Sunset Beach

by Mary Kay Andrews

  She heard her father’s voice in the background, then heard Wendy again. “He wants to know what the problem is.”

  “The problem is that I’ve been arrested and charged with trespassing, and I’m at the Treasure Island police station,” Drue said.

  “Is this some kind of a sick joke?”

  Before she could answer, Brice came on the line. “What was that last part? Did you say you were arrested?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I was arrested at the Gulf Vista. If you’ll just come down and get me out of here, I promise I’ll tell you everything.”

  “Unbelievable,” he muttered. “I’ll be right down. Don’t talk to anybody. Tell them your attorney is on the way.”

  As holding cells went, Drue thought this one wasn’t as awful as it could have been. Not that she had much experience with that kind of thing. She’d been a rebellious, pain-in-the-ass teenager, but somehow, she’d always managed to stay out of serious, go-to-jail trouble.

  She leaned against a wall, closed her eyes and, despite the fluorescent lights overhead, dozed off.

  Thirty minutes later she awoke to see the holding cell door open, with her father on the other side of it. He was dressed like someone who’d just been rudely awakened with the news that his adult daughter had been arrested for a teenager-type crime, in baggy cotton drawstring pajama pants, rumpled T-shirt and leather moccasins. His hair was mussed and he needed a shave.

  “Let’s go,” he said, handing her a plastic bag containing her phone and keys. He kept his hand on her elbow as he steered her out the plate-glass doors and into the parking lot. Just then a silver minivan sped up to the entrance. The driver braked and jumped out.

  Rae Hernandez looked just as unhappy as Brice Campbell.

  “Drue! What the hell’s going on? Daniels just called and said you’d been arrested at the Gulf Vista. Are you out of your mind?”

  Brice gripped her arm tighter. “Who’s this?”

  Hernandez looked him in the eye. “Detective Rae Hernandez. I take it you’re this juvenile delinquent’s father? I recognize you from your television commercials.”

  “Brice Campbell,” he said. “Nice to meet you, but she doesn’t have anything to say to the police.”

  Drue wrenched her arm away from his. “Actually, Dad, I really, really need to talk to Rae. I’ve been trying to call her all night.” She glared back at the detective. “That’s why I went over to the hotel tonight, to see if my theory was right.”

  “Come on, Drue,” Brice said. “As your attorney and your father, I’m telling you this is not the time or place for this discussion.”

  “Dad, please!” Drue exclaimed. “Rae is the detective working the Jazmin Mayes’s homicide.”

  He rubbed the stubble on his cheek. “What’s that got to do with you? Yvonne Howington is no longer a client of the law firm.”

  “You took your legal fee from that crappy settlement you got her,” Drue said. “Yvonne deserved better than you gave her. Jazmin deserved better. So yeah, I started poking into it. And I found something. Something you and Rae need to hear about.”

  “Nobody asked you to go breaking and entering. And trespassing,” Hernandez said.

  Brice shifted into attorney mode. “From what I’ve heard she didn’t actually break into or enter any premises.”

  Drue sighed. “Can we just take this someplace else to talk about? Preferably some place with coffee?”

  “Waffle House okay?” Brice asked, looking at Rae Hernandez.

  She shrugged. “Why not? I’ll follow you over there.”

  50

  Brice waited until Drue had worked most of her way through a platter of scattered, covered and smothered hash browns along with a side of bacon.

  “I still don’t understand what would possess you to break into that hotel. Zee looked into Jazmin’s murder very thoroughly. And so did the police. It’s tragic, but there was nothing there.”

  Hernandez set her coffee mug down. “Actually, the hotel employees we talked to at the time were less than forthcoming. Management at Gulf Vista stonewalled our investigation right from the beginning. From what we’re now hearing, several male supervisors were sexually harassing and preying on female employees, including Jazmin Mayes.”

  “Is that true?” Brice asked his daughter. “Where did you hear this?”

  “I tracked down two different housekeepers, both of whom were friends of Jazmin’s, who, by the way, were never interviewed by Jimmy Zee,” Drue said. She couldn’t resist getting in a dig about the law firm’s investigator.

