Surface Tension (16 page)

“You see, Detective, they didn’t ask me if I knew anything about if or how Neal got off the boat. They just assumed he was still alive, and that I somehow knew where he was.”

Collazo narrowed his eyes and stared at me, clearly thinking about what I’d said. His stare made me uncomfortable. Finally he lowered his eyes to the papers on his desk.

“There are certain factors in common with this Daggett girl and the Krix girl. They both lived at Harbor House at some point, and they both were connected to you.”

“Come on, I’d never met Patty Krix.”

“I can’t verify that. You were there at, or around, the time the Krix girl was murdered, and you were with the Daggett girl just before she died.”

His words should have made me nervous. He was telling me I was a suspect, but I couldn’t get past the questions in my mind. “It just doesn’t make any sense to me. Why would anybody want to kill Elysia? She made it home safely last night, I swear to God. How can she be dead?” I stared at Collazo, fighting the pressure that was building up in my throat again, wanting him to give me some understandable answer to this incomprehensible act.

He was shaking his head. Now his eyes refused to meet mine. “It looks very probable, Miss Sullivan, that Garrett is also dead.” He flipped through the pages of his notebook and sucked on the end of his gold pen. “According to the forensics report, the blood on the deck matched the type listed in his military records.”

I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. “So where’s his body?”

He shrugged. “It’s a big ocean. Sharks, currents, you name it. We don’t always find them all.”

“Okay.” My other hand hurt. I forced myself to relax my grip on my shoulder bag. “Even if you assume he’s dead, it doesn’t tell us why, or what happened to Elysia.”

“True. Nor does it tell us who fired the gun on the
Top Ten
. I thought perhaps you would enlighten me on that one, Miss Sullivan.”

“I’ve told you everything I know. I feel like I’ve been over and over it so many times.” I ran my fingers back through my hair at my temples. I was developing one of those behind-the-eyeballs headaches. “Detective Collazo, please, just tell me what happened to my friend.”

“I’m not at liberty to share certain details with you.”

“That’s bullshit. I’m the closest thing to family that girl had. I have a right to know what happened to her. She wouldn’t do drugs. What makes you think she was doing drugs?”

He ignored my question and let the silence drag out. I refused to let him win this one. I wasn’t going to volunteer anything more until he asked.

“These men who were questioning you, they left you alone finally.”

I finished the story up to our dropping Elysia off at Harbor House, glad to be able to fill the uncomfortable silence.

“Miss Sullivan, what you’re telling me is in direct conflict with what Mr. Long at Harbor House asserts.”

“I’m just telling you what happened.”

“That is precisely the problem.” He grasped the edge of his desk and leaned forward. “You are not telling me everything that happened.” Then he raised his voice, loud but not quite shouting, enunciating each word clearly and never taking his eyes off me. “You think you’re smart. You think I don’t know and I’ll never find out what went on out there, that I’ll never find your connection to all this. But I will, Miss Sullivan. You can count on it. I’ll be there watching your every move. There’s a great deal more to your story than what’s on the surface.”

“I’ve been straight with you. I’ve told you what I know.” My voice sounded thin and whiny.

“Right, Miss Sullivan,” he said, his voice heavy with sarcasm. Sliding his chair back, he stood over me. “Long says the Daggett girl never arrived last night, that they have a curfew. She had never been late before, much less stayed out all night. He says he questioned all the staff and no one saw her. They have a sign-in log by the door and she never signed in.”

“No way. I saw her walk in the door and there was a person sitting there at the desk. Someone over there’s lying.”

“I quite agree with you,” he said, leaning over his desk, speaking in a hushed tone now and staring down at me, “that someone is not telling the truth.”

As I drove up Federal Highway to Sunrise on my way to Mike’s dock, I went over in my mind all the things I wished I’d said, all the clever comebacks, the questions that would have thrown Collazo off guard.

“Goddammit!” I slammed my hand against the steering wheel. I hated the way I’d reacted to Collazo’s insinuations. The man’s eyes were like laser beams. Why did I get all whiny and act guilty as hell?

