Wendy nodded and extended her arm to Drue with a questioning look. “Total family hugs,” Drue said, closing the circle.
41
Drue was too shaken to return to work after leaving the doctor’s office. She called Marianne and told her she intended to take the rest of the day off.
“How’s Wendy?” she asked. “Your dad said she’s not coming back to work for a while?”
“She and the baby seem to be fine,” Drue said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Drue’s cell phone pinged while she was stopped at a light on Central Avenue. The text was from Corey.
How about a swim tonight? Need to check on progress with your knee rehab.
She texted him a thumbs-up emoji. Just before the light changed she glanced to her right. The blocks along that section of Central were lined with antiques and vintage shops, and she loved “window-shopping” during her commute home. Today, on the sidewalk in front of a shop that specialized in mid-century modern, she noticed a glamorous glass-topped rattan dining table with four matching chairs arrayed around it. The seat cushions were covered in a wild jungle-print fabric.
It was love at first sight. The set would be right at home in the dining room at Coquina Cottage. How much? she wondered. The car behind her gave a warning beep and she looked up to see that the light had turned green. Reluctantly, she drove on.
Her plan to finish fixing up and furnishing the cottage had been put on hold for weeks now, due to her growing obsession over the Jazmin Mayes case. In the meantime, the bright blue tarp on her roof had faded and cracked in the relentless May sun, and the water stains on the ceilings were growing by the day. And just that morning, she’d found a legal-looking notice from the city hanging on her front door, warning her that the tarp’s continued placement on her roof was a violation of city building code. The notice gave her thirty days to remove the tarp.
She had to at least get the roof patched, if not totally replaced. And oh, how she longed for air-conditioning. Drue had placed box fans on either side of her bedroom and in the kitchen, but mostly they just stirred up the hot, damp air streaming in through her open windows.
Ever since receiving her first CCK paycheck she’d placed herself on a strict budget, but her bank balance was still pathetically lean. Air-conditioning would have to wait, because a patch job on the roof was now priority one.
And that gorgeous rattan dining room set? Just moved to the end of the wish list.
* * *
Corey was well into his workout by the time she arrived at the Land’s End pool. She sat on the side of the pool, dangling her legs in the water, watching, with envy, as his long, lean body cut effortlessly through the turquoise water. He wore swim goggles, and his bald head shone in the late-afternoon sun.
Drue slipped into the water and began the warm-up routine he’d taught her, starting out slowly, clinging to the side of the pool, doing leg stretches, then marching in place, pumping her arms, gradually lifting her knees higher. She walked back and forth across the shallow end, watching Corey’s progress to avoid a collision in his lane. Finally, she went back to the side of the pool and did several repetitions of knee lifts, knee-to-chest stretches and flutter kicking.
In between counting her reps, her thoughts strayed back to her conversation with Ben. He was right, of course, to point out that she still hadn’t managed to prove that Jazmin Mayes hadn’t been killed while on the job. Even if she managed to uncover the truth behind the girl’s murder, it wouldn’t bring back Aliyah’s mother, and might not even give Yvonne Howington a legitimate claim of criminal negligence against Gulf Vista.
She climbed out of the pool and collapsed onto a nearby chaise lounge, and a moment later, Corey joined her.
“How do you feel?” he asked, toweling himself dry.
“Tired,” she admitted. “But I think the knee is getting stronger. And I’d forgotten how good it feels to move after a long day spent sitting on my ass in an office.”
“Let me see,” he said. She extended her leg and he leaned over, gently probing the scar with long, suntanned fingers.
He looked up and smiled. “It’s noticeably better.” He grabbed his plastic gallon jug of go-juice and took a long drink.
“How are things going at the office?” He offered her the jug, but she made a face and declined.
“Some good, some bad,” she replied. “The big news is that Wendy, my stepmother, scared the living shit out of me today by almost going into labor in my car.”
“You never told me you were going to be a big sister,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “And have you ever referred to Wendy as your stepmother before?”