  “I went over Zee’s report, he didn’t find anything about sexual harrasment,” Brice protested.

  “Maybe that’s because he didn’t look hard enough,” Drue said. “The first time I went to Gulf Vista, I talked to Lutrisha Smallwood, she was the girl who found Jazmin’s body in that laundry room. She told me that the head of engineering made a habit of trying to grope her, until she zapped him in the eyes with glass cleaner. And she hinted that another guy, Herman Byars, the head of housekeeping, had a ‘thing’ with one of the other girls working there.”

  Rae cleared her throat. “Byars has dropped off the radar. He’s not working at the tire store where he was employed when I last spoke to him, and I don’t have a current address, but I’m working on that.”

  Brice nodded and glanced at his daughter, who was mopping up the last of the hash browns with a triangle of rye toast. “You said you talked to two housekeepers. Who was the second?”

  “Neesa Vincent. Who was supposedly Jazmin’s best friend,” Drue said bitterly. “But after looking at the hotel’s security video for hours earlier tonight, I’d hate to have a friend like her.”

  “Why’s that?” Brice asked.

  “Neesa was in on Jazmin’s murder,” Drue said. “I’m sure of it.”

  Brice signaled for the waitress to bring the coffeepot back around and settled into the corner of the booth. “Okay. I’m listening.”

  * * *

  Drue filled her father in on how she’d tracked down Jazmin’s friend and the revelations she’d made after a night of drinking at Mister B’s.

  “Neesa admitted to me that she started trading sex for preferential treatment from Byars, after she got caught stealing from a guest,” Drue said. “The guest complained to management that he’d left eight hundred dollars in cash in the pocket of a bathrobe. Byars lied for Neesa, turned in five hundred, and said the guest was drunk and mistaken about the amount of cash. Afterwards, he kept two hundred and Neesa got to keep a hundred.”

  “After you told me that, I pulled up all incident reports mentioning missing or stolen property at that hotel for the past three years,” Hernandez volunteered. “Lots of petty theft going on at that place. Jewelry, cell phones, cash. But not a single arrest was made.”

  “You think the head of security was part of the theft ring?” Brice asked.

  “We’re looking into that,” Hernandez said. She tapped Drue on the arm. “Don’t leave us hanging here. Let’s hear what you think you figured out from the video.”

  “It’d be easier if I actually had it in front of me,” Drue said.

  “Hold that thought,” Hernandez said, sliding out from the booth.

  A moment later she returned from her minivan with a laptop computer. She pushed away the plates and coffee mugs, raised the lid, tapped some buttons and cued up the video from the hotel’s security cameras.

  Drue pointed at the screen as Jazmin’s cab rolled into view.

  “I kept going back to that argument Neesa had with Jazmin in the employee locker room that afternoon,” Drue said. “There was a time lag of almost thirty minutes between the time Jazmin arrived at the hotel and when she got to the locker room. Of course, there’s no video to prove it, but doesn’t it stand to reason she had to report first to Byars, and explain why she was late?”

  Hernandez paused the video. “Byars told us that when she got to work that day, Jazmin came to him and asked to work a second shi
ft because she needed the money.”

  “Yvonne has said from the beginning that Jazmin wouldn’t have worked that late because of Aliyah,” Drue said. “But what if Byars was lying? What if he told her she’d have to make it up to him later that night for coming to work an hour late?” Drue asked.

  “That’s just supposition,” Brice objected.

  “Watch the video,” Drue said, turning the laptop so her father could see as the action in the employee locker room unfolded.

  “Which one is Neesa?” Brice asked.

  “The girl with all the extensions and dreads,” Drue said.

  They watched in silence. “They’re definitely having some kind of spat,” Brice commented. He watched while Jazmin left the room and Neesa lit a cigarette and pulled out her phone.

  “Any idea what the argument was about?” he asked.

  “Rae said that Neesa claimed it was a mix-up over trading days off, but they worked it out,” Drue said. “But I think she’s lying. Look how agitated she is. And who’s she calling?”

