Sunset Beach

by Mary Kay Andrews

  “What did you tell him?” Drue asked.

  “I told him it sounded like a product liability case, which we don’t do. And I referred him to an asshole who graduated law school with me who does have that practice.”

  “A revenge referral? I like it,” Drue said.

  * * *

  “Hey, Dad,” Drue said, poking her head around her father’s office door later that afternoon. “How’s Wendy feeling?”

  “Come on in,” Brice said, waving her forward. Jimmy Zee sat in the wing chair opposite the desk. “Oh hey, Jimmy,” she said.

  Zee nodded hello.

  “Wendy’s fine,” Brice said. “The meds the doctor gave her have stopped the uh, issues. She’s sleeping a lot, and bitching at me because she’s bored and hates not being in the office, but that’s to be expected.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Drue said. “I’m around all weekend, if you need anything.”

  “Thanks, honey, that’s really nice of you,” Brice said. “I’ll let Wendy know you asked about her. It’ll mean a lot.”

  “Good, well, sorry for the interruption,” Drue said, turning to go.

  “You’re not interrupting. We were just finishing a case conference,” Brice said. “Zee’s got some video surveillance I need for an auto case, but Mr. Caveman here can’t figure out how to transmit it to me.”

  Zee frowned. “I told you, I tried,” he said. “But my phone says the file is too big.”

  “Just convert it to a download and email it,” Brice said impatiently.

  “You know me,” Jimmy Zee protested. “I don’t do all this techno-shit.”

  “So get Ben to do it for you,” Brice said. “But do it right away, because I want to get things squared away before we start discovery on Monday.”

  * * *

  Zee followed Drue into the bullpen and stood waiting, impatiently, by Ben’s cubicle, frowning down at Ben, who was wearing a rumpled, faded, Mötley Crüe concert tee. As soon as the younger man finished his call, he thrust his phone at Ben. “Here,” he said. “I need this converted into a whatever file. Like, now.”

  “Can I ask what it is?”

  “All you need to know is it’s video Brice wants sent to him before the end of business today,” Zee said. “Just do what you get paid to do, okay?”

  “Fine,” Ben said, looking down at the phone. “But it would only take a minute to show you—”

  “Not interested,” Zee said. “In the meantime, I’m gonna step out for a smoke.”

  He turned and walked away.

  “God, what a friggin’ dinosaur,” Ben muttered, turning to Drue when Zee was out of earshot. “How is he even still working as an investigator? He can’t even figure out how to download a file and attach it to an email. I’ve tried to show him, like, a hundred times.”

  “At least he treats you like an adult,” Drue said. “To him, I’m still a five-year-old.”

  * * *

  “Hey,” Ben said, standing beside her cubicle. “It’s Friday and it’s beer-thirty. How about it?”

  “No thanks,” Drue said, looking up. “I was out of the office all morning. I think I’ll hang here for a while and get caught up.”

  “We’ll be at Taco Truck if you change your mind,” Ben said, as Jonah walked up and joined him.

  It didn’t take long for the office to empty out. By six o’clock, she was alone.

  Drue went into the break room, got a soft drink, then sat back down and stared again at the video of Jazmin Mayes’ last night of work at the Gulf Vista resort.

  She watched it, reversed it and then watched it again, hoping in vain that something would jump out at her, some moment that would tell her what had gone so terribly wrong that night.

  After another hour of watching, Drue stood, stretched and walked around the empty office. She noticed her colleagues’ workspaces. Ben’s desktop was clinically neat, devoid of everything but his computer. No photos, kitschy toys, not even a file folder. Out of idle curiosity, she tried the top desk drawer. It was locked, as were the other drawers.