I parked Lightnin’ in the half-empty lot of a pizza restaurant and crossed the street to the waterfront apartment building where Mike kept
Outta the Blue
. I passed through the first-floor parking garage and went out to the boat slips on the Middle River. The boat was all closed up, with the telltale water discharge indicating he had the air-conditioning running below. I pounded extra hard on the hull, and the main hatch slid open almost immediately.

Mike’s salt-and-pepper hair and straggly beard were barely visible through the translucent plastic of the spray dodger. “Who’s there? Oh, hey, Seychelle, come on down.”

After climbing through the gate in the lifelines and making my way around the bimini supports, I followed Mike down the companionway ladder closing the hatch behind me.

“Have a seat.” He pointed to one of the two swivel captain’s chairs in the main salon. He hopped comfortably about without his prosthesis, his scarred stump protruding from his shorts. He hardly ever wore the artificial leg on board, claiming his balance wasn’t good enough yet with it on. “Would you like a piña colada?” He motioned toward the full blender on the galley counter.

Down below, one could see that this boat was the home of a dock-bound bachelor who wasn’t really interested in any distance sailing. Judging from the nineteen-inch TV, VCR, CD player desktop computer, and humidor filled with cigars, I was surprised Mike hadn’t fried the wiring in the boat already.

“No thanks, I don’t have much time. Mike, I don’t know if you understood what I wanted from you, but I hope you can help me with some information.”

“Hey, look, I know I seem pretty stupid when it comes to boats, but there was a time folks thought I was a pretty smart cop. Still got lots of cop friends, too. I’ve already made a few phone calls.” He poured himself a coffee mug full of the yellow slush and hopped over to the other captain’s chair. “Hope you don’t mind. Cheers.” He took a long drink, then licked the ice off his mustache.

“This girl, Mike, she was just a kid, a great kid. I’d seen Ely come through some really bad stuff, but she was a survivor. She was going to make it. I don’t understand what happened. Neal’s missing, Ely’s dead, and this cop thinks I’m involved.”

“Give me a quick overview. What happened yesterday?”

I told him about meeting Ely, walking on the beach, and all the rest of it, up to dropping her off. “Mike, this detective, he’s making me crazy with his weird questions that aren’t even questions. I don’t mean to tell him things, but then I do.”

“What’s his name?”

“Collazo.”

“Shit, Collazo’s on this case? You haven’t been talking to him without a lawyer, have you?”

“I couldn’t reach my lawyer, and I’m trying to find out what’s going on, how an innocent girl who went home to bed could end up in the river the next morning.”

“Listen to me, Seychelle. Never, and I mean never, talk to the cops without your lawyer. Especially to him. Man, he’s a bit of a strange one, I’ve heard, but good, damn good. He pounds a suspect with details, making it sound like the case is all but wrapped up, scaring ’em shitless, but actually he just throws out little bits and then goes all silent and just waits till they can’t take it anymore. They start to fill in the silence. Then he throws ’em off guard by coming at ’em from another direction.”

“Exactly. God, he made me feel like such an idiot.”

Mike shrugged. “It’s his job, and he’s good at it. Too good. They say he’s one of those overachievers who tracks down every little shred of evidence . . . even working on his time off sometimes. If he thinks you had something to do with any of this, you’re in deep shit. You’d better have a damn good lawyer.”

“But I didn’t do anything, Mike.”

“Seychelle, get real. Do you think that matters? Cops are too damn busy today to worry about whether they’ve got the right person for the crime. They just need a person. They need to make the arrest. If the evidence points to you right now, they don’t have the time to be out there looking for any other suspects. There’ll probably be another couple of murders tonight to add to Collazo’s caseload.”

“You’re scaring me.”

“What I found out about this Daggett girl scares me.”

“You know something about Ely?”

“Like I said, I made a few calls. Asked for a few favors. The whole thing was really stupid and sloppy. These guys were total fuck-ups when it came to trying to hide a body in the river. Stupid assholes like these scare me worse than smart ones.” He slapped his hand on the stub of leg that protruded from his cutoff jeans. “They’re unpredictable. Too often they just can’t control their impulses.”

He stared at his leg for several seconds, then seemed to shake off the memory.

“They’re pretty sure it was heroin. We’ll know for sure when the report comes in, and my friend’s gonna call me.”

