Rising Moon

Book 19: Caribbean Adventure Series

by Wayne Stinnett

Genres: Thrillers; Action & Adventure; Book Club Picks

Synopsis

On Grassy Key, things aren’t as idyllic as they seem. The quiet, sleepy community has been awakened. A young woman with strong ties to the community is missing.

A local craftsman, the last person to see the girl, is questioned and released. The girl’s friends are interviewed. Nobody knows what happened to Cobie, except that she left for work one day and didn’t arrive. The only lead is the girl’s car, parked where she worked. But it provides no clues, and nobody saw anything.

Days go by. Then weeks. The case grows cold.

The employer of the girl’s mother knows Jesse McDermitt, a retired Marine and reputed government spook. Jesse leans on people the way only he can and soon finds there is a lot more to the abduction than anyone knew.

Does he find the missing girl? Does he survive what he uncovers?

Find out in this 19th novel in Wayne Stinnett’s wildly popular Jesse McDermitt Caribbean Adventure series.

Release date: December 21, 2020

Publisher: Down Island Press; 1st edition

Print pages: 256

Sample

Chapter One

November 2020

 

The screen door slammed behind her as Cobie rushed down the steps of her mom’s mobile home. She took them two at a time, then sprinted to her little car. She was almost late for work and needed to make a stop on the way there.

Her mother’s trailer, like many others in the park, had seen better days. But it had weathered two big hurricanes in Cobie’s lifetime, both passing close enough to the small island of Grassy Key to cause a lot of damage. Their trailer had survived, though, one of the few still remaining in the Florida Keys.

In 2005, Hurricane Wilma had passed fifty miles to the north. Cobie was just a toddler then. The storm was a Cat-3, spinning crazily out over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. It pushed winds from the northwest and piled water up against the Gulf side of the low-lying key. Wind-driven waves had lapped at the trailer door and they’d lost their porch awning. But the trailer had held fast with a dozen hurricane straps attached to anchors her father had labored to drive into the limestone bedrock by hand.

The hurricane had come just five months before her daddy was killed in a car crash.

He was coming home late from a bar down on Big Pine Key, where he played on a pool team. Witnesses said he was driving fast and erratically, almost hitting another car head-on. He’d swerved and then overcorrected, hitting the barricade and flying over it into the ocean. They found his car days later, his body still inside. Everyone thought her father had been drunk, but Momma swore that he didn’t drink. Later, the autopsy showed she was right. He’d had a heart attack, but the cause of death was drowning.

She remembered how scared she’d been during the storm, but little of the details of her father’s accident. Momma hadn’t shared that information with her until she was much older.

Three years ago, Hurricane Irma had made landfall just down island, on Cudjoe Key. It was a big one, a Category 4 storm, sending powerful winds and torrential rain through their neighborhood, which was thirty-five miles away. The trailer park itself was on the Gulf side of the Overseas Highway and the wind had been mostly from the south, so the park was slightly sheltered from the wind by the raised roadbed. The ocean side flooded, and some waves even crested the highway, flooding the park. The wind blew boats and cars around, some crashing into neighbors’ trailers.

They hadn’t evacuated for either storm. The first, because Daddy was a Conch and stubborn about such things. Momma would have taken them away before Irma, but they had nowhere to go and no money to get there.

“What time do you get off work?” Cobie’s mom called from the door.

Donna Murphy was an attractive woman in her late thirties. She was lean and short in stature, like Cobie. They often wore each other’s clothes. Her hair, also like Cobie’s, was the color of wheat, streaked with lighter colors from the sun. Her face was beginning to show lines, mostly from worry about Cobie and their future. Hard times seemed to follow Donna like a dark cloud.

“Three,” Cobie yelled back, as she yanked open the car’s door. “A bunch of us are going to Cable Park after.”

Cobie stepped back, dodging most of the heat that came boiling out of her car. Though it was only a few days until Thanksgiving, it was still ridiculously hot, and her blue car seemed to absorb it.

Cobie got in, leaned across the seat, and rolled down the passenger-side window before winding down her own. The old Fiesta lacked a lot of the things some of her friends’ cars had, like electric windows and air conditioning, but it ran forever on ten dollars’ of gas, didn’t cost much to buy, and started. Most of the time.

A typical Keys car.

Her mom approached and leaned on the doorframe. She instantly jumped back, rubbing her forearm. “The park closes at sunset, Cobie.”

“That’ll give me almost three hours to try out my new board,” Cobie responded. “You working today?”

“This afternoon, in the Gift Shop.”

