“JOE!” HIS MOTHER’S VOICE STARTLED him awake. He opened his eyes and when he struggled to sit upright his cramped back muscles screamed in protest.
Ava was standing beside the driver’s-side window, both hands on her hips. “What do you think you’re doing?”
He yawned and opened the truck door. “I was sleeping. Until you started screeching at me.” He started walking toward the office. “And now I’m gonna go take a pee inside. Unless you want me to whip it out right here in the parking lot of your motel.”
He took his own sweet time washing his hands and splashing water on his face. Ava was waiting when he walked out of the bathroom.
“Why were you sleeping in your truck in my parking lot? Were you drunk last night? And aren’t you supposed to be at work right now?”
He yawned again, then headed for the coffee bar. He poured himself a mug and gulped half the cup down.
“I wasn’t drunk. I’m taking PTO today. Anything else?”
“When are you going to tell me what’s going on with Letty?” Ava asked. Her arms were crossed over her chest. He should have known she’d figure something was up.
“You’re right, there is something going on. But I’m not really at liberty to discuss it right now.”
“That woman who checked into the efficiency yesterday. Vikki something. Who is she really? And don’t tell me it’s none of my business. She’s staying at my motel. I have a right to know.”
Crap. He didn’t need this. He’d been awake half the night, sitting in the front seat of his truck, wedged tightly behind Letty’s Kia, just in case she decided to make a run for it. He’d finally dozed off around three.
“Vikki Hill is an FBI agent. From New York. I really can’t talk to you about this right now, Mom.”
Ava would not be deterred. “Just tell me this. Does it involve Maya? Is she in some kind of danger?”
“Maya is involved … indirectly,” he admitted. “But I’m going to make damned sure she’ll be okay.”
Isabelle came bounding down the stairs from the apartment. “Hey, bro,” she said, kissing his cheek. “Aren’t you supposed to be out chasing criminals?”
“Aren’t you supposed to be at school?” he countered. “Why is everybody so worried about my work schedule?”
“He slept in his truck out in the parking lot last night,” Ava told her daughter. “Because Letty and Maya are in some kind of trouble with the FBI.”
“Oh, shit!” Isabelle breathed. “For real? Do they really think Letty killed her sister? I mean, that’s cray-cray. Letty would never.”
“What do you know about any of this?” Joe asked sternly.
“That’s what I’d like to know, too,” Ava said pointedly. “Young lady?”
Isabelle took a half step backward. “I promised Letty I wouldn’t talk about it. To anybody. She’s in big trouble, okay? That’s all I really know.”
“Who is Letty’s sister?” Ava asked. “Why is there an FBI agent staying here? And why am I always the last to know anything?”
The office doorbell chimed and Maya and Letty walked in.
“Maya Papaya!” Isabelle exclaimed, as the little girl jumped into her arms.
Letty had dark smudges under her eyes and now she warily regarded the assembled family.
“This is about me, isn’t it?” she asked Joe. “You told them?”
“I didn’t say anything, Letty,” Isabelle volunteered. “I kept my promise.”
“Nobody’s told me nothing,” Ava said. “Don’t you think it’s about time you filled us all in?”
Letty silently nodded in the direction of her niece.
“Come on, Maya,” Isabelle said, understanding the unspoken cue. “Let’s go upstairs and play school before it’s time for me to go to real school.”
Joe poured a mug of coffee and handed it to Ava, then poured one for Letty, who waited until she heard the two girls’ footsteps ascending the stairs. She took a sip of coffee, then put the mug aside. “I’m sorry I lied to you, Ava.”
Her coffee grew cold while the whole story poured out, a torrent of jumbled words and emotions, betrayal, regrets, grief and fears. Letty held nothing back. Nothing, with the exception of the object she’d found sewn inside Maya’s stuffed elephant. For reasons she didn’t really understand, she decided to keep the nanny camera’s existence to herself, at least for the time being.
Ava listened without interrupting, until Letty mentioned the name Declan Rooney.
“Him!” she said, scowling. “That man was the devil. I should have known he was bad news the minute Chuck brought him and your sister to this motel. I guess that Irish accent of his had us all fooled. That and those damned blue eyes of his.”
“Not all of us were fooled,” Joe said. “And as it turns out, Rooney’s accent was as fake as the rest of his story. He grew up outside Boston.”
Her tone softened. “Letty, I still can’t believe I didn’t notice until right now the resemblance between you and Tanya.”
“I guess it’s a good thing you didn’t figure it out, or you never would have rented me a room,” Letty said.
“I probably would have anyway, though. Because of Maya. And also, because I sensed you were a good person,” Ava said. She turned and gave her son a pointed look. “What happens now?”
“That depends on Letty,” Joe said.