  “You think it was Byars?” Hernandez asked.

  “Definitely,” Drue said.

  Hernandez started the video again. “You can tell that’s Jazmin, mainly because she’s wearing that white baseball cap,” Drue told Brice, referring to the slender woman shown pushing a cleaning cart down the hotel hallways.

  “Yeah, but the bill of the cap hides her face,” Brice said.

  “Exactly.” Drue nodded.

  After another five minutes of watching, Brice yawned and looked down at his watch. “My God, it’s after three. I’m too old for this crap. Can we just get to the point?”

  Now Hernandez was yawning too. “My kid has a baseball tournament in Sarasota starting in exactly five hours, so yeah, Drue, let’s wind this up.”

  “Okay,” Drue said reluctantly. “Can you fast-forward it to the last room Jazmin cleaned that night? I think it’s around the 11:05 mark.”

  The detective sped up the video, pausing it at the point Drue requested.

  “Now back it up, please, so we see Jazmin approaching the room.”

  Hernandez did as she was asked.

  “Check her body language,” Drue said. “She’s beat. She’s walking slowly, you can tell it’s an effort pushing that cart. Her shoulders are slumped, her head is down.

  “Pause it again here, Rae,” Drue added, as the young housekeeper stopped in front of the hotel room door.

  “Now watch, she takes the lanyard with her key card and pulls it over her head. She takes the cap off to do that, and you get a good look at Jazmin’s face. Start it again, please, Rae.”

  As the three watched, the housekeeper did just that. Her chin was sharp and pointed, with the same small cleft that Aliyah had, and her face sagged with fatigue.

  “See?” Drue said. “That’s Jazmin Mayes. No doubt about it, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s her. Nobody has claimed otherwise,” Rae said.

  There was a short gap in the video, then the hotel room door opened and the cleaning cart was pushed from the room.

  Brice leaned forward to read the time stamp at the bottom of the video. “There’s nearly a two-and-a-half-hour gap. What’s up with that?”

  “The security cameras in the hotel are motion activated,” Rae said. “It was apparently a slow night in that wing of the hotel that night.”

  “Which is another interesting point,” Drue said. “There was a Shriner convention going on in the hotel. People everywhere. Why not in that hallway at that time of night?”

  She glanced down at the video. “Pause it here, okay?”

  Drue tapped the figure of the housekeeper, suspended in time. “Notice anything about Jazmin?”

  “Not really,” Brice said. “But from the camera angle, you can only see the back of her head.”

  Rae leaned forward to get a better look. “Something’s different about the hat, right?”

  “Bingo.” Drue tapped the screen again. “Look how high that cap is sitting up on her head.”

  “Looks like the cap shrunk,” Brice agreed.

  “Okay, start the video again,” Drue said.

  As they watched the video, the housekeeper pushed the cart down the hallway at a breakneck speed.

  “Must have chugged a couple of Red Bulls while she was inside that room,” Hernandez said. “Or maybe that’s not Jazmin anymore. Right?”

  Brice shook his head. “What? You’re saying it’s somebody else? Who? And how did they get in that room?”

  Drue exchanged a knowing look with the detective.

  “Your daughter is saying that it’s not Jazmin pushing that cart. It’s Neesa Vincent. Remember all those dreads and braids she was wearing? She had to shove ’em up under that cap so she’d look like Jazmin, at least to the security cameras. And she had to keep moving, and keep her head down.”

  “That’s why I had to get a look at that room tonight,” Drue explained. “I watched that video backwards and forwards, and finally I figured it out. Jazmin went in that room at 11:05. But she never came out. Because somebody was waiting for her. Somebody who chose that particular room because it was in the oldest, most isolated part of the hotel, with the crappiest rooms that rarely got rented out.”

  “Byars?” Hernandez said.

  “But how did he get in?” Brice asked. “Unless somebody tampered with that video?”

  “I kept wondering if it had been tampered with, but it’s digital,” Drue pointed out. “Everything is time- and date-stamped.”

  “If it was Byars, he got in the room the same way you did, right?” Hernandez asked.

