she didn’t suddenly get worse,” she told Blaze when she disconnected the call. “It’s the only thing I have to hang on to right now.”
“It’s that old saying,” he told her. “No news is good news. Right?”
“Right. But now I’m ready for something. Anything.”
“Let’s see if the scene tells us anything new.”
They worked their way into South Tampa through the five-thirty traffic and over to Calypso. The parking lot across the street was full—probably, Peyton thought, with cocktail hour hangouts killing time until dinner. She’d been told Calypso’s dinner hour didn’t really start until seven. Before that it was cocktails in the bar or appetizers in the wine cellar. Probably, she thought, so they could handle the cost of the dinner. She’d looked up Calypso online and nearly passed out at the prices. Dane Hollister must have made a damn good living to be able to afford to take Brianne to places like this.
There was curbside parking across the street from the restaurant and luckily, as Blaze pointed out, this was not a street where one usually found people walking. She could see someone was leaving just as they pulled up. He parked and turned off the engine.
“Let’s head up the sidewalk a little way. We can’t drive slowly enough to see what I want.”
“We’ll be the only people walking,” she commented.
“I know, but we’ll pretend we’re looking for an address. Come on.”
He was good at this, she realized. He actually acted as if they were searching for a place.
“The car came from that direction.” Blaze indicated with his head. “If it was parked in this line, it would have been facing away from Calypso, so whoever was driving would have had to turn around. Let’s see where else it could have been.”
Peyton realized at once this was not a street that saw a lot of walkers. There was a boutique hotel, a couple of small office buildings and some small, eclectic businesses. Some of them had parking spaces at the side.
“Whoever it was could have been waiting here.” Blaze pointed at one of them. “Or here. Or the next one. You can see the entrance to Calypso from any of them, the way the street takes a little jog.”
“So it was just a matter of watching until they came out. But…”
They stopped, waiting for the car that wanted to pull out into the street.
“Let’s wait until we get back in the car,” he told her. “We’re the only ones walking. Here we are.”
Once they were in the car, he cranked the engine so the air conditioning would come on, but he didn’t pull away from the curb.
“How did whoever it was know…”
“They had to know…”
They both spoke at the same time, looked at each other and grinned.
“You first,” she said.
“This wasn’t a random thing. Calypso is not a place that you just drop into and hope they have a table free. You have to make reservations, so whoever did this had access to Dane’s calendar.”
“So…someone from his office?” Peyton frowned. “I didn’t get that vibe when I was there, but then I wasn’t looking for it. I focused only on Kendrick. I wasn’t thinking of anything else.”
“We need to make a list of possibles. People who would know their schedules. The places they liked to go. Who would be in a position to know about that reservation no matter how far in advance it was made?” He snapped his fingers. “What happened to your sister’s belongings after the accident? Her purse?”
Peyton frowned. “I think they’re in a drawer in her room. The nurse apologized that they’d had to cut off her clothes to treat her, but I didn’t care. The clothes were the least important things. I didn’t think about anything else. Why?”
“She has to have a cell phone. These days, everyone who breathes has one. And what does everyone have on that piece of equipment besides phone numbers?”
Peyton scrunched her forehead. “Many things. I’m not sure what you’re looking for.”
“A calendar, Peyton. Notes. Photos. Every time they even think of doing something they put it in their phones. They take pictures of the oddest things. People keep their entire lives on their cell phones.” He snapped his fingers. “And even if the phone is destroyed, everything gets stored in the cloud. The all-knowing cloud.”
“If you have sign-in information and passwords,” she reminded him.
“First, we have to find the phones, Dane’s as well as Brianne’s. Then we’ll worry about passwords. What happened to Dane’s stuff?”