  Jonah’s desk, on the other hand, resembled a mini-landfill. A stack of empty plastic stadium cups with the orange and blue UF logo sat atop a dog-eared copy of Sports Illustrated. A cracked coffee mug held an array of pencils and pens, and a stapler in the shape of an alligator was being used as a paperweight on a stack of computer printouts and file folders. Pushed to the back of the desk was a framed photo of Jonah, posed on the beach between two adorable towheaded preschoolers in swimsuits. She picked up the photo and examined it with interest. Cute kids. She wondered whose they were. Jonah hadn’t bothered to lock his desk. The top drawer held a snarl of paper clips, rubber bands, Post-it notes, a half-empty bottle of aspirin and an astonishing number of tubes of lip balm. She counted eleven different brands and flavors before she lost interest and went back to her own desk and the Gulf Vista security video one last time.

  Drue’s eyes were burning with fatigue as she reached the portion of the video at the 11:05 P.M. point.

  Again, she saw the shadowy figure of the housekeeper slowly roll the laundry cart toward a door at the end of a long, narrow hallway. Jazmin’s face was obscured by the bill of her baseball cap as she hesitated in front of the door, but when she raised her head to slide her key lanyard from her neck, Drue spotted the girl’s distinctive pointed chin. She watched as Jazmin passed the key card over the door lock, then pushed the door open.

  At 1:32 A.M. the door to the room opened. The laundry cart emerged from the room, followed by Jazmin, whose head was bowed as she walked rapidly away from the room.

  Drue watched as the girl’s figure moved out of camera range. She paused the video, reversed and watched it again. Something was different, she thought. The most obvious thing was the housekeeper’s energy level. When the girl approached the room she was trudging, clearly exhausted at the end of a long night. But when she emerged, two and a half hours later, she moved at a near-run.

  Drue paused the video again, staring down at the back of the housekeeper’s head. Something else was different too. She didn’t know what it meant, but she was sure it had to mean something. She reached for her phone and called Rae Hernandez. When the call went straight to voice mail, she left a message: “Rae, call me, please. I think I figured something out.”

  She went back to work, glancing at her phone every fifteen minutes, until finally it rang, and she saw UNKNOWN CALLER flash across the caller ID screen.

  46

  She snatched the phone up. “Hey.”

  “You’re starting to get on my nerves with all these phone calls,” Rae Hernandez said.

  Drue said eagerly, “Look, I’ve got lots to tell you, which is why I’ve been trying to reach you.”

  “So you said. What’s up?”

  The words came tumbling out, and even to Drue it sounded like she was babbling.

  “I went over to the Silver Sands motel the other night and talked to Jazmin’s boyfriend. He told me that when he worked at the Gulf Vista, Shelnutt, the head of security, and some of his cronies there used to get together in a vacant room to watch footage from the security cameras—of half-dressed or nearly naked women at the beach or pool, couples having sex in the elevators. Porn parties, Jorge called them. I also then managed to track down Neesa Vincent, the housekeeper who was Jazmin’s best friend. And she admitted to me—”

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Hernandez demanded. “Who told you to go around interviewing my witnesses?”

  “I wasn’t really interviewing them, I was just talking, and I think they told me stuff they might not tell a cop…”

  “Jesus Christ on a crutch.” Hernandez moaned. “I knew it was a mistake talking to you. Don’t you understand? This is an active investigation. You’re putting it and yourself in jeopardy. The last thing I need is some amateur mucking around in things.”

  “I wasn’t mucking,” Drue said, refusing to be intimidated. “Do you want me to tell you what I found out? Like
how both Jazmin and Neesa were trading sex for favors from Herman Byars, the head of housekeeping? Or do you want to keep bitching me out?”

  “What I want to do is go home and have dinner with my family, which I promised my husband I would do tonight,” Hernandez groused.

  “Okay, fine.” Drue disconnected.

  Her phone rang again. She waited three beats and picked it up.

  “Don’t hang up on me again,” Hernandez said with a growl. “This isn’t some game you’re playing.”

  “I’m well aware of that,” Drue said, matching the detective’s tone. “Can we meet? Or not?”

  “We don’t need a coffee klatch. Just tell me everything you learned,” Hernandez said.

  “I was thinking I could tell you what I know and you could let me see the rest of the video from the hotel.”

  The sheriff’s detective swore softly. “I don’t need this shit.”

