VIKKI HILL STARED DOWN AT the screen of her laptop. She blinked. She’d run the search on a whim, with zero expectations. But damned if she didn’t get a hit.
Tanya Michelle Rooney, real name Tanya Michelle Carnahan, had been arrested down in Florida almost exactly five years ago, on charges of fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud.
She read the arrest report with interest. It looked as though the woman was mixed up in a scam, along with two male associates. The three of them had set up shop in a motel room and duped their unsuspecting victims into selling gold and silver coins and estate jewelry for far below their actual worth. One report she read put the amount the trio had earned in excess of $150,000. Not a bad profit for less than two weeks of work.
But when an elderly victim complained to a local cop that she feared she’d been cheated, the authorities closed in. A sting was organized with an undercover agent, but by the time the cops moved in, the two male associates had fled, leaving only Tanya behind holding the bag. But not the profits from the scam, or any of the gold or silver, which had apparently vanished.
“Ain’t that the way?” Vikki mused aloud.
The woman had been booked and arrested, but eventually released. Vikki wondered why, until she pulled up Tanya Carnahan’s booking photo.
“Ahhh,” she said. She’d seen other, flattering photos of Tanya in the New York tabloids, and she’d even seen the police photos taken at the murder scene. But even dirty and disheveled in a police mug shot, the woman was strikingly beautiful. Vikki could see what Evan Wingfield had seen in Tanya. And she could understand how even a devious crook like Wingfield had been taken in. The snake had been charmed, and he still didn’t know to what extent.
She read the arrest report again and laughed at a detail she’d overlooked earlier. Tanya Carnahan had been arrested in a small beach town called Treasure Island. You couldn’t make this shit up if you tried, she thought.
Several different jurisdictions had been involved in the sting operation, including the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the FBI, the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, and, of course, the locals.
The feds and the state cops probably weren’t all that invested in the incident, especially since the men had slipped through their grasp, but this would have been a big deal to a small police department. Vikki figured the arresting officer, a man named Joe DeCurtis, would know the most about the incident. She glanced at the clock. It was after six, but she put in the call anyway. As expected, her call went straight to voice mail, so she left a message.
Returning to the arrest report she found the name of the other two suspects in the scheme, both of whom had slipped away before the authorities closed in. One, a Declan M. Rooney, age forty-two at the time of the incident, was apparently the mastermind and founder of the ring. And, it seemed, he was married to Tanya Carnahan. Or so she claimed.
Rooney’s driver’s license photo was included in the report. Vikki had a theory that you should never trust a man who took a good driver’s license photo, and Declan Rooney’s photo only reinforced that belief.
He had dark, wavy, shoulder-length hair combed back from a high forehead, and piercing blue eyes. He looked, Vikki thought, like a goddamned pirate.
“Good stuff,” Vikki said out loud. She did a quick search and discovered that Declan Rooney had an impressive arrest record, with stops around several Florida towns, like Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach, and Sarasota. He was a small-time thief with ambitions for the big time.
She widened her search to the NCIC database and found a more extensive rap sheet, dating back to Rooney’s teen years in Boston. His juvenile arrest record was blocked, but starting at seventeen, he’d been booked for shoplifting, breaking and entering, drug possession, auto theft, and aggravated assault. The last charge piqued her interest, because his other arrests were mostly nonviolent property crimes.
After a little more digging she found the incident report for the aggravated assault charge. After some short jail stints up north, Rooney, like so many other ambitious crooks, had decided to take his talents for the grift down south, to Florida, specifically.
Declan Rooney had advertised a phony ten-thousand-dollar Rolex Oyster Perpetual watch on Craigslist in Boca Raton, but when the buyer whipped out a jeweler’s loupe to examine the watch, Rooney pulled a gun and beat the man so badly he’d broken his jaw and fractured an eye socket. Unfortunately for Rooney, the victim had snapped a quick photo of his license plate when he’d pulled into the shopping center where the transaction was set to take place. He’d done six months in a county lockup for the assault.
Vikki scrolled back to the photo of Tanya. She took a screenshot of her booking photo, then clicked over to compare it with the photo of Letty Carnahan that Evan Wingfield had provided.
There was a definite family resemblance. The older sister had the same nose and mouth, but her face was fuller, the features softer and the cheekbones not nearly as prominent as her younger sibling’s. Letty’s hair was almost a chestnut brown, and the way she parted it down the middle accented her widow’s peak.
When and how, she wondered, had Rooney hooked up with Tanya? She had no other arrest record that Vikki could find. According to Evan Wingfield, his ex had done some modeling and acting in Atlanta, immediately prior to her move to New York to live with her sister. Had that been a lie, too?
According to Evan, the sisters, estranged after he dumped Letty for Tanya, had only reconciled after his breakup with Tanya. “After that they were thick as thieves,” Evan claimed.
But if that was true, what would have prompted Letty to kill her sister, accidentally or not?
She needed to find Letty to answer that question. And she needed to find her before Evan Wingfield did.