  “Through the sliding-glass doors,” Drue said, nodding excitedly. “That room’s not exactly ground-floor, as I’d hoped, but even somebody with a blown-out knee like me didn’t have much trouble climbing up onto the balcony.”

  “There were no video cameras on the back of that building,” Hernandez said. “We checked.”

  “There are now, though,” Drue said dryly. “That’s how Shelnutt’s security guard saw me climbing up.”

  “After Jazmin was killed, Gulf Vista’s owners took a look at the hotel’s security lapses and beefed up everything,” Brice said, looking at his daughter. “If I’d known you were going over there tonight I could have saved you from getting arrested.”

  “No, you would have stopped me from going altogether,” Drue said. “But that’s not the point, Dad.”

  “So Byars decides to deal with Jazmin that night, after she gets off shift,” Hernandez said slowly. “But not in his office, because that’s too public. He uses a room he’s probably used before for that kind of thing.”

  “He was head of housekeeping, so he had plenty of access to stepladders or whatever else he needed,” Drue agreed. “And if anybody stopped to ask what he was doing, he could say he was changing a lightbulb or something like that.”

  Hernandez took a sip of coffee, made a face and pushed it away. “I don’t think he planned on killing Jazmin. It was an impulse. Maybe he just intended to have sex with her. She resisted, which either pissed him off or turned him on, or both.”

  “If I remember correctly,” Brice said quietly, “the medical examiner said Jazmin had been beaten and strangled.”

  “I think she tried to fight him off, and maybe he bashed her with something in the room. Like a lamp or something,” Hernandez said. “The medical examiner said she was choked with a ligature. Maybe an electrical cord.”

  An image of the young mother flashed in Drue’s mind, of Jazmin, alone and fighting for her life in that shabby hotel room. She felt queasy.

  Drue sipped from her water glass, trying to choke back the nausea.

  “I think you’re right about it being an impulse killing,” she told Hernandez. “Byars was a perv and a predator, until things got out of hand. After he realized what he’d done, he had to act fast.”

  “Which is when he called his girlfriend, Neesa,” Hernandez said.

  “I think Byars ordered her to come t
o that room and climb up onto the balcony. Once she was inside, he had her clean up the room. They loaded the body into the laundry cart, Neesa shoved all those dreads up under Jazmin’s cap, and off she went.”

  “With best friends like that, who needs enemies?” Drue said bleakly.

  “He probably planned to move the body off the hotel property, but he didn’t get the chance, because there was some kind of screwup, and Lutrisha found it. In the meantime, by the time our officers responded to the Gulf Vista, the murder scene had been cleaned up,” Hernandez said.

  Brice put out his hand and gently closed the cover of the laptop. He looked at Drue. “You say you’ve got a copy of this video?”

  “On a flash drive. In my purse, at home,” Drue said.

  “What’s your next step?” he asked Hernandez. “You’ll reopen the case, right?”

  “It was never closed,” the detective said. “My next step is to go home, crawl in bed and get a couple hours of sleep. Then I’ll try and sweet-talk my husband into skipping golf so he can take Dez to that baseball tournament. Then, I guess I’ll go pay a visit to Neesa Vincent.”

  “I want to come too,” Drue said.

  “No way. You’re not a cop. You’re not even a lawyer.”

  “But I know where she lives, and you don’t,” Drue pointed out. “And Neesa likes me. You think she’ll really talk to a cop? In fact, I’ve got an idea. A great idea, of how we can get her to talk.”

  Rae Hernandez pushed herself up from the booth and grabbed her laptop. She fixed Brice Campbell with a malevolent stare.

  “She’s your kid, all right.”

  51

  “No,” Brice said. “Out of the question. At the very least, if you’re right, this woman aided and abetted a brutal murder.”

  “Oh, hell no,” Rae Hernandez said.

  The three of them were standing in the parking lot of the Waffle House on Gulf Boulevard, clustered around the hood of Hernandez’s Honda Odyssey.

  “I hate to agree with your father, but that’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard of. Neesa Vincent is a wild card,” Hernandez said.