“Tell Manny and the gang I said hi,” Cobie offered, turning the key with a silent prayer. The little blue car started. “I really gotta run, Mom. I’m late and I have to stop at Ty’s and pick up my new board. He just texted me and said I could pick it up this afternoon.” She bounced in her seat and clapped her hands. “But I can’t wait to see it and try it out.”

“Don’t forget,” Donna said, as Cobie shifted to reverse, “your Uncle Rob and Gina are arriving this evening. They should be here by eight o’clock.”

How could she forget? Her mom had told her every day for two weeks that her uncle, a musician, was driving his RV down with his girlfriend for a few weeks and staying at a nearby campground through Thanksgiving weekend.

“I’ll be home before then,” Cobie said, backing out into the street.

She waved at her mom and drove off. Her job at Kmart was just a ten-minute drive and she had fifteen to get there. If Ty was home, she’d stop on the way. He’d texted her that her board was ready, so why wait till after work?

Cobie and her friends knew one another’s schedules. There were only a handful of kids her age on Grassy Key—most of her friends lived in Marathon, as did Ty. He was older and a little odd, but because he made wakeboards and surfboards, he was within her circle of friends.

Traffic was light when she turned south on Overseas Highway, toward town. She saw a friend riding the opposite way on the bike path and honked the anemic-sounding horn. Trish waved and Cobie waved back.

A few minutes later, she turned onto a street on the ocean side, made a quick right and then another left and saw Ty’s van in his driveway. There was another car parked behind it, so she just pulled over under a gumbo limbo tree at the edge of an empty lot next door. She would only be there for a minute.

Ty had a little shop behind his house on the corner where he made custom boards; wakeboards mostly, but he also made kiteboards, even surfboards. You’d have to go way up the coast to surf, unless there was a storm out on the Gulf Stream. Whatever kind of board anyone wanted, Ty was the guy.

Cobie didn’t recognize the Nissan parked behind Ty’s old VW van, but it was new and not from the area. Having grown up on Grassy Key, she knew every car on the island and could always spot a friend in a long line of tourists’ cars. The black GT-R sportscar with dark windows stuck out. But Cobie knew that people came from all up and down the Keys to get one of Ty’s boards, so a strange car didn’t seem unusual to her.

Ty was rarely in his house, except to eat or sleep. His shop was air-conditioned and he had plenty of work to keep him out there from sunrise to well past sunset. He had a stereo system in his shop, as well as a refrigerator. Though she and most of her friends were still in high school, Ty allowed them to sneak a beer from the fridge once in a while. He was older, almost thirty. He even smoked weed with one or two, but Cobie never tried it or the beer.

Knowing he was most likely in the shop, Cobie went around the side of the house, following the well-worn path. As she approached the shop’s door, she could hear the voices of Ty and another man coming from inside, but not what they were saying.

Without knocking, she turned the knob and walked in. Ty and the other man looked up from Ty’s small desk. Cobie didn’t recognize him.

On the desk was the digital scale Ty used to mix epoxies, resins, and powders. A pile of blueish-white powder sat on the scale.

“Hey, Ty,” Cobie said, smiling brightly. She closed the door behind her. “Making a new resin or something?”

“I thought I told you to lock the door,” the other guy said, rising from his seat at Ty’s desk.

“It’s okay,” Ty said, also rising. “She’s cool.”

The stranger went past Cobie, staring at her body, and locked the door. He was medium height, dressed too nice for the Keys, and had dark eyes and black hair, slicked back.

“Cool?” the man said, looking her over again. “I’d say hot.”

Cobie ignored him and turned to Ty. “What’s going on?”

“You picked a bad time for a visit,” the man said. He moved in front of her, letting his eyes roam once more, stopping for a moment at the square neckline of her tank top.

Cobie was used to boys looking at her chest. But they mostly just stole a glance, or a stealthy peek. This guy gave her the creeps, staring at her boobs.

“What’s your name?” the man asked, removing her sunglasses, and tossing them on a table.

“Hey!” she exclaimed. “Those were expensive.”

A corner of his mouth went up, not a smile or a grin, but more of a sneer. If he drove the high-priced sportscar out front, Cobie was sure he could easily afford to replace the sunglasses.

“I asked your name.”

Cobie looked from him to Ty, who now wore a worried expression.

“Cobie Murphy,” she replied, then looked back at her friend. “What’s going on here, Ty? Is my board ready?”

“You shouldn’t have come till this afternoon,” was his only reply.