  “What kind of pizza do you like?” Drue asked, reaching for her purse and keys.

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I haven’t had dinner and I’m starving. I’ll pick us up a pizza on the way to your office.”

  “Pepperoni. Cheese. No green peppers and no goddamn anchovies.”

  “Goes without saying,” Drue agreed.

  * * *

  Rae Hernandez eyed the grease-spotted pizza box warily. “What took you so long? I’m starving and I almost gave up on you.”

  “I was all the way in downtown St. Pete,” Drue said, as Hernandez led her back to her office, stopping in the break room to buy soft drinks from a vending machine.

  Drue put the pizza box on top of a file cabinet, and Hernandez opened a file drawer and pulled out paper plates and napkins. The smell of warm tomato sauce and gooey melted cheese filled the small, cluttered office.

  Hernandez rolled her desk chair over to the cabinet and put a slice of pizza on her plate. “Tell me more about these porn parties. It would have been nice if I’d heard about this two years ago.”

  “Jorge said he only went once,” Drue said, putting aside her own slice of pizza. “But he said Shelnutt and his buddies had them all the time. The head of engineering, Larry Boone, would designate a room as ‘out of order,’ so that the front desk staff wouldn’t rent it out.”

  “And who were the guests at these little soirees?”

  Drue ticked off the names she’d been given. “Shelnutt, Herman Byars, Boone for sure.”

  “How about the hotel manager?” Hernandez asked.

  “Jorge didn’t mention him.”

  Hernandez sipped her Diet Coke. “Did Jorge say anything about Jazmin’s relationship with those guys?”

  “He said she never specifically complained about any of them. But he doesn’t have a high opinion of the management staff at his old place of employment.”

  “That makes two of us,” Hernandez said. “How did you manage to track down Neesa? I’ve been wanting to question her again, but she’s been in the wind for nearly two years now.”

  “Jorge told me she hangs out at Mister B’s. The country music club in Seminole. Sure enough, one of the bartenders pointed her out to me, and eventually we got to chatting. She got pretty talkative after I started buying the drinks,” Drue said. “And even more so on the drive home.”

  She placed her cell phone on the desktop and played back her tape of Neesa’s conversation.

  “Interesting,” Hernandez said, when the tape ended. “But totally illegal to tape somebody in this state without their knowledge. Still, you got her to admit to being a petty thief, and whoring herself out to the head of housekeeping to get herself out of trouble.”

  “So, what do you think?” Drue asked, secretly pleased with her own sleuthing abilities.

  The detective shrugged. “I think it’s probably time to revisit Herman Byars, and probably Brian Shelnutt too.”

  “My turn,” Drue said. “Can we talk about that video?”

  Rae Hernandez stood and closed the door to the office. “I know I’m gonna regret this,” she said, as she motioned for Drue to join her in front of the computer monitor on her desktop. “One of our tech guys put this together. It’s all footage of Jazmin Mayes on September fifteenth, from the time she arrived at the hotel until the last time she’s seen alive.”

  She tapped some keys, and a grainy black-and-white image of a dimly lit parking lot filled the screen. As Drue watched, a cab pulled into view and a woman dressed in a short-sleeved T-shirt and jeans climbed out of the backseat.

  “This is at 2:45 P.M. and shows Jazmin arriving late to work, in a cab,” Hernandez commented.

  The next sequence, a half hour later, showed Jazmin in what appeared to be a locker room. As she watched, Jazmin spun the dial of a padlock, opened it and placed her pocketbook inside. She donned a uniform smock, then sat on a nearby bench and removed her street shoes before donning a pair of white tennis shoes. As she was finishing up, another woman, dressed in a housekeeping smock, entered the room and began talking to Jazmin. The woman was black, and her hair was worn in a spiraling coronet of cornrows.

  Drue squinted at the screen. “Is that Neesa Vincent?”

  “Yeah. I thought you just met her.”

  “Her hair’s different now,” Drue commented. While the women talked, Jazmin took a cell phone from her pocketbook and stashed it in the pocket of her jeans, then reached inside the locker again and pulled out a white baseball cap.