“Some things take time to get used to,” she said tartly, ignoring his taunt. “She’s not due until November, but the doctor said she was having premature labor, so she’s put her on bed rest.”
“How did your chat with that housekeeper from Gulf Vista go?”
“I’m more convinced than ever that somebody covered up something at that hotel,” she replied. “I also talked to Jazmin’s best friend last night. You wouldn’t believe the crap that was going on at Gulf Vista.”
She quickly filled him in on what she’d learned about the toxic atmosphere of sexual harassment at the hotel.
“God, men are pigs,” Corey said. “How do you women stand it?”
“After a while, you just get numb to it,” Drue said. “But not all guys are pigs. I had lunch today with one of my coworkers, Ben. He’s a little nerdy, yeah. I mean, his idea of fun is designing video games. But he and this other guy at work, Jonah, fixed my car, and wouldn’t let me pay them. Ben knows I’ve been digging into the Jazmin Mayes case. He insists that there’s nothing sketchy about the way the firm handled Yvonne’s case, but at least he listens without staring at my boobs the whole time I’m talking.”
“Have you told that police detective about the sexual harassment stuff?” Corey asked.
“I’ve tried to call her several times today, to tell her about meeting Neesa Vincent last night after I talked to Jaz’s boyfriend. I’ve left a bunch of voice mail messages, but she hasn’t returned any of my calls.”
Corey pulled on a T-shirt. “What’s your next step?”
“I was wondering,” she said slowly. “Do you have a laptop? I want to take another look at the video from the hotel’s security cameras, but I didn’t have a minute to spare at work today.”
“Would you like to come up to my place and watch some videos?” Corey asked, waggling his eyebrows.
“Sorry,” Drue told him. “You’re much too nice a guy to make that sound even remotely smutty.”
“Too nice, or too gay?”
She smiled.
* * *
Corey’s condo was on the second floor, with two sets of French doors that afforded sweeping views of the point where Boca Ciega Bay flowed into the Gulf. A pair of worn tufted-leather Chesterfield sofas separated by a contemporary glass and brass coffee table sat atop an antelope-hide rug. The walls were dotted with framed color photographs of vintage neon signs.
“My ex was a fine art photographer,” Corey explained. “I should get rid of these because they remind me of him, but the thing is, I love to look at them.”
“He does beautiful work,” Drue commented.
“Did. As far as I know, he hasn’t picked up a camera in a couple years. His new boo is a rich doctor, so Scott doesn’t have a reason to work. He’s now a proud member of the idle rich.”
Corey gestured toward the open-plan kitchen, which was separated from the living room by a black granite-topped island. “I’m just gonna take a quick shower. If you’re thirsty or hungry, help yourself to anything in the fridge.”
She walked around the living room for a while, staring at the photos. She recognized a couple of the signs as belonging to local landmarks, including the Sunken Gardens on Fourth Street, the Thunderbird Motel, just down Gulf Boulevard in Treasure Island, and the El Cap, a family-owned bar also on Fourth Street.
/> After a while, she wandered into the kitchen. The contents of Corey’s refrigerator were laughably boring. Four bottles of O’Doul’s non-alcoholic beer, a jar of cashew butter, a head of kale, a bunch of carrots and a cellophane bag full of small brown squares that looked like fudge.
She helped herself to one of the squares. It was chewy and tasted vaguely of dried fruits and nuts and unidentifiable herbs, with an unpleasant aftertaste. Drue spat it into the trash and opened an O’Doul’s, which didn’t taste much better.
Corey emerged from the bedroom area, carrying his laptop. He set it up on the counter and Drue handed him the flash drive.
The screen filled with the black-and-white image of a woman dressed in a uniform smock and jeans, her face partially obscured by the bill of a baseball cap, exiting a room and pushing a laundry cart down the narrow hotel corridor.
“That’s her?” Corey asked, leaning in to look. “Jazmin?”