The stranger grabbed her wrist and jerked her toward a chair, pushing her down onto it. Before she could protest, he grabbed a piece of rope from Ty’s workbench and pulled her arms tightly behind her back.

Cobie screamed.

“Cover her mouth!” the stranger ordered Ty, as he tightened the knots on her wrists.

Cobie screamed again and the guy hit her. The punch to the back of her head made her groggy.

“You don’t have to do this,” Ty said. “She won’t—”

“Shut up,” the stranger growled. “Since you don’t have money, I’ll take this as payment. She can work off your debt for my supplier.”

Ty reluctantly took a roll of tape from a shelf and tore off a strip. The guy behind her pulled Cobie’s head up by her hair and held her in place with one hand under her chin.

Cobie’s eyes were having a hard time focusing. Then she saw Ty coming toward her with the tape.

“No, Ty,” she squealed, struggling in the other man’s grasp.

In Ty’s eyes, she could see pity, as if he truly were sorry that she’d chosen to come early to pick up her board. But she also saw a little of what was most prominent in the other man’s eyes—lust.

The tape went over her mouth, and Ty mashed it in place. Cobie squirmed on the chair, but the man held her firmly as she began to cry.

The stranger let her go and started rummaging through the different cans and bottles of epoxies and solvents on the shelf.

Cobie started to stand; to try to make a run for the door, but the man wheeled and hit her in the stomach with his fist. She doubled over, unable to breathe, then he pushed her back onto the chair.

“Top shelf,” Ty said. “The brown bottle.”

The man grabbed the bottle and a towel. He poured some of the contents onto the towel and squeezed it in his fist a few times.

Cobie started to struggle again as the man put the chloroform-soaked cloth over her face.

The last thing Cobie heard, before passing out, was the man telling Ty to get rid of her car.

Chapter Two

December 2020

 

It looked kinda weird to me—out of place. I cocked my head, staring at it, then took a sip of Costa Rica’s finest from a chipped Force Recon mug and studied it some more.

Definitely out of place.

There’d never been a Christmas tree in this house. In fact, I hadn’t had one since my first wife left me.

I’d been deployed the day after we put the tree up in our living room in base housing. We’d spent all evening decorating it with our daughter Eve’s help. When my FAST team received orders the next morning, we didn’t have time or permission to make even a quick phone call. It was my third combat deployment in six years—the fourth deployment overall, because I did a two-year billet as a drill instructor at Parris Island during that time, and Sandy and I rarely saw one another.

 Eve turned six just a few days after Sandy left on Christmas day, and Kim was just a baby then. I returned from Panama to find an empty house, save for a dried-up brown tree, lying on the floor in the living room. 

A single ornament had lain in pieces beside it. I remember recognizing the remnants of that blue and red glass ball from Sandy’s and my first Christmas together. It’d been a gift from the company gunny, Owen “Tank” Tankersley. The significance hadn’t been lost on me then.

Sandy blamed the Corps for our failed marriage. 

“Do you like it?” Savannah asked, turning, and smiling brightly.

“Yeah,” I replied, deep-sixing my thoughts, and smiling back. “Looks real…Christmassy.”

She came closer to me and slipped her arms around my waist. I stared down into twin azure pools, clear and bright—deep enough to dive into. I often thought it was Savannah’s eyes that had first attracted me to her so long ago.

“When was the last time you had a Christmas tree in this house?”

“Well…this one’s the first.”

She frowned. “When was the last time you put up a tree anywhere?”

I kissed her forehead. “Kim was in diapers.”

Her eyes widened. “Now, Jesse, she’s thirty-one. You mean to tell me that you haven’t had a Christmas tree in all those years?”

“Not until today,” I replied, taking another sip from my mug. “Unless you count the fake ones the clerks put up in HQ, when I was still in the Corps.”

“That’s a crying shame,” she said, turning back to the tree with another ornament in hand. “Do you at least have something personal to decorate it with?”

My mind returned to the broken blue and red ball. It’d had the Marine Corps emblem on it with my and Sandy’s names around the top and the date, October 23, 1983 around the bottom. That was the day terrorists killed 220 of my fellow Marines in Beirut, along with twenty-one others.

Tank, then a gunnery sergeant, had given one of the ornaments to each of his NCOs in tribute to those who would not see Christmas that year, or ever again. The fact that the ball had been broken, but all the pieces lay in one tiny area on the floor several feet away from the tree, had told me that Sandy had placed it there and stepped on it.