  “Watch this part,” Hernandez commented.

  Neesa and Jazmin were engaged in a spirited conversation, with Neesa making wild hand gestures, once even grabbing Jazmin by the collar of her smock. Jazmin appeared agitated too, shaking her head emphatically and poking Neesa in the chest with her forefinger.

  “Looks like they were having a pretty serious argument,” Drue said. “Did you ask Neesa about that when you questioned her?”

  “We did,” Hernandez said, stopping the video. “She claimed it was just some misunderstanding about scheduling. Said Jazmin had agreed to swap days off with her, and then backed out at the last minute. She also said the two worked things out later that night.”

  “Did you believe her?” Drue asked.

  “At the time, we had no reason not to,” Hernandez answered.

  The detective restarted the video. Jazmin donned her baseball cap and left the room, pushing a housekeeping cart. Neesa, however, lingered. She pulled out her own phone, pausing to light a cigarette, before tucking the lighter in her pocket. The video showed the housekeeper walking toward the locker room door, opening it and waving the smoke outside.

  “Wonder who she was calling?” Drue said.

  Hernandez cued up the video and Drue watched for another hour as Gulf Vista’s security cameras captured the young housekeeper trundling her cart down narrow hotel hallways, pushing it in and out of rooms, and eventually, at the 7:30 P.M. mark, entering a drab room with vending machines and five or six tables and chairs.

  “The break room,” Hernandez said. The video showed Jazmin entering, inserting coins into a soft drink machine and retrieving a drink. Then she sat at a table, alone. She removed her cap, talked on her cell phone, then appeared to be typing something into the phone.

  “Did you find Jazmin’s cell phone after she was killed?” Drue asked.

  “No.” Hernandez shrugged. “Unfortunately, Jazmin was in the habit of buying cheap burner phones at Walmart, because she couldn’t afford a contract. Probably the killer took that phone and destroyed it. We got Yvonne Howington to try calling it, off and on for the next three days, but there was never an answer.”

  “Do you know who she texted that night?”

  “It was a teacher at her daughter’s school. Nothing of interest.”

  “No sign of Neesa,” Drue pointed out. “Which means she lied when she told me she and Jazmin got together during their break that night.”

  The two women continued watching as Jazmin and her cart worked a route through the hotel hallways, each time stoppin
g outside a room and consulting a printed list. Occasionally, Jazmin picked up a small handheld radio and spoke into it.

  “Who’s she talking to?” Drue asked.

  “The front desk. The clerks call housekeepers to determine whether a room has been cleaned and is ready for check-in, or they’ll call up to have more towels or soaps delivered to a room if a guest requests it,” Hernandez said.

  “She cleaned a total of twelve rooms that night,” Hernandez said. “Trust me, there’s nothing more worth watching, so I’m gonna speed it up to show you the last room Jazmin cleaned that night, room 133, because I’m tired and I want to go home and see my family and take a bath.”

  Drue thought better of protesting.

  “Here we go,” Hernandez said, pausing the video at the 11:05 point.

  The video showed a housekeeper in a Gulf Vista smock and baseball cap stopped outside a room. The woman passed her key card over the door’s lock and entered. At 1:32, she emerged from the room and set off down the hallway with the cart, getting into the elevator, then walking down the walkway to the laundry room.

  “And that’s it,” Hernandez said. “The last time we have her on camera.”

  “Can you back that up so I can see it again?” Drue asked.

  Hernandez sighed dramatically but did as her guest asked.

  Drue leaned in closer, staring at the computer screen. The angle of the security camera showed the housekeeper from above, but her face was obscured by the bill of the baseball cap.

  “That last room she cleaned, did you guys find anything there?” Drue asked.

  “Nothing. Turns out Jazmin was a really thorough worker,” Hernandez said. “We questioned the last guest who’d stayed in the room, but he didn’t know anything. He checked out late that afternoon because he had a family emergency. In fact, we checked all the rooms in that wing the next morning, and found zip.”