“Yes,” Drue said. “The time stamp shows that it’s 1:32 A.M. And that’s the problem. Despite her mother’s insistence that she wasn’t working that late, clearly she is working.”
“Did the police talk to anybody who saw her working that night?” he asked.
“Don’t know,” Drue admitted. “Her best friend, Neesa, told me that she and Jazmin took their dinner break together at seven that night, and that’s the last time she saw Jazmin.”
“There’s not a lot to see, is there?” he said. “Just hotel corridor, elevator and the walkway to the laundry room. And of course, the housekeeper pushing that cart. You don’t even really get a look at the girl’s face.”
Drue rewound the video and watched it again from the beginning. She pointed at the shot of the woman entering the hotel room at 11:05 P.M. “See? That’s her. The video is grainy, but you can see her chin. I saw several photos of Jazmin on her Facebook page. She had a very distinctive chin. Kind of pointy, with a little cleft in it. Come to think of it, Aliyah has the same cleft.”
The video progressed, and Drue and Corey watched it two more times. “Something keeps bugging me about this thing, but I can’t put my finger on what it is,” Drue said. “I really wish I could watch all the video from that day that shows Jazmin.”
“You’d watch eight hours of housekeepers walking up and down hallways? It’d be like paint drying,” Corey pointed out. “But you know what I notice? Does it strike you as strange that there’s nobody else around in this video clip? I mean, when we were there, that hotel was pretty busy.”
“May is still their busy season,” Drue said. “Jazmin was killed in September. I don’t know what September is like over here, but in Fort Lauderdale, things are totally dead that time of year.”
“Yeah, maybe you’re right,” Corey said.
“Although … Zee’s report said there was a Shriners convention going on then.”
“I didn’t see any fezzes in that clip, did you?”
“They could have all been at a banquet, or partying down at the pool, or staying in a different part of the property,” Drue said. Her stomach rumbled loudly, so she got up and went back to the refrigerator, taking another square from the cellophane bag and popping it into her mouth, grimacing as she chewed.
“What are you eating?” Corey asked.
She shrugged and kept chewing. “Energy bites? You said I could help myself to anything, right?”
Corey fetched the bag and held it up. “These? You ate these? They’re Bitzy’s protein chews.”
Drue paused midchew. “Who’s Bitzy?”
“My Pekingese. Well, Scott’s. I still dog-sit her sometimes.”
She walked into the kitchen, spat out the bite and retrieved another near-beer from the fridge. “What do you say we go over to my place?”
“Okay, but why?” Corey asked.
“Because I’m super hungry from my workout and you don’t have any food fit for human consumption in your house.”
* * *
Drue produced a box of chicken burritos from her freezer and placed them on the counter while Corey looked on in horror.
“You’re not seriously going to eat that, are you?” he asked.
“Don’t be such a food snob. They’re very delicious. And the label says they’re non-GMO so in my book that’s healthy.”
She rummaged around in the refrigerator until she found a bottle of spring water, which she handed to her guest.
Corey had seated himself at the kitchen table and was idly leafing through the thick black binder that had taken up permanent residence there. “Hey, what’s this?”
“Just another friggin’ mystery,” Drue said. “I found this in a box of my dad’s old law school textbooks, stuck way in the corner of the attic.” She gestured upward, then slid Colleen’s black-and-white high school graduation photo out of the binder.
“Pretty. Is that your mom?”
“No. Her name was Colleen Boardman Hicks. She went shopping and then to dinner with a friend in downtown St. Pete in 1976 and has never been seen since.”
“What’s it doing up in the attic of your grandparents’ house?”
“That’s what’s been keeping me awake a lot of nights,” Drue said. “I don’t know if I told you this, but my dad was a St. Pete cop when my parents were first married, and my grandparents let them live here in the cottage for cheap. They moved into town before I was born, and then, after my dad got out of law school, they split up. That’s when my mom and I moved to the east coast. I guess my mom must have stored her stuff here after the divorce. The box I found the binder in had her handwriting on the outside of it.”