She and I had been married less than a month when I was deployed to Lebanon for the second time that year. Our wedding was rushed, in the middle of our scheduled rotation, because Eve was on her way. It was on that second deployment to Beirut when the bombing occurred.

I made it home that Christmas and for the birth of our first child. But part of me, even to this day, had been left behind in the rubble of the Marine barracks.

On what would have been our seventh Christmas together, Sandy left, taking our girls, Eve and Kim.

I was in a jungle in Panama.

“No,” I replied, snapping the memory from my mind. “I’m afraid I don’t have any decorations for it. But I think there’s still time to order one.”

Savannah turned and smiled. “Order one? Who in the world orders just one Christmas tree ornament three days before Christmas?” She cocked her head a moment, looking at me curiously. “Wait, forget I asked that. You. That’s who.” I grinned at her and she turned back to the tree. “But I doubt you could get it in time.”

“We’ll see about that,” I replied, pulling my phone out. “Gotta make a call.”

Out of habit, I stepped outside to the corner of the deck. It used to be the only place on the island where you might get one bar of signal strength. And that was only if you held your tongue in your cheek in exactly the right position. With the new cell tower on Big Pine, though, we could now get a signal anywhere on my island.

I pulled up the number and stabbed the Call button.

“Master Guns,” I said, when Tank answered. “You’re still coming down, right?”

I’d talked to him just a few months earlier. Tank called me every October 23rd without fail. He probably called all his NCOs that were there.

During that last call, he’d expressed a desire to visit the Keys and I’d told him to come down any time he liked. When Savannah overheard that he wasn’t planning anything for Christmas—she had been listening to my end of the conversation while we watched the sun go down—she insisted that we invite him to spend it with us on the island.

Tank had served in the Corps longer than just about anyone. He’d enlisted during Vietnam at the age of seventeen and was finally forced by an act of Congress to retire two years ago. He’d served fifty-one years.

“Lookin’ forward to it, Gunny,” he boomed back.

After five decades in the Corps, Tank didn’t usually speak or talk. He boomed and roared.

“You got no idea how much it made my day when you invited me. But didn’t we just confirm this a couple of days ago?”

“I know.” I felt foolish for asking what I was about to ask. “Do you remember the Christmas of ’83?”

He didn’t respond right away but when he did, his voice was much more subdued. “That’s one I can never forget, Jesse. Why?”

“You had Christmas tree ornaments made for a bunch of the company non-coms. I remember you got a lot more of them than we had NCOs.”

“I was a dumbass gunny then,” he said with a chuckle. “Ordered them off the wrong roster and still had to get a dozen more than I thought I needed. They only sold them in boxes of twenty.”

I remember how devastated he’d felt ordering Christmas ornaments for some of the guys who didn’t come back. The fact that he had to buy even more than that at least made my question a little easier. 

I wouldn’t be asking for a dead man’s ornament.

“Do you still have them?”

“I do,” he said solemnly. “I hang a different one every year. But you probably mean the extras that didn’t have names on them, right?”

“Yes. I don’t suppose you hung onto those too, did you?”

“I did.” He paused a moment, then said, “Been wondering when you’d want a new one. They’ve got the date on ’em, but no name. I know a guy here in Jacksonville. If you want, I’ll have your name on it when I bring it.”

“Yeah,” I said, looking back through the door. “That’d be nice, Tank. Just put Jesse and Savannah on it—double November and ends with Alpha Hotel.”

“Got it. Will do,” he said. “Oh, and one thing.”

“What’s that, Tank?”

“It’s taken you a while to get another one, son. Don’t break it like you did the first.”

I chuckled and we ended the call.

Tank had gone with me when I went home that day to find my family gone and my house empty. A moving van does not escape scrutiny in base housing communities, so word spread quickly among the wives and other Marines in the neighborhood. 

But Tank was one of only three people deployed with us who knew that Sandy had left me. Just before we took off from Panama, the battalion CO, back at Lejeune, had informed our company CO, who in turn told the sergeant major. I was on the list for gunny at the time, and the sergeant major and Tank didn’t tell me she was gone until we were wheels down at Cherry Point.

When I looked back into the house, Savannah had her back to me. She was wearing shorts and a lightweight, blue, sleeveless blouse. Stretching high on bare feet to reach the top of the tree, she extended one leg behind her for balance, like a ballet dancer. Her blouse rode up, showing a smooth, tanned, lower back—the muscles along her spine as tight as any ballerina’s.

I had a sudden realization—Tank hadn’t been talking about the glass ornament when he warned me not to break the new one. He was talking about my upcoming marriage.

