MELTDOWN OVER, MAYA SAT AT her red table, contentedly sucking on the cherry Popsicle Ava had fetched from her apartment above the office.
“Letty, is there any way you can go to the grocery store this morning and pick up the stuff for Bingo Night?” Ava asked. “I want to be here when the pest-control guy arrives. There are ants all over the pool patio, and the Feldman girls said they’ve seen some of those damned German roaches in their unit. I need to walk him around and point at every place I want sprayed.”
“Happy to do the shopping. I don’t want Maya around when the spraying happens anyway,” Letty said. “Anything else you want me to get while I’m out?”
Ava handed her the shopping list. “This is all for now, but I’ll call you if I think of anything else. Are you sure you don’t want to leave Maya here with me?”
At the mention of her name, Maya looked up. Her face and hands were smeared with sticky red Popsicle juice. “I go to store.”
“Thanks, I appreciate the offer, but she’s been pretty clingy all morning,” Letty said. “I’d better take her along.”
She turned and held out a hand to her niece. “Let’s go home and get you washed up before the store. Okay?”
“Okay,” Maya said.
Letty was in the produce aisle at Publix, picking through a bin of avocados, trying to find the elusive—not hard as a rock, not on the verge of rot—when the man on the other side of the display nodded and smiled in her direction.
Letty gave him a curt nod. She chose four avocados, bagged them, and placed them in her shopping cart. Maya was sitting in the bottom of the cart, leafing through the pages of her sticker book.
“How many avocados did we choose?” Letty asked. She’d read somewhere about teachable moments, and had already gotten her niece started with counting, an activity Maya loved almost as much as spelling.
Maya touched each of the dark green fruits. “One. Two. Three. Four!”
“Good job!” The man was beside her now, smiling down at Maya. “What a smart little girl you have.”
He was in his early forties, good-looking, deeply tanned, with a square jaw and a baseball cap with the brim pulled low over his face, and in his black jeans and black pullover, he looked totally incongruous among the usual crowd of tourists, snowbirds, and retirees. His shopping cart held only a six-pack of beer and a bag of chips.
Letty instinctively moved her cart away from his. “Thanks,” she said.
“How old?” he asked, rolling his cart toward her.
“I’m four!” Maya piped up. “I’m a big girl.”
“I’ve got a little girl just your age at home,” the stranger said, staying right alongside Letty’s cart. “She likes to count and spell too. Can you spell your name?”
Maya beamed. “M—”
Letty shook her head emphatically at her niece, then lightly tapped her index finger across her lips.
“I don’t mean to be rude,” Letty said, stopping in the middle of the aisle. “But I’m trying to teach her not to speak to strangers. So I’d appreciate it if you’d just move along. Okay?”
“Wow!” the man said with a smirk. “Sorry if I was trying to be pleasant. Excuse me!”
Letty felt a chill run all the way down her spine. She was sure she’d seen this man before. In fact, just the night before in the nanny-cam video, not to mention his booking photo. She rolled the cart out of the produce section, nearly running in her haste to get away from him. The store was crowded with people getting an early start to their weekend shopping, so she had to dodge and weave and swerve.
When she got to the next aisle, she turned around and saw that the stranger was at the back of the store, leaning over, pretending to examine a display of ground chuck. She whipped out her phone, snapped a couple of photos of him, then hurried to the front of the store. She left her cart outside the women’s bathroom and took Maya inside.
Her hands were shaking as she called the motel. She started speaking as soon as Ava picked up. “Ava, is Joe around?”
“Haven’t seen him this morning,” she said. “What’s up?”
“I’ll explain later,” Letty said. “Can you please text me his phone number?”
“Doing it right now.”
As soon as the number popped up on her phone screen, Letty texted him. Call me back, please. Important.
Her phone rang a moment later. “Letty? What’s wrong?”
“I’m at the Publix in Madeira Beach, and Maya’s with me. We were in the produce department when I noticed this strange man staring at us. It creeped me out. He wanted to know how old Maya was, and said he had a four-year-old at home too. Then he tried to get her to say her name, but I stopped her, and basically told him to back off. Joe, maybe I’m being paranoid, but I think it’s Declan Rooney. I think he was stalking us. I took a couple photos of him when he was pretending not to watch us.”