“I’ll meet with the FBI agent today. Then I guess I’ll do whatever she wants,” Letty said. “I’m out of options, and I’m tired of running.”
They heard footsteps clattering down the stairs, and the discussion was suspended.
“Letty,” Maya said, running into the office. “Isabelle says she has to go to school now.”
Isabelle was a step behind the little girl. “Unless Mom writes me a note so I get an excused absence. Then we could go to the beach.”
“Nice try,” Ava said. “You go on to school. Maya will be here waiting after lunch, and so will the beach.”
Joe’s phone pinged to signal an incoming text message. “It’s from Agent Hill,” he told Letty. “She wants us to meet her for breakfast at the Seahorse.”
“The diner down in Pass-a-Grille? Now?”
“Maya can stay here with me,” Ava offered. “We’ll have our own school.”
“I can write my name,” the child boasted. “M-A-Y-A.”
Ava clapped her hands in appreciation. “That’s great. Let’s see if you can write my name. A-V-A. Hey, did you know my name is spelled the same backward and forward?”
“Nice parking job,” Letty said, as they approached his truck in the motel lot.
He opened the passenger door and she climbed into the truck.
“Did you really think I’d run?” she asked, as they pulled into traffic.
“No, but I didn’t want to take a chance,” he said. “The FBI isn’t fooling around with this stuff, Letty. They want to nail Evan Wingfield, and as I understand it, you’re their best shot at doing that.”
It was early and traffic was light. They passed tourists and retirees out walking or jogging along Gulf Boulevard, the road that strung the beach towns together, going south to St. Pete Beach and Pass-a-Grille.
The Seahorse Restaurant was a low-ceilinged wood-frame building sitting on a corner lot facing Tampa Bay across the street. It had cheerful green-and-red awnings and flower boxes spilling over with red geraniums. Joe pulled over to the curb. Letty sat very upright, looking straight ahead. Only her hands moved, clutching and unclutching in her lap. She’d hardly slept, and her stomach was in knots.
“I’m scared.”
“I know.” He placed his hand atop hers. “I swear, Letty, no matter what, I won’t let anything bad happen to you, or Maya. We’ve got this.”
She took a deep breath. Nodded. “Okay. Let’s go.”
“That’s her,” Joe said in a low voice, indicating a lone woman seated at a table in the corner of the covered patio.
The agent was dressed in a black knit tank top and white jeans. Letty was surprised to note that Vikki Hill looked younger than the photo Zoey texted from the diner, maybe early forties? Her sunglasses were pushed up into her dark, shoulder-length hair. Her skin was coffee colored, in contrast to the vivid red lipstick she wore. She was studying the menu, but looked up as Joe and Letty approached.
“Agent Hill,” Joe started, as he pulled Letty’s chair away from the table.
“Just Vikki, please,” the agent corrected him. “Hi, Letty. Thanks for coming.” She gestured at the coffee carafe, but Letty shook her head. “I’ve been up since three, and I’ve already had enough caffeine.”
“How about some food?”
“Not hungry,” Letty said.
“You sure? The bureau is buying. I’ve already eaten. Shrimp for breakfast! Crazy, huh? I could get used to being in Florida this time of year.”
“You probably wouldn’t like it in July, though,” Joe said.
“I don’t like July, anywhere,” Agent Hill said.
Jittery from all the coffee, Letty kept looking around the room.
“It’s just me,” Vikki Hill said, noticing her unease. “No backup agents, no plainclothes cops dressed as waiters or other tourists or hidden cameras. Just me. So, I understand Joe here has filled you in on what’s going on?”
“He tells me Evan Wingfield hired you to kill me. Right?”
“Well, not me personally. You know Wingfield pretty well, worked for him, dated him, so you probably realize he doesn’t really have a very high opinion of women. I mean, he likes them for some things, but he doesn’t really trust them to do the heavy lifting, if you get my drift. He actually wants me to act as a sort of broker, to find him someone else to kill you.”
Letty swallowed hard. Her head was throbbing and she felt sick. She took a tiny sip of water.
“No offense, or anything,” she said finally. “But I find all of this hard to believe. Even for Evan Wingfield.”
Agent Hill nodded. “I get it.”
She placed her phone on the table, studied the screen, and paused before tapping an icon. “This is a recording of a conversation I had with Evan Wingfield last week. Remember, he thinks I’m just a greedy, crooked city housing inspector.”
The recording quality wasn’t stellar. It sounded tinny, with a bit of echo, but Letty recognized Evan’s voice instantly.
“Listen, ah, there’s something I need you to do for me.”
“What’s that?” It was a woman’s voice.
“You know they still haven’t found my daughter, right? I mean, it’s nuts. Maya’s only four, and as far as I know, that crazy bitch Letty could have taken her anywhere. She could be in real danger.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I was thinking, you have a lot of contacts, like in the city. You used to be a cop and you still know a lot of cops, too, right?”