“Who were you talking to?” Savannah asked as I came back in.

When I first met her, she’d been on the verge of kicking my ass up one side and down the other for scaring her sister, Charlotte. I’d warned her sister about sex slavers abducting a woman and her two teenage daughters just a few weeks before that. Charlotte had thought I was making it up. I remembered that Savannah had called me bud then, and it wasn’t meant in a nice way.

But by that time, it was already too late. Her long, tanned legs, blond hair kissed by the sun, and those big blue eyes had already worked their magic on me.

It seemed like yesterday. She was twenty-nine then, visiting the Keys with her sister after breaking up with her husband, still full of youth and raw energy. The last two decades had done little to diminish either of those traits. She was easily the most beautiful and passionate woman I’d ever known.

“That was Tank,” I replied. “Leave a spot in the middle for me, okay?”

“The middle of the tree?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “Special delivery memorial Christmas tree ornament from Tank Tankersley.”

“I’m looking forward to finally meeting him,” she said. “You talk about him so. How long did you say he served?”

“Fifty-one years—from LBJ to the Donald.”

Her head tilted up as she counted on her fingers. “That’s ten presidents! Why so long?”

That was a good question. After Sandy left me, the Corps filled the gap as my family. I was promoted to gunnery sergeant six months later and threw everything I had into my job. Not long after, I was deployed as part of the Marine Security Detachment aboard the USS Independence, last of the conventionally powered supercarriers. All of the larger naval warships had a contingent of Marines aboard for security. The other Marines in the MSD had been together a while. I was the new guy, but I wasn’t going to be with them long. I had a lot to keep me occupied as the Independence was deployed to the Persian Gulf during the runup of Desert Shield. I would spend the next four months mostly on my own in the desert.

A couple of years later, I tried marriage again, a bartender named Kristina Butcher, who was four years older than me. That had been a huge mistake, which I quickly corrected. A month after divorcing Kristina, I’d found myself in the Mog. Somalia was a nightmare, but I remember thinking it a reprieve. I’d married one other time, but Alex had been murdered on our wedding night by arms smugglers.

Not the greatest track record, I know.

I guess the emptiness had been the same for Tank after he and his wife divorced. From the age of seventeen, the Corps had been his only family until he met Jolene. Their marriage didn’t last as long as my first one. I figured he had done what I had—adopted the Corps as his only family. But he’d just never moved on from there.

And the Corps was in no hurry to see him leave. Having the Medal of Honor around his neck meant Tank had a home forever. Or so he thought. Having an MOH recipient on active duty was good PR for recruiters. But even Chesty Puller couldn’t stop the march of time.

“I guess he just never had any reason to leave,” I said. “U.S. Code says you can’t serve beyond the end of the month of your sixty-eighth birthday. Otherwise, he’d probably still be in the Corps.”

“I’d think after that long, he’d have a hard time readjusting.”

I nodded. “Not really readjusting. He probably doesn’t remember much about his life before the Corps. I’m sure it was tougher than most.”

“There,” she said, stepping back. “It’s not my best. The trees we put up on Sea Biscuit were smaller, so I don’t have as many decorations as I’d like to have for such a big tree.”

She turned and hugged me. “Thanks for getting it for me.”

She’d chosen the spot in front of the big double window that faces south; the direction someone would come, if someone were inclined to visit. I’d never had many visitors to my island, but over the last few months, we’d had quite a few friends stop by. I had to admit, the new drapes, pulled back with a sash, went equally well with the rough-hewn interior wall boards and the tree.

“We can hit the Kmart if you want,” I offered. “Pick up some more ornaments.”

“They’re probably all picked over,” she said, turning back to the tree and moving one ornament to a different spot on the same branch. “I bet they don’t have anything left but those tacky elf-on-a-shelf ornaments.”

“Oh, no,” I said, clutching at a strand of imaginary pearls around my neck. “Not those hideous things.”

She turned and put her hands on her hips, staring at me. “So, are you going to tell me what this memorial ornament is?”

My grin disappeared. “Tank was the company gunny when I was in Beirut in ’83. I was one of his squad leaders. That first Christmas after the bombing, he had some glass balls custom made for all the NCOs, commemorating the date of the attack.”

“I remember you telling me how hard he took that.”

“We all did,” I said. “I was lucky, I guess. My squad was on mounted patrol that morning, miles from the barracks.”

I turned toward the sound of a dozen feet coming up the back steps, eight of them with claws.