“Text me the photos. But what makes you think this isn’t just some garden-variety perv? Rooney’s never seen you or Maya.”
“Maybe it is just some random creep. He was wearing a baseball cap that obscured his face. But Joe, I think he has seen Maya before. I’ll explain it later.”
“Where is this guy now? And where are you?”
“I’m hiding out in the ladies’ room. He was trolling around in the meat department. He’s wearing black jeans and a black zip-neck pullover, and some kind of navy-blue baseball cap. I’d say he’s about six-two.”
“Okay, sit tight. I’m headed your way.”
He called Vikki Hill on his way to Publix. “Hey. We might have a complication. Letty just called me from Publix. She thinks she saw Rooney. He was stalking her. I’m going there right now.”
“Aw, shit,” Agent Hill moaned. “How does she know it’s him?”
“Not sure. But she texted me some pictures she took, and although he’s got a ball cap pulled down over his face, the build and profile fit. It looks like this could be our guy.”
“You want backup?” she asked. “That store’s just a mile from here, right?”
He hesitated. “I guess it couldn’t hurt. See you there.”
“Letty, I don’t wanna stay here,” Maya whined. “I want my goldfish crackers. And my sticker book.”
They’d been in the bathroom for ten minutes. They’d washed their hands, watched a cartoon on Letty’s phone, and sung “Let It Go” twice. Letty was tired of hiding in a locked bathroom stall, and she was tired of being afraid, and she was tired of listening to bathroom noises.
“Okay, ladybug,” she said. “Let’s go.”
She was placing Maya back in the shopping cart when her phone dinged with a text from Joe.
Here.
She texted back. We’re right inside the front doors.
Letty scanned the front of the store, but didn’t spot any tall men dressed all in black.
Joe sprinted through the door. “Is he still here?”
“Not up front,” Letty reported.
A moment later, Vikki Hill joined them. “Any sign of him?”
“Not up here,” Letty said.
“Let’s split up,” Joe said. “You take the right side of the store, I’ll take the left.”
“I’ll go with Vikki,” Letty said.
The agent gave Maya a tentative smile. “Hey there. I’m Vikki.”
Maya ducked her head. “I’m not s’posed to talk to strangers.”
“Exactly right,” Vikki Hill said. “Do not talk to strangers. Ever.”
They were rolling at a fast clip through the frozen food aisle, then past the wine and beer, then the pharmacy, dodging senior citizens who were perusing lists on their phones or just chatting in the middle of the aisles.
“Jesus! Aisle cloggers are the worst,” Hill said under her breath.
“It’s the coupon clippers who drive me nuts,” Letty said.
“And don’t get me started on people writing checks. Who does that? You see him anywhere?” Vikki asked.
“I think he’s gone,” Letty said. “I’m so pissed at myself for hiding out in the bathroom like some chickenshit. I should have at least tried to follow him out to the parking lot to see what he was driving.”
“With a little kid in your cart? No. You did the right thing.” Hill pointed at Joe, who was standing in front of the customer service counter, chatting with a man in a short-sleeved dress shirt and tie and Publix name badge.
“We think he’s gone,” Vikki Hill said, as they approached.
“I didn’t see him either,” Joe said. “Agent Hill, Letty, this is Craig Hoffman. He’s the manager here. I’ve asked if we could take a look at the store’s security cameras. Maybe we can get a better look at this guy’s face that way.”
“And I was just explaining that I’d have to get my district supervisor’s approval for that kind of thing,” Hoffman said. “Sorry. Company policy.”
Vikki Hill frowned. “Mr. Hoffman? How long would that take? The man we’re looking for is a felon and a fugitive. He’s a suspect in an unsolved homicide in New York. We won’t disrupt business or hassle your customers. All we want to do is look at the video for the past hour.”
Hoffman shrugged. “And as I said, it’s company policy. We like to assist law enforcement in any way we can, but…”
The FBI agent waved aside his apology. “Never mind.” She turned to Joe. “Let’s roll. We’re getting nowhere here.”
“I’ll meet you back at the motel,” Letty said, brandishing Ava’s grocery list. “I’ve got to finish shopping.…”
Agent Hill plucked the list from her hand. “Now,” she said quietly. “I heard from our friend this morning. We leave now.”