Shimmer (3 page)

‘Not necessarily,' Sam said. ‘With more weather on the way.'

The guy had looked a little better for a moment after that, and then he'd remembered what he'd seen.

It would be a long time till he forgot that.

4

It wasn't easy getting much out of Claudia.

She had asked, soon after her arrival, if she could stay for a while.

‘Sure you can,' Grace had said. ‘You know that.'

Managing, with an effort, not to ask why.

‘Dan's going to work from home,' Claudia said. ‘Take care of the boys.'

‘Can he do that, with the office to run?' Grace asked, since Claudia worked part-time in her husband's architectural practice these days.

‘Don't you think I'm entitled to a break?'

That wasn't like Claudia at all, that kind of self-pitying snap-back, and Grace had decided it was time to delve, but then Joshua had noisily woken up, which meant that the next hour or so had been all about him. And seeing Claudia holding her nephew close, seeing her tenderness and the little boy's happy responses, Grace felt once again overpoweringly and unequivocally glad that she was here.

This was the sister who had often clung to her for comfort after Frank Lucca, their father, had abused her, who'd followed her lead when Grace, the younger sister, had discovered her own inner strength and masterminded their escape from Chicago to Florida. The sister who had always been close, loving and absolutely necessary to her.

It was hard for Grace to imagine what might have gone wrong in the Brownley household, because for as long as Claudia, Daniel and the boys had lived down in the Florida Keys, all had seemed about as blissful as any family scene could be. But then Daniel had made his decision to move all the way north-west to Washington State, had set up a shiny new architectural practice in Seattle and found his family a great waterfront house on Bainbridge Island, a thirty-five minute ferry hop from the city (and a location once picked by CNN and
Money Magazine
as the second-best place to live in the United States).

The waterfront position had been intended to make them feel at home, and Grace's impression had been that it had certainly worked out for Daniel and the boys. But not so well for Claudia, which Grace had suspected for a long time.

And done nothing about it. Not that there was much she could have done, except make her regular phone calls to ask how her sister was doing, and, of course, worry about her.

Now, a new heap of guilt came flying at Grace. She'd been too busy with her own life to consider Claudia properly, too busy with her own family and her patients – and then all hell had broken loose almost a year ago, after which they'd been blessed with Joshua, and ever since then it had all been about learning to cope with motherhood and her own new, unfamiliar uncertainty.

Excuses.

‘You can stay as long as you want,' she told her sister now.

She couldn't believe she hadn't said exactly that right away.

‘Only I thought,' Claudia said, ‘with Cathy away, there might be space.'

Cathy, their beleaguered daughter, who'd gone through more pain and grief in her young life than most people endured in a whole lifetime, and who had told Grace and Sam a little over three months ago that she was going to do some travelling because there were too many bad memories for her, on campus at Trent University and at home and on the beach and just about every place she looked in and around Miami.

‘And I know it's all going to come with me wherever I go,' Cathy had told her parents, ‘but still, I have this feeling that getting away for a while might help me.'

Sam had fought it longer than Grace, wanting passionately for their daughter to stay home and let them go on helping her heal, but his wife had reminded him that maybe home was getting a little claustrophobic these days for a twenty-one-year-old with a need for private space to howl out her pain.

‘Not to mention having a paranoid cop for a dad,' David Becket had added, ‘wanting to mount surveillance every time Cathy comes within a mile of anyone who
might
spell trouble for her sometime in the next three decades.'

‘Am I really that bad?' Sam had asked his father.

‘You just want her safe,' David had said. ‘We all do, son.'

And Cathy's travel plans had sounded safe and well thought through, and even if she had needed their permission they'd have known they had to let her go, because whether or not it worked out for her, that was the only way they could hope to get her back again when she was ready to come home.

So for now, Cathy was on the West Coast, working as a coach's aide at a Sacramento college, after which she was scheduled to work and train at a series of summer athletics camps in various parts of California.

And every time Grace opened one of her kitchen cabinets, she saw a box of her daughter's favourite Honey Graham Life cereal and missed her more than ever.

But Cathy's bedroom was available for Claudia.

5

The area canvas was already well underway, a small team of detectives working through every residential, hotel and commercial building with an outlook on to Ocean Drive between 5th and 15th Streets, as well as the promenade, dunes and the beach itself, checking every available surveillance camera, their aim to speak to every resident, worker, proprietor and visitor in the vicinity.

‘Let's hit the Strand first,' Sam had said at the outset, since that particular boutique hotel faced the beach between 10th and 11th Streets, and was also one of the few buildings in that part of the Art Deco District with balconies – and a rooftop known as one of the best spots in South Beach for watching firework displays.

And maybe homicides, too.

Nothing there, nor at the Victor, no one discovered anyplace as yet with anything useful to talk to them about, though in the circumstances neither Sam nor Martinez had expected this to be easy.

‘Mildred wants to talk to you, Sam,' Detective Beth Riley informed him at around eleven as she and Mary Cutter – a petite, attractive detective with whom Al Martinez had enjoyed a brief, but pleasurable relationship some years back – came into the large office shared by the Violent Crime detectives.

Sam's antennae were up. ‘Where and when?'

‘Usual time and place, she said,' Cutter answered.

Which meant around noon in Lummus Park, on a palm-shaded bench.

‘Think she has something?' Martinez asked.

There was no acrimony between himself and Cutter, though fear of just that was what had driven them both to ending the relationship before they'd got in too deep. No special woman in Martinez's life these days, though that was, he claimed, the way he liked it; no one to worry about night and day, he said, no one to fear for him.

‘She didn't say,' Cutter answered.

