget Sound.”
“What was she doing on the Net?”
“I’m not sure exactly. I wish I’d paid more attention.” He sighed and ran his hand through his hair. “I keep thinking of all the should-haves. She denied being troubled, said everything was fine, but I could see…I thought the kids were getting on her nerves, or maybe it was the pressure of all her volunteer work. She initially got on-line to conduct research for a charity campaign that would fund a program to assist young single mothers. That was one of her passions. Next thing I knew she was up there alone in her study for hours, often late at night.”
“That’s when she began to appear stressed?”
“That’s right,” he said thoughtfully. “At the time I didn’t think the two were connected. Now I wonder….”
“You have access to her computer, right?”
“I thought so. After she disappeared, a detective suggested I check her e-mail and computer files. I tried, even brought in a troubleshooter from my company. He had no luck either. The hard drive was wiped out. There must have been a crash, maybe a power failure.”
“Perhaps it was deliberate.”
He shook his head and glanced at me sharply. “That would mean that her disappearance—everything—was premeditated, that she planned to leave us. I’ll never believe that.”
Restless, he got to his feet, began to pace, then suddenly turned to me.
“I’m already thinking ahead. What do you think of that?” he demanded, eyes wet. “Thinking ahead to the next lead after this one doesn’t pan out. If Shannon was no longer on this planet,” he said, his right hand over his heart, “I’d know it, I’d feel it. That means something, doesn’t it?”
I murmured an encouraging sound but remembered all the similar words from people who refused to face reality.
Wide-awake, though exhausted, he wasn’t ready to rest, so we walked south to the boardwalk.
“What was her financial situation when you met?” I asked. “Was she broke?”
“No, not at all. She had money of her own.”
“Three million dollars?”
“Whoa.” He smiled. “She was no multimillionaire, but she was comfortable. I think she had somewhere in the neighborhood of nine hundred thousand dollars.”
“Nice neighborhood,” I said. About a third of the missing money, I thought.
“Insurance and inheritance,” he said. “From her family and the property that was destroyed. She invested. Shannon’s a shrewd businesswoman. At first I wrote off her little boutique as an indulgence, a hobby, something to keep her busy, but she put it into the black in six months. Highly unusual for a small business.”
“Did she keep her money separate after you married?”
He hesitated, as though debating whether to answer. “She mingled some with mine in our joint portfolio, kept a few accounts, investments of her own.” He paused. “You know, discussing Shannon’s personal business like this makes me extremely uncomfortable. If you’re asking whether Shannon cleaned out her bank accounts when she left, she didn’t. They’re still intact. She’s no Mata Hari, no schemer or swindler. You’d like her,” he said
hopefully. “I hope you two get to meet one day.”
Casa Milagro loomed ahead.
“There’s a guy up there,” I said, “on the sixteenth floor. Sees everything down here. He’s probably watching from a dark window right now with night-vision binoculars, telescopes, and zoom-lens cameras.”
We stared up. “He witnessed the murder,” I said. “He saw the whole thing.”
Broussard looked startled. “So why didn’t the police arrest the killer?” He gazed up at the high floor.
“He didn’t call it in until much later, when the woman’s body surfaced and began to float in on the tide. He was worried about his credibility. Wanted to be sure the cops wouldn’t doubt his word. He’s an odd guy.”
“He must be. I thought there were good Samaritan laws,” he said gravely. “When you see someone in danger, you have an obligation to help.”
He stopped.
“Wait,” he said, “if he saw it from up there, then this must be where it happened.”
“That’s where they brought her out of the water.” I pointed.
“The poor woman, whoever she was.” We both shivered in the cool night air. “What’s that?” he asked.
Like a beating heart, the distant repetitive throb of a bata drum came from somewhere down on the beach, near the surf.
I strained to see in the darkness. “It’s the full moon,” I said. “A salute to Chango, the Afro-Cuban god of thunder and lightning.”
“So they actually practice that stuff here. What does it mean?”
“Chango,” I said, “is a macho ladies’ man and an avenger of evil.”
“He must have his work cut out for him in this town,” Broussard said bitterly.
We walked in silence for a time, listening and looking at the moon.
I gave him directions for his early appointment at police headquarters and said good night back at his hotel.
On the way home I checked my messages. Kagan and Rothman had left several each, some urgent. Let them wait until morning, I thought. Let them join the rest of us whose sleep would be troubled tonight.
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