Finn came through the open door first, followed by Woden, then Jimmy and Florence. The dogs proceeded to their rug in the middle of the room and sat, looking at the tree.

I pointed at each dog in turn. “There will be no drinking of the tree water. No peeing on any tree inside the house. And no roughhousing around it. Do I make myself clear?”

They both looked at the tree, then at Savannah, and finally back at me before lying down with their big heads on their equally big paws.

“It looks beautiful, Mom,” Florence said.

Our daughter was home for two weeks from UF and was staying in Kim and Marty’s little house on the north side of the island. They weren’t there very often; both being sworn officers with Florida Fish and Wildlife. They worked out of Everglades City on the southwest coast.

Jimmy looked around the room. “You’ve sure done a lot for the old place, Savannah.”

“Hey,” I said, indignantly, “I did most of the work.”

“Thank you, Jimmy,” Savannah said, then turned and kissed me on the cheek. “And you worked very hard on it, Jesse.”

Florence helped herself to the coffee pot. “It’s bigger than we ever had on Sea Biscuit.”

“Go big or go home,” Jimmy said. “That’s what Jesse told me when we were picking it out.”

Savannah had subtly hinted at wanting a tree for a week and I’d pretended not to pick up on it. Then I’d surprised her with a nine-footer strapped to the Grady’s Bimini top.

“I remember when I was a kid, my dad said that a Christmas tree should be as tall as the room,” I offered in defense.

My phone chirped and vibrated in my pocket. When I looked at it, I didn’t recognize the number, but it was local.

“McDermitt,” I said, after stabbing the Accept button.

“Hi, Jesse,” a man’s voice said. “You might not remember me—we met at the Rusty Anchor a few years back. This is Manny Martinez.”

“I remember,” I said. “The Grassy Key Resort guy, right?”

“Yeah. Look, I know you’re probably busy with Christmas right around the corner, but I was wondering if I could meet with you? Maybe over lunch or something?”

“What’s this about?” I asked, heading to the table next to my recliner, where there was a notepad and pencil. 

“Did you hear about the girl that went missing just before Thanksgiving?”

“Yes, I did. I haven’t heard much recently, though.”

“Her name’s Cobie Murphy,” Manny said. 

I scrawled the name on the pad.

“Her mother works at the resort,” he continued. “Her name’s Donna and you’re right, there hasn’t been any movement on her case since about a week after she disappeared. A search was conducted by volunteers over the long weekend, but the only thing that was turned up was her car, abandoned at the Kmart where she worked. The cops are convinced she just took off, like so many do. Donna and I are convinced that’s not what happened. She thinks Cobie’s still alive, but even if she’s not, there’s just no closure.”

He was right. It happened a lot in the Keys, it seemed. Paradise to an adult is boring to a teenager and sometimes they ran off for the bright lights and action of cities like Miami or LA.

Marathon, like most of the small towns up and down the Keys, didn’t have its own police force. That was left to the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office, which was stretched thin. The county included much of southwest Florida, from Everglades City south and a good portion of the Glades itself, not to mention all of the Keys.

“And you want me to look into it?” I asked.

“I figured with your background in Homeland Security and owning a security business up island…”

“Hang on a sec,” I said, and turned to Jimmy. “Do we have any charters coming up?”

“No, man,” Jimmy replied. “Nothing till after the first of the year. But remember? You’re dropping me off at the Anchor tomorrow, so I can stay with Naomi for Christmas. And you’re supposed to pick your friend up at the airport early in the afternoon.”

I put the phone back to my ear. “How about lunch at the Rusty Anchor tomorrow, Manny? Say, about eleven hundred? I have to pick up an old friend at the airport at twelve-thirty.”

He agreed and we ended the call.

“What was that all about?” Savannah asked.

“That was Manny Martinez,” I said. “The owner of Grassy Key Resort. Remember that girl that disappeared a month ago?”

“I saw her a couple days before it happened,” Florence said. “I’d met her at a friend’s birthday party over the summer and ran into her again the week I was home for Thanksgiving. From what I’ve heard, the police seem to think she ran away. I didn’t get to know her all that well, we just talked a little, but she didn’t seem like the type to me.”

“They never do,” I said. “Until they actually do it. Anyway, her mother works for Manny and he asked me to look into it.”

“It was like five weeks ago,” Jimmy said, looking down and shaking his head. “I, and most of the guides, helped with the search. But you know what they say when someone’s been gone more than forty-eight hours, man.”

I did. The first day was search and rescue. The second day was searching beyond hope.

After that, it was a body recovery operation.