She put the burritos on a plate and stood in front of the microwave oven, holding the plate aloft. “Last chance. Sure you don’t want to get in some of this fiesta of fabulousness?”
Corey made a gagging noise. “I’d rather eat Bitzy’s energy bites.” He tapped the cover of the binder. “You know, you really should consider getting yourself a hobby.”
“You mean an obsession? Like doing an Iron Man?”
“Touché,” he said. “So was this one of your father’s investigations from when he was a cop?”
“I asked him that, and he said it wasn’t, because he was still just a patrol officer. But he did go to high school with Colleen Hicks, although he claims they didn’t run around with the same crowd of friends.”
Corey still looked puzzled. “Did he have any idea how this file would have ended up here, with a bunch of his stuff?”
Drue placed a plate, napkin and cutlery on the table, carefully pushing aside the binder, and poured herself a glass of wine. “I told him I found a file of old newspaper clippings about the disappearance, in my mom’s stuff, but I didn’t mention finding this thing.” She nodded at the binder.
“Why not?”
She took a sip of wine. “I’m not sure. Maybe because I’m still not a hundred percent sure I trust him. There are just a lot of unanswered questions, you know?”
“Like what?”
The microwave dinged. Drue transferred the hot plate onto the kitchen table. She took a bottle of Cholula sauce from a cabinet and doused the burrito in it.
“To start with, what’s the official police file doing in a box in my grandfather’s cottage, more than forty years after this woman vanished? Who put it up there? I’ve read through it. There’s no mention of Dad’s name in any of the reports.”
She tasted a forkful of her dinner, paused, then sprinkled more hot sauce atop her burrito.
“But I’ll tell you whose name is in the file—and that’s Jimmy Zilowicz, who everybody calls Jimmy Zee and who is not only my dad’s oldest friend but a former St. Pete police detective, and currently case investigator at the law firm.”
“Coincidence?” Corey asked.
“I asked Zee if he had a theory about the Colleen Hicks case. He said his role was minor, that he just did some legwork.”
“And did he have a theory?”
“He said that Colleen Hicks and her husband were into some kind of k
inky stuff. And that right before she vanished, she cleaned out their joint savings account. Allen Hicks, that was the husband, was a control freak, according to Zee. He says she probably disappeared on purpose.”
Corey leafed through the binder, pausing at the black-and-white photos in their clear plastic envelopes. “Do you believe him? Do you believe it’s possible that she’s alive?”
She poked at the burrito with her fork, took a bite, chewed and swallowed. “If she’s still alive, she’d be around my dad’s age now. Why would she stay hidden all these years?”
“Suppose she did start a new life? Remarried, maybe had kids, now she’d have grandkids. Whatever happened to her husband?” Corey asked.
Drue reached for her cell phone and typed the name Allen Hicks into the search engine. The search yielded more than three dozen citations. She pulled up the first two and read them.
“Three years after his wife disappeared, Allen Hicks got a Mexican divorce. He remarried, got divorced again and then married a third time.” She looked up at Corey. “Clearly the guy wasn’t exactly distraught over losing his wife.”
She clicked on the next story link and skimmed it quickly. “Allen Hicks retired to North Carolina and died in 2009.”
“Which still leaves the question of whatever happened to Colleen,” Corey said. “Is she dead or alive?”
“And what, if any, is the connection to my dad?”
“Why don’t you just ask him?”
“I did. He denied that there was any real connection.”
“Just level with him,” Corey said, shaking his head impatiently. “Tell him you found the old police files up in the attic—in a box of his stuff.”
“I can’t,” Drue insisted. “He’s not just my dad, he’s also my boss. It would be like I was accusing him of something dishonest at best and criminal at worst. I can’t say anything to him. Not until I have some kind of proof.”
“Proof of what? That he had something to do with this Colleen Hicks person?”
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