As they werewalking out to the car, Bob asked, “When do you think she started lying?”
“When I told her that Snow said she couldn’t identify anyone,” Lucas said. “Duffy thinks she can.”
“I got the feeling that Duffy issureshe can. You want to go back and jack up Snow?”
Lucas scraped his lower lip with his upper teeth, then looked at his watch. “It’s almost five, it’s getting dark, and Snow said she was about to start on her last customer an hour ago. She won’t be there. Besides, it might be better to let her stew on it overnight. The fact that she lied. We’ll hit her again tomorrow.”
“I looked up Magnus Elliot’s house on the iPad, the satellite view. That’s a place we might not want to go walking around in the dark.”
“Okay... we got a lot done,” Lucas said. He yawned. “Let’s finda new place to eat. Maybe the feds will run some of these women down tonight. We’ll find out in the morning.”
“There’s this street over in Fort Lauderdale, Los Feliz or something, supposed to have some good food.”
“Let’s go,” Lucas said. “I’m hungrier than hell.”
Turned out that the street was Las Olas, not Los Feliz. Parking was a nightmare, but they lucked into a slot a few blocks from the restaurant they’d picked and walked back. Bob was talking about palm trees and houses when Lucas interrupted: “Did we just make a mistake? Should we have hit Snow again? Or hit Elliot?”
“This investigation has been going on for months,” Bob said. “One more day...”
“That’s not what I asked,” Lucas said. He was strolling along with his hands in the sport coat pockets. “I asked, did we make a mistake?”
Bob considered, pursed lips, staring down at the sidewalk.
Then, “I don’t know. Maybe.”
CHAPTER
NINE
Alicia Snow watchedthrough the front window as Lucas and Bob rolled out of the parking lot in the Pathfinder. They’d frightened her. They seemed smart and mean, a bad combination. She mentioned Patty Pittman’s disappearance because Pittman’s disappearance had nothing to do with the boating party, and if the marshals started investigating Pittman, they wouldn’t be pushing on her.
She walked back to the office and got on her phone. A man answered after five rings and she said, “This is Al. Where are you?”
“At my place.” His voice down low; she could hear a television in the background. “What’d I tell you about calling? My wife is out in the living room, if she...”
“Listen to me! Two U.S. Marshals were here, questioning me,” Snow said, the fear leaking into her voice. “They asked about the party on the boat. About who could pick you guys out, if they saw pictures. They know about all the girls.”
“Shit! I heard about those guys. They’re going around hitting on people. How’d they get to you?”
“I don’t know, they didn’t say. When I told you about PattyPittman disappearing, you said it didn’t have anything to do with you guys, so I told the marshals about her. I figured that if they’re investigating Patty, they won’t be questioning me. They really scared me; these marshals aremean. What are we going to do?”
After a silence, Jack Cattaneo said, “We’re going to take it easy—or you are. Nobody will know about you, about the two of us. I mean, if my wife heard about us, I’d wake up with a knife in my chest. So: you take it easy, play it cool, relax. They... didn’t try to pressure you? They didn’t know anything?”
“No, nothing like that. They were polite, they were going around trying to find people who’d seen your faces. And the girls did. I told them I remembered some guys on the boat coming up while we were getting hamburgers, but I didn’t talk to you. I told them I really couldn’t pick anyone out from a picture.”
“But they got a list of the girls.”
“I guess.”
“All right. I’ll talk to some guys. You stay cool. Here comes Belinda.”
He clicked off.
Belinda wasn’t actuallycoming. Cattaneo’s wife was rattling around the family room with her acrylic paints and an oversized canvas she was callingMoonrise, Big Cypress. Satisfied that she hadn’t overheard the phone call, he put the phone in his pocket, sat on a kitchen chair, and closed his eyes.
He had, indeed, told Snow that nobody on the boat had anything to do with Patty Pittman’s disappearance, but he’d been lying. In fact, the men on the boat had everything to do with PattyPittman, and now, if Snow had put the feds on the Pittman case, it could be coming back to bite them on the ass, not that they’d had any choice with Pittman.
He chewed on a thumbnail for a moment, sighed, and wandered back to the family room and asked, “Belinda: late lunch?”
