Other clues in the apartment pointed to travel. There was no luggage in the closets, no bras or underwear in the bedroom drawers, no makeup on the bathroom sink. The most interesting thing Stranahan found was crumpled in a waste basket in a corner of the living room: a bank deposit slip for twenty-five hundred dollars, dated the twenty-seventh of December.
Have a nice trip, Stranahan thought.
He let himself out, carefully locking the door behind him. Then he drove three blocks to a pay phone at a 7-Eleven, where he dialed Maggie’s phone number and left a very important message on her machine.
At the end of the day, Christina Marks dropped her rented Ford Escort with the hotel valet, bought a copy of the New York Times at the shop in the lobby, and took the elevator up to her room. Before she could get the key out of the door, Mick Stranahan opened it from the other side.
“Come on in,” he said.
“Nice of you,” Christina said, “considering it’s my room.”
Stranahan noticed she had one of those trendy leather briefcase satchels that you wear over your shoulder. A couple of legal pads stuck out the top.
“You’ve been busy.”
“You want a drink?”
“Gin and tonic, thanks,” Stranahan said. After a pause: “I was afraid the great Reynaldo might see me if I waited in the lobby.”
“So you got a key to my room?”
“Not exactly.”
Christina Marks handed him the drink. Then she poured herself a beer, and sat down in a rattan chair with garish floral pillows that were supposed to look tropical.
“I went to see Maggie’s family today,” she said.
“Any luck?”
“No. Unfortunately, they don’t speak English.”
Stranahan smiled and shook his head.
“What’s so funny?” Christina said. “Just because I don’t speak Spanish?”
Stranahan said, “Except for probably her grandmother, all Maggie’s family speaks perfect English. Perfect.”
“What?”
“Her father teaches physics at Palmetto High School. Her mother is an operator for Southern Bell. Her sister Consuelo is a legal secretary, and her brother, whats-his-name … “
“Tomas.”
“Tommy, yeah,” Stranahan said. “He’s a senior account executive at Merrill Lynch.”
Christina Marks put down her beer so decisively that it nearly broke the glass coffee table. “I sat in the living room, talking to these people, and they just stared at me and said—”
“No habla English, señora. “
“Exactly.”
“Oldest trick in Miami,” Stranahan said. “They just didn’t want to talk. Don’t feel bad, they tried the same thing with me.”
“And I suppose you know Spanish.”
“Enough to make them think I knew more. They’re worried about Maggie, actually. Been worried for some time. She’s had some personal problems, Maggie has. Money problems, too—that much I found out before her old lady started having chest pains.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Second oldest trick,” Stranahan said, smiling, “but I was done anyway. I honestly don’t think they know where she is.”
Christina Marks finished her beer and got another from the small hotel refrigerator. When she sat down again, she kicked off her shoes.
“So,” she said, “you’re ahead of us.”
“You and Reynaldo?”
“The crew,” Christina said, looking stung.
“No, I’m not ahead of you,” Stranahan said. “Tell me what Maggie Gonzalez knows about Vicky Barletta.”
Christina said, “I can’t do that.”
“How much did you promise to pay?”
Again Christina shook her head.
“Know what I think?” Stranahan said. “I think you and Ray are getting the hum job of your lives.”
“Pardon?”
“I think Maggie is sucking you off, big-time.”
Christina heard herself saying, “You might be right.”
Stranahan softened his tone. “Let me give you a hypothetical,” he said. “This Maggie Gonzalez, whom you’ve never seen before, shows up in New York one day and offers to tell you a sensational story about a missing college coed. The way she tells it, the girl came to a terrible and ghastly end. And, conveniently, the way she tells it can’t ever be proven or disproven. Why? Because it happened a long time ago. And the odds are, Christina, that Victoria Barletta is dead. And the odds are, whoever did it isn’t about to come forward to say that Reynaldo Flemm got it all wrong when he told the story on national TV.”