“Heroin? No way.”

“The M.E. at the scene found the injection site.”

“No way. She’d never do that. Even when Ely was on the streets, she wasn’t into anything that involved sticking needles in herself. If she could smoke it, yeah. Grass, crack. But injecting heroin? No way.”

“That’s not all of it. She didn’t die of an overdose. It was strangulation . . . there were marks. It may not have been intentional.”

“What the . . .” I struggled to comprehend what he was saying to me. “How do you strangle someone accidentally?”

“She was probably so out of it from the drugs, they didn’t know she was dying. The people who are sexually stimulated by that sort of thing sometimes get carried away.”

“Mike, what are you talking about?”

“There was evidence of sexual activity, Sey. Nasty, rough, ritualistic stuff. There were rope marks on her wrists, and she was tore up pretty bad—inside and out. Probably gonna find semen from several partners. The people who enjoy bondage are like addicts. They need more and more. This time your friend’s extracurricular activities went too far.”

“Elysia?” I knew she hadn’t had a boyfriend since she’d come off the streets and cleaned up her act. “No way. She’d never—”

“My sources said she’d had one prior arrest for prostitution in ninety-seven.”

“Yeah, but that was before she got cleaned up. Her life had changed. Totally. She had a job. She was clean.”

Elysia into bondage? Tough as she was in other ways, the girl cried if she got a paper cut.

“Mike, if what you’re saying is true, she didn’t do any of it voluntarily. I know that for sure. She was forced. Shot full of drugs like that, she probably didn’t know

what the hell was happening. But why? And how did she get back out on the street without anybody over at Harbor House noticing anything?”

“She couldn’t have. Not from how you describe their check-in procedures at Harbor House. Either you’re lying or they are. Simple as that. That’s how the cops see it. Question they’ll ask themselves is, which of you stands to gain by telling a lie? Which one of you is already under suspicion for another crime?”

XI

Everything kept coming back around to Harbor House. As I drove down Sunrise, headed for the beach, I told myself that my real reason for going over there was to find out what sort of funeral arrangements were being made for Ely. If nobody else was going to step forward, I’d figure out a way to take care of it somehow. At least that’s what I’d tell them over at Harbor House. But at the same time, I tried to remember exactly what Elysia had said about James Long. She’d said something about how Patty had fooled even James. What had she meant by that? I wanted to find out if he was the one doing the lying or if he was being lied to.

The door buzzed when I was still several steps away, and I hustled to grab it. Inside the lobby area, I was struck by the similarities to the police station: the glass booth, reception desk, locked doors leading to the inner areas. I wondered, briefly, if they were trying to keep people out or in.

Behind the reception desk, a young woman sat in the chair and an older woman was looking over her shoulder at a paper.

“Can I help you?” the older woman asked looking up at me.

“Yes, I don’t know if you remember me, but I used to come here to visit Elysia Daggett, and I spoke to you several times about her. You are Minerva, right?”

Her face took on a practiced expression of grief. “Oh, yes, I remember you. Yes. We’re just devastated here. Really, we’re so sorry, and we want you to know we share your grief. She had been doing so well. It’s doubly hard to lose them when they’ve been doing so well.”

She wore her long, gray-streaked hair pulled back in a tight bun. She looked the epitome of the spinster schoolmarm, and I wondered how she could possibly strike up a rapport with these street-hardened girls. As she spoke, I made the appropriate nods and sad smiles, but her words didn’t convey any of the true heart-rending ache that I felt. There was a void in my life where Ely had been, but it was more than just emptiness. I couldn’t stop asking myself if I had done something wrong. Could I have visited her yesterday or taken her home with me last night? Could I have changed the course of events?

“I was wondering if I could talk to the director about her. I’d like to know what arrangements are being made, and I have some questions about her actions last night.”

“Well, Mr. Long is a very busy man. He’s in a staff meeting this afternoon.”

“Minerva, this is very important to me.” I was not about to give up easily. “Ely was like a sister to me. She told me everything about her life.” I tried to look very knowing, though I hadn’t a clue what it was I was pretending to know. But someone in this place was lying and had made me look like both a fool and a liar. I was determined to find out why.