“I know a few.”
“Somebody has to know where Letty is. I mean, she’s not some criminal mastermind, for Christ’s sake.”
The woman’s voice sounded bored. “Maybe you should hire a private detective or something.”
“I have. It’s like flushing money down a toilet. Nobody can tell me anything. That’s why I thought of you.”
“Really? Because I am a criminal mastermind?”
Evan got a laugh out of that.
“No, seriously. I want you to ask around. Talk to her friends at that diner. You have the kind of face people trust. I bet people tell you stuff all the time.”
“And then what? What if I were to find out where she is? I tell you and then you tell the cops and they arrest her and bring your kid back home?”
“Something like that … Or…”
“Or what?”
“Or we deal with Letty ourselves. You know what the courts are like. She’s a woman. Some guys probably even think she’s hot. She’d probably get off with a slap on the wrist—even for killing her own sister. No. She should have to pay for what she did to my family. Like, really pay.”
Letty felt a chill run down her spine. Joe had been watching her face carefully. He reached across the table and gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. Vikki Hill saw, but said nothing. She tapped the phone and the recording stopped abruptly.
“It goes on like that for a few more minutes. He dances around, blames you for killing Tanya, blames her for wrecking his business. He has some not very nice things to say about you, Letty. I tell you, he’s pretty paranoid right now. Apparently, Tanya told him she knew he was paying off city inspectors, and she threatened to take what she knew to the police.”
Letty’s voice was hoarse from anxiety and lack of sleep. “About a month before she was killed, Tanya told me Evan was going to have to agree to giving up custody of Maya, and that he’d have to agree to her move to LA because she had the goods on him. But she never told me what she knew, or how she knew it.”
“Your sister was full of secrets, wasn’t she?” Vikki Hill asked.
Letty stared down at the tabletop, at the greasy, yolk-streaked remains of the FBI agent’s breakfast. It reminded her of the thousands of dishes she’d cleared in her years of waiting tables at the Lazy Daizy. And of sitting down, that first time, across from the polite, generous customer all the waitresses referred to as Table Two.
What if she’d blown him off, told him to take a hike that day, when he invited her to see the apartment he suddenly had available? What if she’d never met Evan Wingfield, or allowed Tanya to guilt-trip her into allowing her to move in with her? The what-ifs were relentless. They woke her up every morning, came to her in her sleep, or at odd moments when she was reading with Maya.
“Yeah,” she said softly. “Secrets within secrets. That was Tanya.”
Joe drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “So far, all we’ve heard is Wingfield blowing off steam, which is not the same thing as asking you to find somebody to kill Letty. Did he eventually stop dancing around?”
Vikki Hill picked up the phone and tapped the fast-forward button on the recording. “Give a listen,” she said.
It was her voice, midsentence.
“Why don’t you tell me the real reason you want Letty dealt with?”
“I told you already. Call it frontier justice.”
“No. I call it bullshit. I know you, Evan. It all comes down to money, doesn’t it?”
“That crazy Tanya had a will. Who knew? Some Indian woman she met at AA. Who hires a drunk lawyer for estate planning? Tanya Carnahan, that’s who. Long story short, she left everything to Maya, in a trust with Letty named as Maya’s guardian.”
“So?”
“So, when we were together, before things went bad, I put a bunch of my holdings in an LLC and transferred it into Tanya’s name, which I never mentioned to her.”
“As a tax dodge.”
“It’s perfectly legal. Now though, with Tanya dead, my four-year-old kid and her crazy aunt hold title to, like, twelve million dollars’ worth of prime New York real estate. My apartments. And my lawyers tell me I can sue, but unless I can prove Letty killed Tanya, the apartments are held in a trust that Letty controls.”
“But you’re Maya’s legal father, right? Can Tanya just cut you out of the kid’s life like that?”
“Maybe, maybe not. But we don’t need to go into that right now. Let’s get back to Letty. Can you find her, or not?”
“Maybe? I mean, what’s it worth to you?”
“Ten thousand.”
“Bwhahahaha. Seriously. I’ve got a job, you know. I’ll have to take time off, call in some favors, that costs money. Plus, travel, if it comes to that. Plus, if you want me to hire someone to take care of Letty, that ain’t free. I mean, I don’t even know how much it costs to hire a hit man.”
“Christ! Will you quit saying that word?”
“What should I call it instead? A consultant?”
“Whatever. Just get it done.”
“Fifty thousand. And don’t even try and dick around with me. I know you’ve got the money, Evan.”
“Okay. Do it. I don’t want to know any of the details. Just take care of it.”
“And what about the kid?”
“Yeah. Of course. Maya. You’ll see that she’s not hurt, right? Look, I gotta go. Text me when you know something.”