Surface Tension - Kling Christine - Страница 28

As I was ranting and raving out loud in the wheelhouse, I suddenly saw in my mind the image of Ely walking across the dining room at the Bahia Cabana, her green eyes flashing with recognition and joy. Things had finally been going right for her. Last night she’d told us she planned to go apartment hunting in the morning. Whoever had “dumped her,’’ as Collazo called it, was wrong. Somebody did miss her. Maddy would have to wait.

I had driven by the Fort Lauderdale Police Station hundreds, probably thousands of times, but I’d never been inside. I parked in a visitor’s spot and fed a handful of quarters and nickels into the meter: not a good spot to let your meter expire. At the pay phone in the parking lot, I dialed Jeannie’s number. She lived only a few blocks away, and I figured I’d go back, sit in the Jeep, and wait until she arrived so we could go in together. The phone continued to ring until finally her answering machine picked up.

“Great,” I said aloud as I replaced the receiver: I wasn’t willing to sit around waiting for Jeannie to get home. She would be furious with me, but I needed to talk to Collazo about this now.

Beyond the door, a receptionist sat inside a tinted glass booth and pointed to a telephone on the counter as I approached. I picked up the handset as she picked up hers. I told her I was there to make a statement about the murder of the Krix girl. She told me to have a seat, someone would be with me shortly.

Two young women wearing miniskirts and tube tops sat at the end of the row of red plastic chairs. I nodded to them, but they ignored me. They sat slack-jawed, bored, staring into space. They looked like extras for some Hollywood version of life on the streets. The smaller of the two, a Hispanic girl with black hair teased high on her head, walked over to the gumball machine and put a dime inside. She opened the little metal door.

“Aw, shit. I hate green ones.” She turned to her friend. “You want it?”

The other girl, a blonde with a serious case of crusty acne and extremely red, bloodshot eyes, took the gum and popped it into her mouth.

On her second try, the Hispanic girl got a red one, and for the next few minutes they sat there blowing little pink bubbles. In spite of the makeup and the clothes, I doubted either girl was over sixteen.

I thought about how easy it was to dislike girls like them, to turn away from them and not see them, and yet how similar they were to Ely in many ways. She could have been them at the same age.

“Do you girls go to school?” I asked.

“Nah,” said the blonde. “I quit when I had my baby. They acted all hinky ’bout it. Dumb-ass teachers. I didn’t need that shit.”

If one of them vanished tomorrow, would she be missed?

The other girl blew a huge bubble that popped all over her face. They both burst into giggles.

A woman came through the glass door at the far end of the lobby. “Seychelle Sullivan.”

“Here.” I got up and followed her through the door and into an office off the hallway just beyond. She was very friendly and efficient, and I was beginning to think better of the Lauderdale cops. She fired questions at me, typing the answers on her keyboard nearly as fast as I spoke them. We got the preliminary stuff out of the way first. Name, address, birth date.

“You’ve got a birthday coming soon, then,” she said.

“Yeah. The big three-oh.”

She smiled. “It’s not so bad.”

That was what everybody always said to me, but I didn’t believe them.

“Okay, just tell me, slowly, exactly what happened that day.” I had repeated the story so many times that the telling went quickly. I didn’t have to pause or search for words to describe the horror as I had the first time. Just as we were finishing up, the phone rang on the woman’s desk.

“That was Detective Collazo,” she said after hanging up. “He wants to speak to you. I’ll show you the way.” She led me upstairs to the homicide squad room. Collazo was the only one there, sitting at one of the desks back in the corner of the large room. The air-conditioning must have been set as cool as it would go. My hands felt icy, but I could see the sweat rings under the sleeves of Collazo’s neatly pressed white shirt.

He looked up from the papers on his desk, nodded to me, and pointed to the chair opposite his desk. “Miss Sullivan, I wanted to talk to you about Elysia Daggett.”

“Good, because I want to talk to you about her too. What happened?”

“Miss Sullivan. Start with your version of what happened last night.”

I told him the story then about my meeting Elysia at her work, walking on the beach, the two guys who jumped us, and the strange questions they were asking. He took notes and asked me to go over my descriptions of the two men several times. I once thought I was a fairly observant person, but I soon realized I wasn’t able to give lots of details, just more of an overall impression. It was what they were asking that had attracted my attention.

“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.