“People are unreliable,” I said. “Memories even more so.”
I opened my satchel and grabbed the photo of the man who had approached Freddie Pecos in the dark outside the ATM. Then glanced back at the sketches. I took the face in pieces, looking from mouth to mouth, then the bridges of each nose. Finally, at what little I could see of the eyes, given the man in the photograph wore a brimmed hat pulled low.
Portions of different sketches matched the man in the picture to a T, yet none of them matched him in total. The parts, oddly, were greater than the whole, rather than less than it. Taken in full, none of the sketches looked exactly like the parking lot photo.
“Maybe these are the same person,” I said. “Maybe not. But something about the sketches is off.”
At the bottom of each drawing was Ed Offerman’s name, and below that, a signature that read “W. C. Walker.” The sketch artist’s name.
I glanced at the last page of the file, which was more of a catalog of names, detailing other women who had been reported missing after the news of the first two bodies had surfaced. The list was made by Offerman, but he referenced the local lead, Detective Quinones, who had detailed files on each missing person—available if the investigation showed promise in the future.
Looking back at the last paragraph on page 18, I reread the final sentence from Offerman, who noted that between mid-2018 and mid-2020, Shilo County had more missing women per capita than any other county in Florida.
Richie had been taking notes on his phone. Now he set it down on the desk. “So,” he said, “next steps?”
Our potential new C.I. was sitting in jail for at least two days. After that, Director Poulton would not care about a cold case involving three dead women in North Florida. Not unless we could tie it directly to J. P. Sandoval and guns.
“Let’s take a drive,” I said, grabbing the notes and sketches and dropping them back onto the two-hole punch in the file.
I headed for the elevator, but Richie was moving in the other direction.
“Shouldn’t we swing by and say goodbye to Agent Chizek?” he asked. “Thank him?”
“Thank him?” I turned to Richie. “For what?”
CHAPTER TEN
We headed west along 10 out of Jacksonville, but quickly transitioned onto rural state highways 23 and 21.
The diversity of plant life and habitat in Florida’s interior is like few other places. I remembered canoeing through the swamps in this area with my Uncle Gary, two weeks after my ninth birthday. The surface of the water was the color of celery, the riverbanks crowded with sweet gum and cypress trees. We emerged onto a sinkhole where otters played and a group of eighteen Black women were holding a baptism, their clothes as white as the inside of a coconut before they entered the green water.
I looked over at Richie, who was studying the landscape out the window. I rarely felt the need to fill an empty space, but intellectually, I knew others appreciated it.
“You all right?” I asked.
He nodded, turning to me. “Where I grew up,” he said, “inland from San Diego? People don’t think of it as farm country, but it is. A lot of horses and crops. New subdivisions poppin’ up all around them.”
“Did you grow up on a farm?” I asked.
“No,” Richie said. “But my sister rode horses. We had a field behind our house with avocados and orange trees.” He motioned around us. “Like Florida, California is a lot more rural than people think.”
Richie and I were almost in Shilo when I veered off State Route 21. It was 12:08 p.m., and my gas tank was close to empty. I pulled into an Exxon that shared a parking lot with a Dollar General and a Tropical Smoothie Cafe. Richie got out, telling me he needed to use the head.
As I filled up, I stared at the storefronts on the opposite side of the street. One-with-God Church. Rent-2-Own Furniture! Pawn4Cash. I topped off the tank and put away the nozzle.
“What are you thinking about?” Richie asked, following my eyes across the road. He stood to my right, shoveling gum into his mouth from a paper bag.
“The odds,” I said. “One shopping plaza with numerals in all three shop names.”
Richie often chewed gum, but this time it was a baseball-themed brand for children, packaged in the kind of paper pouch I had not seen since my mother forced me to play Little League.
“And those numbers?” he asked.
“One-point-four percent,” I said. “But the margin of error is higher than I prefer.”
Richie stared at me, nodded, then got in the car.
Twenty minutes later, we were sitting with Detective Warner Quinones from Shilo Police Department. Quinones was five foot eight and stocky, a Latino with a five-o’clock shadow and wavy hair.
