It was less than an hour since Faisal had received that fateful call that Ava was missing. Now he looked long and hard at the face of the young woman who lay dead on the cold steel of the examining table. Her hair was long, almost to the middle of her back. She was brunette and a few years older than Ava. After that, the similarities stopped.
He’d insisted on viewing the body in the hope that the similarities would somehow give him a much-needed clue. Now he didn’t know why he’d bothered. It was depressing and frightening all at the same time. Looking at her frightened him for Ava and saddened him for the deceased woman’s family.
“She may have been asphyxiated,” the coroner said.
He listened as the coroner went into some detail on why he believed that could be a possibility.
“Her eyes are bloodshot. Classic sign of asphyxiation.”
A chill ran through him like none he’d felt before. He’d stood in this position many times but never had he felt the haunting fear that the person before him could have been someone he knew and loved. He almost took a step back. That thought combined with the cold steel and sharp smell of disinfectant that depersonalized death was almost too much. This wasn’t Ava but someone had loved her.
Regret and anger snaked through him as he thought of how this young woman had died unnecessarily, how it could just as easily have been Ava on that slab. The reality was as disturbing as it was unthinkable. Whether they could prove it or not, he was sure that this woman had died of unnatural causes. It wasn’t right or fair. And he knew it happened much too often. He’d thought of adding a branch of investigations geared solely to violence against women. He’d seen too much of it in his work. But now wasn’t the time for such considerations.
Five minutes later, Faisal was heading across the hospital parking lot to a charcoal 1967 Mustang he kept in Miami for his rare visits to the city. He slipped behind the wheel and leaned back against the plush leather, the keys in his lap, his arms crossed and a frown on his face.
A woman who supposedly should have been Ava was dead. The fact that the decedent had been in Ava’s room and Ava was still the registered patient indicated that Ava was the target. Now there were questions that needed to be answered, and quickly.
Where had Ava gone? He tamped down the panic he’d felt at losing her when he’d only just found her. He had to stick to facts.
She’d come here for a vacation with her father before starting her working career as a clinical psychologist with a public school in Wyoming. But none of that gave him the answers he needed. She’d flown out of Casper, Wyoming, where she’d leased an apartment. It was interesting that she’d stayed in the state where she’d studied, at least for her first four years, and where they’d met. It was far from her father’s residence in the Caribbean. But as much as he knew she loved her father, tropical life had never been for her, she’d said so often. So Wyoming, the end of school and the beginning of a career, was where her life had been until just a week ago when she’d joined her father in St. Croix for a voyage to the Bahamas. Now, her father was missing and she’d fled. To him, it was clear that she knew something and that she didn’t trust anyone to help her. That pained him but he couldn’t dwell on it. How he felt had no relevance to helping Ava.
He reviewed the facts, running them through his mind in record speed until he hit on what he considered to be key questions. Did Ava’s secret threaten her father’s well-being or his business? Yet her father was missing, possibly already dead, and still she’d run. Was it a threat that had frightened her? Did she know something? What had caused her to leave the hospital?
Whatever Ava was after, he was sure it was major and he was also sure that it was linked to the death in her room. He’d left the morgue with more questions than answers and an unspoken confirmation that Ava was no longer safe. She’d run and he thanked everything he cherished for that. If she hadn’t, she’d be the one in that morgue.
Still, the fact that she’d run left him with questions. Why hadn’t Ava turned to him instead of running? For whatever reason, she hadn’t trusted him.
He opened the car door and stepped out. Despite the feeling of urgency, he had no direction. He needed to think this through. The door shut and he pressed the key fob, locking the door without a backward glance.
His mind went back over the case, of what he knew and what he might have missed. A yacht with what they could only assume had two men on board had disappeared. The Coast Guard had no answers and the vast Atlantic was hiding its secrets well. What had happened? What had Ava seen? He stood with his hands on his hips for a second, looking right, left and behind him as if on the quiet street there might be an answer. But all he saw was a pretty girl in a sundress walking a white poodle. Her long blond hair had stripes of baby blue. He’d like to tell her to dodge that salon the next time she had her hair done. It was a lighthearted thought amid the gravity of what had happened.
Faisal stared across the street where high-rises hid the vastness of the Atlantic. Somewhere beyond Miami’s crowded docks lay a deadly secret. A secret that may already have killed.
* * *
FAISAL STOOD ON the sidewalk outside of Mercy Hospital considering his options. Ava’s father’s final destination had been Fort Lauderdale. He looked at his watch—it had been over an hour since he’d been told of her disappearance and it had been longer than that since she’d made her escape. From what he knew she might have had all night and had definitely had most of the morning. He’d like to grab the hospital administrator and shake sense into him. Instead he clenched his fist and tried to put himself in Ava’s position.
What was in Miami for her? He couldn’t think of anything. Where would she have gone? Her identification was missing, along with her credit and debit cards. The only money she had was the one hundred and fifty dollars he’d given her and the fifty dollars she’d lifted. Two hundred dollars wouldn’t get you far, not if you wanted to sleep and eat.
