Walker hesitated. “Surgical, I guess,” he said. “The paper kind we all wore. So I had to fill that in, too.”
Cassie took the sketches back and pointed at dark areas on the face on two of the drawings. “What are these?” she asked.
“To be honest,” he said, “I can’t remember. But if I had to guess—scars of some type.”
“Mr. Walker,” I said, “did Ed Offerman ask for your impressions of these interviews?”
“My impressions?” He grinned. “You got a better vocabulary than me, brother. No, no. Impressions were not requested. My job was just to draw this guy…el joven.”
Cassie squinted, translating. “The young man?”
Walker smiled. “It wasn’t that, though. But there was a nickname.”
“Wait,” I said. “The nickname was in Spanish?”
“Oh yeah. Most of these gals spoke Spanish. I told Offerman that, too. That he spoke Spanish.”
“He who?” I clarified.
“He the whatever,” Walker said. “The bad guy. Whatever his nickname was.”
Cassie and I exchanged a glance. This was nowhere in Offerman’s notes, and I wondered just how much he’d drunk while Walker drew.
“You’re sure?” Cassie said.
“Oh yeah.” Walker nodded. “Me and the ladies talked in Spanish for a while, and this one gal—she mentioned the guy in the sketch picked up her friend for a date. And that he spoke Spanish.”
“How well?” Cassie asked.
Walker hesitated. “I remember asking her that—‘Como un guero?’”
“Like a white boy,” Cassie translated.
“And she smiled at me,” Walker said. “Said yes, but mentioned he spoke okay, all the same.”
“And you took that as what?” I asked. “The guy in the sketch grew up here, but in a Latin community? A Latin family?”
“Hell, I dunno, man. It’s Florida. You can bebornhere and not speak a lick, you know what I’m saying? Or you can pick up the language along the way, am I right?”
Walker was right.
He’d also handed us our first potential break in the case.
“So he spoke Spanish,” I said. “Fluently enough to communicate with native speakers.”
“Check,” the sketch artist said.
“And he went by a nickname. But you can’t remember it?”
“Check again,” he said. “And sorry.”
“Tell me,” I said. “If you heard the nickname… if someone else told us… would you recognize it?”
“For sure.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Cassie followed up with more questions for the sketch artist, asking Walker what he remembered about the women he had spoken to. But nothing else stuck.
