Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel #31) - John Sandford Page 0,35
of months after the boat party.”
“You know where her mother is?”
Snow shrugged, but said, “I assumed she’d be down around Islamorada. I don’t really know.”
“Do you think your friend Meredith might know? Ms. Duffy?”
“Oh. Nooo . . . She and Patty weren’t friends at all, hardly. Patty was ditsy. Is ditsy. Meredith is like the last thing from ditsy. Patty was friendly with a couple of other girls . . . Let me write down their names and numbers . . .”
She punched up her phone again, got her note back from Lucas, copied out phone numbers of Sandra Klink and Karen Loftus. “I know they’ve moved around, so I don’t have addresses for them and we weren’t close anyway . . . But I bet they kept their phone numbers.”
She pushed the note back to Lucas.
Lucas asked, “You saw the guys on the boat close up . . . Could you pick them out if we showed you some mug shots?”
Her forehead wrinkled and her eyes slid away from his, then she said, “Maybe. If you didn’t tell anybody that I did it.”
“Good. We appreciate it,” Lucas said. “We’ll have a couple of FBI agents come around to talk with you.”
“They do the clerical part of our investigation,” Bob told her. “The paper stuff, instead of the street investigation.”
She bobbed her head: “Okay.”
* * *
They talked for a few more minutes, but Snow had nothing more of interest. As they stood to leave, Lucas asked, “Where’s this Islamorada place? Somewhere by Miami?”
“Oh, no, it’s like these islands, it’s probably halfway down the Keys. Maybe . . . a hundred miles from here? Maybe more. It takes quite a while to get there.”
“Okay.” Lucas thanked her, gave her his card and asked her to call if she remembered anything more. He told her to expect a call from the FBI.
Outside the salon, Bob asked, “We’re not going after this Patty?”
“Not if the cops are looking for her and haven’t been able to find her and it’s a hundred miles from here. Sounds like a fine task for our friends in the conservative suits,” Lucas said. “I’ll call Weaver and unload this on him. They’ll need to talk to whoever runs the hairdresser school, plus all the classmates, plus Pittman’s mother and whatever local cops have been looking for her. Take us a week, it’ll take the feds a day.”
* * *
They sat in the car and Lucas called Weaver, told him what they’d done and gave him the names and phone numbers they’d gotten from Snow. “If you have your boys get on this, they’ll probably be able to dig up some women who could identify the shooters, if you’ve got mug shots of them, and you probably do, if they’re really in the Mafia.”
“Lucas, this is terrific,” Weaver said. He’d been in the FBI too long to actually sound excited, but he was. “We’ll get all over it, starting tonight. What are you doing?”
“We’ll talk to one more of these hairdressers, named Meredith Duffy, then . . . mmm . . . we got another guy we want to talk to, but I don’t think we’ll make it today. He’s down in Miami.”
“Okay. Thanks again,” Weaver said. For the first time, he seemed to have a little hope in his voice.
When Lucas rang off, Bob said, “I feel kind of bad about that. They’ll find something good and guess who gets the credit?”
“Life sucks and then you die,” Lucas said. He looked both ways as they rolled out of the shopping center into heavy traffic. “Get on your phone and find the fastest way to this Bombshell place.”
Bob started tapping on his phone but said, “Life sucks and then you die, so you better take the credit where you can. You know the feds. When it comes to credit, they’re always the first in line. Look what happened with that 1919 guy you killed. I never even saw your name in the newspapers.”
“There’s still newspapers?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah. Nobody knows I was involved but a bunch of U.S. senators,” Lucas said. “Who would you rather have on your side? Some bureaucrat halfway up the ranks of the FBI? Or a U.S. senator who sits on the Finance Committee and can fund a new machine gun for you?”
“You got a point,” Bob said. “Let me get this address.”
* * *
The Bombshell was in another crumbling mall and apparently aimed at a younger crowd. What Lucas thought of as soft