“The money?” Angie said.
She nodded. “In a trash bag, laid flat under the ice in the machine on the fifth floor, just outside his room.”
“Ballsy,” I said.
“Not easy to get to, though,” Desiree said. “You have to move all that ice; your arms are pinned in through the small door of the machine. That’s how Price found me when he came back from his friends’ house.”
“Was he alone?”
She shook her head. “There was a girl with him. She looked like a prostitute. I’d seen her with him before.”
“Your height, your build, same color hair?” I said.
She nodded. “She was an inch or two shorter, but not so you’d notice unless we were standing side by side. She was Cuban, I think, and her face was very different from mine. But…” She shrugged.
“Go on,” Angie said.
“They took me in the room. Price was stoned on something. Flying and paranoid and raging. They”—she turned in her chair, looked out at the water, and her voice dropped to a whisper again—“did things to me.”
“Both of them?”
She kept her eyes on the water. “What do you think?” Her voice was ragged and thick now. “After, the woman put on my clothes. Sort of to mock me, I guess? They put a bathrobe around me and drove me to the College Hill section of Tampa. You know it?”
We shook our heads.
“It’s like Tampa’s version of the South Bronx. They stripped the bathrobe off me and pushed me out of the car, drove off laughing.” She raised a quaking hand to her lips for a moment. “I…managed to get back. Stole some clothes off a line, hitched a ride back to the Ambassador, but the police were everywhere. And a corpse with the sweatshirt Jay had given me was lying in Price’s room.”
“Why’d Price kill her?” I said.
She shrugged, her eye wet and red again. “I think because she must have wondered why I was going through the ice machine. She put two and two together, and Price didn’t trust her. I don’t know for sure. He was a sick man.”
“Why didn’t you contact Jay?” I said.
“He was gone. After Price. I sat in the shack we had on the beach and waited for him, and the next thing I know he’s in jail, and then I betrayed him.” She clenched her jaw and the tears came in streams.
“Betrayed him?” I said. “How?”
“I didn’t go to the jail. I thought, Jesus, people have probably seen me with Price, maybe even with the dead girl. What good would it do if I went to visit Jay in jail? All it would do is implicate me. I flipped. I lost my mind for a day or two. And then, I thought, the hell with it, I’m going to go get him out of there, have him tell me where his money is so I can post bail.”
“But?”
“But he’d left with you two by that point. By the time I caught up with all of you…” She pulled a pack of Dunhills from her purse, lit one with a slim gold lighter, sucked the air back into her lungs, and exhaled with her head tilted toward the sky. “By the time I reached you, Jay and Mr. Cushing and Graham Clifton were dead. And I couldn’t do anything but stand around and watch.” She shook her head bitterly. “Like a brainless asshole.”
“Even if you had caught up with us in time,” Angie said, “there wouldn’t have been anything you could have done to change what happened.”
“Well, we’ll never know now, will we?” Desiree said with a sad smile.
Angie gave her a sad smile in return. “No, I guess we won’t.”
She had no place to go and no money. Whatever Price had done with the two million after he’d killed the other woman and blown out of the Ambassador may have died with him.
Our interrogation seemed to have worn her out and Angie offered Desiree her suite for the night.
Desiree said, “Just a quick nap, I’ll be fine,” but when we passed through Angie’s suite five minutes later, Desiree was flopped on her stomach, still dressed, atop the bedcovers, as deep in sleep as anyone I’ve ever seen.
We went back into my room, shut the door on Desiree, and the phone rang. It was Devin.
“You still want to know the name of the dead girl?”
“Yeah.”
“Illiana Carmen Rios. A working girl. Last known residence, One-twelve Seventeenth Street Northeast, St. Petersburg.”
“Priors?” I said.
“She took ten or so falls for hooking. On the plus side, she probably won’t have to worry about doing any jail time in the near future.”
“I don’t know,” Angie said as we stood in the bathroom with the shower running. If the room was bugged, now we had to worry about what we said again.
“Don’t know what?” I said as the steam rose in clouds from the tub.
She leaned against the sink. “About her. I mean, every story she told had a fantastic quality to it, didn’t you think?”
I nodded. “But none any less so than most of the stories we’ve heard in this case.”
“Which is what bothers me. Story upon story, layer upon layer, and all of it either complete or partial bullshit since this thing began. And why does she need us?”
“Protection?”
She sighed. “I don’t know. Do you trust her?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t trust anyone except you.”
“Hey, that’s my line.”
“Yeah.” I smiled. “Sorry.”
She waved her hand at me. “Go ahead. Take it. What’s mine is yours.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” she said and turned her face up toward mine. “Really,” she said softly.
“Feeling’s mutual,” I said.
Her hand disappeared in the steam for a moment, and then I felt it on my neck.
“How’s your shoulder?” she said.
“Tender. My hip, too.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said. And then she bent to one knee and tugged up my shirt. When she kissed the skin around the bandage over my hip, her tongue felt electric.
I bent and wrapped my good arm around her waist. I lifted her off the floor, sat her on the sink, and kissed her as her legs curled around the back of mine and her sandals dropped to the floor. For at least five minutes, we barely came up for air. These last few months, I hadn’t just been hungry for her tongue, her lips, her taste—I’d been weak and light-headed from wanting.