Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel #31) - John Sandford Page 0,62
know the name of the guy she hooked up with?”
“No, she didn’t talk about it.” She paused, and then said, “You know what I think? I think the guy had money, whoever he is, and she hoped something might happen with him. But I think the guy was just getting laid.”
Lucas pushed her, and she started to cry, but insisted she didn’t know anything else.
Lucas asked Duffy to sit on her couch, and he took Parker outside, out of earshot, and said, “Call Weaver. We need a search warrant for Snow’s apartment. Quick as he can get it. Tell them it’s a life endangerment situation, she could be hurt or injured in the apartment, but we also need to cover everything else. We want to go through everything in the apartment.”
“You think . . .”
“She’s gone. They’re cleaning up. Everybody who might know something, that we touched: they’re cleaning up.”
* * *
Lucas called Weaver and they agreed that he and Parker could enter the apartment on grounds that Snow might be inside, injured and unable to respond to their knock, but they wouldn’t be allowed to search the apartment until they had a warrant. Duffy didn’t have a key, but knew where the manager lived. The manager had a key, opened the door. The apartment was as empty, and as undisturbed, as Magnus Elliot’s house.
“It’s gonna be a couple more hours to get the warrant, it looks like,” Parker said. “What do you want to do?”
Lucas looked at his watch. 5:45. “I want you to stay here with Meredith. Make sure she’s not . . . interfered with. I need the car keys.”
Parker handed over the keys. “Where are you going?”
“I don’t know. Someplace quiet,” Lucas said. “I’ll be back for the search. Call me.”
Lucas went down to the truck, got in, wandered around, eventually crossed what looked like a major street, Sunrise Boulevard, and took it east. Thinking about Bob. A few hours earlier, feet up, laughing at Miss Congeniality; now Bob was gone, on a slab at the medical examiner’s office, to be cut open and . . .
He kept driving, eventually arrived at Fort Lauderdale Beach. He hardly realized what it was, when he got there; it took a moment. He turned north, parked, walked out on the sand, took his shoes off, and sat down.
The sun came up over the Atlantic; and Bob was still gone. As Lucas was sitting there, he saw two muggers walking down the beach at him. He slipped his Walther out of its holster, and let it rest against his thigh.
He looked at the muggers and said, “Hey, guys.”
* * *
Lucas spent another week in Miami. Russell Forte stayed for three days, representing the Marshals Service. Lucas talked to Romano and Bianchi before they bailed out, and the old man sensed that Lucas believed them about the setup, which didn’t help them on the gun or money laundering charges that the feds had come up with. The old man refused to say much while he was sitting in an interview room, but he told Lucas, “I’ll be out of here tomorrow. You meet me on the way out. On the steps.”
Lucas and two FBI agents interviewed Meredith Duffy, Alicia Snow’s friend from the boat. She was frightened to death. She would, she said, go home to Georgia until it was all done with. She was willing to look at mug shots, and she did, but failed to identify any of the men on the boat, for sure, but ticked one face with her index finger.
“This guy, maybe. Not for sure. I couldn’t really . . . but I think he might have been the boat driver.”
Weaver, who was leaning over her shoulder looking at the computer screen, said, “John Cattaneo. Once known as ‘Black Jack.’ Huh. He’s from New Jersey. Did time for ag assault, that was a while back, nothing since . . .”
* * *
On the steps of the federal courthouse, after he and his son-in-law had made bail, Don Romano told his attorney and son-in-law to walk off a way, and when they were alone, said to Lucas, “Ask your Mafia experts about the Newark group. Doug Sansone. He’s the motherfucker who did this to all of us. The FBI thinks me’n some friends had a little thing going over in Perth Amboy and up on Staten Island. I’m not saying yes or no, one way or the other, but . . . that fuckin’ Sansone wants all