Homeless people were often high on the investigators' agenda, seldom as suspects, more often just the most likely bystanders to have stumbled on potential evidence or useful information.

Mildred Bleeker was a bag lady of uncertain years who enjoyed a relationship of mutual respect with some of the cops and detectives in the Miami Beach Police Department. In return for their courtesy – and, now and again, a bottle of Manischewitz Concord Grape – Mildred had never shown any great qualms about assisting the police with occasional nuggets of information about crimes of violence, especially those related to drugs.

She did, however, have her preferences, and for a while her favourite had been a young patrolman named Pete Valdez, but he'd left the department a few months ago, and since then Mildred's personal bias had leaned firmly towards Sam.

‘I heard about your troubles, Detective Becket,' she'd told him one morning last March, encountering him on the corner of Lincoln and Washington and accepting his invitation to dip into the bag of Krispy Kremes he was bringing to a departmental meeting. ‘I hope you don't mind if I ask you how your family are faring now?'

‘I don't mind at all.' Sam had been surprised but touched, had told her they were faring pretty well, and then he had shown her some photographs of Joshua, and in return Mildred had tugged out a gold locket from beneath layers of mostly black clothing – she always wore black with just a few splashes of colour – and had opened it to reveal a pair of tiny black-and-white photographs of a young man and woman.

‘My fiancé,' she had said.

‘And you,' Sam had said.

‘About a thousand years ago,' she said.

‘I'd still know you anywhere,' Sam told her. ‘Handsome couple.'

‘Donny was one of a kind,' Mildred said. ‘They broke the mould, you know?'

‘Same with my wife,' Sam said. ‘Grace.'

They'd left it there, respecting each other's privacy, but there had been a fair number of exchanges since, and during one Mildred had confided that Donny had died as an innocent bystander in a drug-fuelled shooting. Sam had tried a few times to persuade her to come eat with him in a restaurant or coffee shop or even back at their house, which Grace had encouraged – anything that might take the lady's fancy – but she had always thanked Sam and refused. So far as he could tell, Mildred Bleeker's lifestyle was of her choosing, and the closest they'd ever come to lunching in comfort had been a couple of conch-filled tamales on her bench.

There was no reason to think that Mildred's message was in any way connected to the killing, Sam realized now.

‘Could be anything,' he said, as Cutter set down a coffee cup on her desk and Riley started checking her messages.

‘Mildred know about the rowboat?' Martinez asked.

‘She didn't say,' Riley said, raking one hand through her short red hair, her mind already half on other things.

‘Guess she wouldn't,' Martinez said. ‘You not being Sam Becket.'

All Sam knew was that he'd give a whole lot more than a dozen tamales for so much as a clue as to where the slaying had taken place. With nothing new to go on, and with the likelihood that the brutality had gone down
inside
someplace – maybe in a motel or hotel room or a brothel or a garage or someone's private apartment – the only way they were going to find out about that any time soon was if it was some place where, say, an employee had walked in this morning to find more than they'd bargained for.

No reports yet of bloodstains or chemical spillage or even struggle.

Sam was itching to see Mildred.

6

Grace was sometimes afraid that Cathy might never come back.

Too many things she'd seemed fearful of since Joshua's birth.

‘Which is not really like me,' she'd told Magda Shrike a few months back. Magda being her former mentor and psychologist and good friend who'd relocated to San Francisco for a time, then returned a year ago. ‘Or never used to be.'

‘Events take their toll,' Magda had said. ‘On everyone.'

‘Except the bad things last year hardly happened to me, did they?'

‘They happened to people you love, so of course they happened to you,' Magda said. ‘You're being way too hard on yourself, Grace.'

Which was one of the reasons Grace had decided, a while back, that it was high time she went back to doing what she was best at. Namely thinking of others, specifically her patients. The children she could be helping.

True enough, but still, it was what Grace had spent years training for and many more years than that practising, and she was good at her work, she was too honest to deny that much.

Except that she'd also been having to come to terms with the fact that returning to practice would mean having to find someone to help out again; not exactly a replacement for Lucia Busseto, her former office manager – because frankly, Grace could not imagine ever again feeling able to entrust her young patients' confidential files to any other person.

I'd be entrusting
Joshua
to another person.

That thought struck fear into her again now, as it always did when she and Sam discussed getting any kind of help in the house.

Which was, in itself, she thought, not entirely healthy.

‘Beeba,' Joshua said from his high chair in the kitchen, right on cue.

‘You said it,' Grace answered.

David and Saul – Sam's twenty-two-year-old adoptive brother – had both offered to take care of Joshua any number of times, and Lord knew she and Sam would trust either of them to the ends of the earth. But this was not so much babysitting as a long-term lifestyle decision, one that she was going to have to come to terms with as determinedly as any other working mom.

Still, right now, Claudia was here. Had flown thousands of miles because apparently she needed her sister, and whether that was for shelter or a shoulder to cry on, or for something else entirely, then Grace knew it was time to give herself a sharp kick in the rear and simply be here for her.

Sam called at eleven thirty to tell Grace he was on a new homicide investigation.

Which meant, as she knew, there was no telling when he'd make it home.

‘We have a visitor,' she said.

Claudia was upstairs, settling herself in Cathy's room, and Grace had called their daughter in Sacramento a half-hour ago, and Cathy had assured her that she had no problem with that.

‘I like thinking of my room being used,' she said.

‘Want us to take in a lodger?' Grace asked, deliberately light.

‘I wouldn't go that far,' Cathy said, sounding merry, then sent them all hugs, especially Joshua who she said she was missing like crazy and could not
wait
to see again, all of which had made Grace feel a whole lot better.