A city bus lumbered by and stopped. He waited with the others at the stop and once inside, spoke to the driver. Two minutes later he stood on the curb. He now knew that there was a bus that went from the hospital to the intercity bus depot. It stopped here every fifteen minutes and arrived at the depot with one transfer. Ava could have been out of the hospital area within fifteen minutes of exiting the building. If that were true, she could be long gone. The problem was that, even if he was right, he didn’t know where she was headed or why. He didn’t know if a bus was the answer but it was a place to start.
Five minutes later, he was again behind the wheel of his Mustang. He put the car in gear and with a screech of tires headed toward the depot. But an hour later he was ready to ditch the conversation with the man at the security desk. He was sun-bronzed and wrinkled with age, sun or both. He looked like he’d been working far too long. Worse, he refused to reveal any information. Instead, he stated that it was an infringement of traveler confidentiality and his oath of employment. Faisal doubted if he’d taken any oath of employment but whether he had or not, it was clear the conversation was going nowhere. He turned away in frustration but the feeling of eyes on him had him turning around. She was a plump woman somewhere between forty and fifty-five. Her brown hair was bobbed in an efficient shoulder-length style and she had a suitcase by her side. She seemed to be giving him the literal once-over—like she was deciding if she should trust him or not. Her lips tightened and she let go of the handle of her suitcase. It was as if she’d made her decision.
“I may know what you need,” she said. The words sounded ominous and hollow like something from an old murder mystery, much like the tattered Agatha Christie in her hand.
He almost turned away—she could be an eccentric looking for a little excitement in her day. Judging from her flowered dress and the way she seemed at home, as if hanging around a bus depot was what she did, there might be a good chance of that. Yet his instinct told him to listen, and experience had taught him that evidence could come from the most unlikely places.
“I saw her, you know. The woman you’re looking for.” She put the book down as he closed the distance between them. “Gorgeous woman, at least I think she could have been but she looked sickly, frightened even. I didn’t speak to her. She left here late last night.” She looked at her watch and then sheepishly back at him. “I suppose I’ve lost track of time.”
There was something about the fact that she never quite looked at him, and the way the ticket attendant had looked at her with disdain that made him doubt that the woman was a credible witness.
“Me, I’m headed here and there,” she said vaguely, as if he had asked. “She got on a bus to Fort Lauderdale.” She frowned and leaned forward. “You don’t believe me?”
“I never said that.” He’d put no thought into her last words other than Fort Lauderdale was where he had planned to meet Dan Adams. It was possible that Ava went there to find answers. He met the woman’s bloodshot, brown eyes. The determined tilt to her chin seemed to say that she was going to make it despite her circumstances. “It’s true. I don’t know what her ticket read but that was the bus she got on. Hard woman to forget. If I were younger I might have been mighty jealous.”
“Anything else?”
“Fort Lauderdale, like I said.” She shrugged. “I’d love to go myself but funds are...” Her voice trailed off.
Faisal peeled off enough bills to get her across the country. “Here,” he said simply. “Treat yourself to a trip.”
Her eyes lit up as she took the money almost reverently. “My daughter lives in Chicago,” she said simply. “I’ll go there.” And for the first time, there was purpose in her expression that made Faisal feel that she might not be the only one whose luck was about to change.
Reluctantly, he moved away. He looked at his watch—it was nearing noon. She could already have been there and left the bus depot heading for another destination. Enough time had passed. His phone buzzed.
“Zaf,” Faisal said as he answered. “Things have changed direction here.” He went on to tell Zafir how the occupant of Ava Adams’s room had died, possibly murdered by suffocation. “One thing is clear—if it was murder, the murderer thought they were taking out Ava. The records hadn’t been switched over, some foul-up at the front desk.”
“So if it’s murder, the murderer didn’t know what Ava looked like,” Zafir said thoughtfully.
“He knew alright. Thing is the victim had long dark hair and was close in age. If her head had been turned...”
“A case of mistaken identity.”
“Unfortunate,” Faisal said, “that anyone had to die. But what I have out of all of this is that the description the administrator gave of the man they think is the murderer matches Ben Whyte. He was the second man on the yacht that night.”
“You’re assuming he’s alive. It could be a long shot but on the other hand, if he is you’ve got yourself a suspect.”
“This case is not like anything I’ve seen before.”
“I won’t disagree with you there. My question is, what are the chances that Dan’s still alive?”
“Not good,” Faisal said grimly. “That’s why, considering what’s just happened, I’m focusing on Ava. Her safety is paramount. This death, it makes my skin crawl. Who would want to kill her?” He moved the phone to his other ear as he collected his thoughts and a breeze pushed a strand of dark hair across his eyes. He pushed it back impatiently.
“She knows something,” Zafir said and there was a dark edge to his words.
“You’re right about that. She had some traumatic memory loss when I saw her but eventually that’s going to go away. Meanwhile, we’ve upgraded to a red,” he said. He thought of the danger to Ava, which would also shadow him as he’d do anything to protect her. He’d do it for any client—but for her... He paused.
“Go out of touch—”
“And you’ll send help,” he interrupted. “Meantime, I’m heading to Fort Lauderdale.”
“Dan Adams’s intended destination.”
“Exactly. But not just that—I had a tip at the bus station. Ava may be headed there.”
He ended the conversation shortly after that. The longer Ava stayed missing, the more Faisal worried for her safety. Especially now that he knew there was a killer on her trail, and she was running out of time.