The Killing Edge (12 page)

They didn’t speak as they started out, but the silence wasn’t uncomfortable. In fact, Chloe was surprised to find herself feeling more comfortable with him than she’d ever felt with a man before. A man she was attracted to, anyway.

Her life had become insular in a lot of ways. She worked with the police, she had her practice. She talked to Jim at work, she had her uncle and her circle of friends, and she modeled now and then.

But she seldom just enjoyed life or going for a drive—or being with a man.

Especially not a man who called to something inside her, who made her want him, want to be with him in a way that was natural and easy.

Which was ridiculous, because nothing was ever easy.

Certainly not wanting him.

They took the turnpike south to US1 at Florida City. Luke turned and grinned at her, pointing out the window. “There’s a Cracker Barrel,” he said.

She laughed. “Actually, I love Cracker Barrel, and I
am
hungry. But we’re so close to the Keys…and the fish tastes so good on Key Largo.”

“Even if it was caught off Miami?”

“
If
it was caught off Miami, which I doubt it was, it still tastes better in Key Largo.”

He nodded and kept driving.

There was construction along the eighteen-mile stretch, so it was slow going. They passed a sign that told them they had reached Lake Surprise, and soon after, another that announced, Crocodile Crossing.

“Have you ever actually seen a crocodile cross here?” Luke asked.

“No, but I did see an alligator trying to cross 1–95 up in Broward once. Honest,” she said.

In another few minutes they finally reached Key Largo, then laughed when they both suggested the same restaurant.

It was mom-and-pop owned, and lovingly operated. The decor was rustic, and prize fish were displayed on the walls. A large deep-sea dive suit was displayed by the front door, and when the menu offered fresh fish, it meant caught that morning. Ordering was an easy affair and an oddly intimate one, considering the fact that they didn’t know each other well. She would get the snapper, he would order the grouper, and they would share.

“You never chose to leave the area,” Luke said after they had been served iced tea, and the waitress—the mom of the mom-and-pop—left them.

“Uncle Leo was already involved with his career, and there was nowhere I really wanted to go. I love home, crazy as it may be,” Chloe told him.

He nodded. “Sounds like staying was the right decision.”

“Except that you seem to think that the massacre was never really solved, right?”

He shrugged. Their grilled fish was already arriving. Once the waitress had gone again, he said, “I don’t know. It’s so difficult to tell now…such a long time has passed. Something just—I don’t know. It was too neat. All tied up.” He hesitated for a second, then said, “I told you, I made Stuckey meet me at the house the other day.”

Chloe said, “What did he think about that?”

“He humored me,” Luke said. “I could still read
‘Death to defilers!’
on the wall. And that…drawing…like a hand.”

Chloe looked down at the table. It was as if someone had snatched her breath away. Even after all this time, the terror of that night could still reach out and touch her.

“You really loved your wife, didn’t you?” she asked softly, trying to get way from her own thoughts.

“Sure. We were just kids, really. I met her soon after I graduated from college. If we were going to have problems, there was never time for it to happen,” he said gruffly. “Yeah, of course I loved her. What ticked me off so badly was that rather than looking at the five murders it turned out Hugo Lenz had committed,
I
came under scrutiny. While I was still trying to deal with the fact that my wife was dead at the age of twenty-three. I couldn’t stop imagining the terror she must have felt, and I couldn’t forget that I hadn’t been there for her. Anyway, I was young, and I was mad, and I was done with playing by rules that didn’t make sense to me anymore. Once upon a time I believed I could change the world. Sometimes now, taking this route, I can
at least change a life for the better. Sometimes I think Stuckey is like what I might have been if I’d continued along that road. And I’m the alter ego he needs.”

“So how long have you been living on your boat on Key Biscayne?” she asked.

“Off and on, seven years or so. When I moved to the States, I headed for New York at first. Big sprawling sea of humanity where you can get lost in the crowd. I went from there to Hawaii, from Hawaii to Los Angeles, and then I came here. I was on the west coast of the state for a bit, then I more or less settled down in the Miami area. Miami’s kind of big and messy, too. But then you’ve got the Keys for diving and fishing and a laid-back life where people still say please and thank-you, own little restaurants like this and don’t think the world will end if something isn’t done in an instant. It’s me, I think. My place. My kind of life.”

Back in the car, she thanked him somewhat awkwardly for lunch, which he had paid for, and offered to pick up dinner, which earned her one of his charming crooked grins, along with a thank-you.

A thirty-minute drive took them through Key Largo and Islamorada and to the turn off to the Coco-lime Resort.

It wasn’t really much of a resort—not compared to the sophisticated places the rich liked to frequent. Coco-lime was rustic and charming. Like the restaurant they had just left, it was family owned and operated. Once it had been a single-story strip motel with fifteen rooms, but a recent two-story addition offered another thirty. Chloe’s favorite room had always been in the old building—the door opened
out to the pool and the cascading waterfall that constantly recycled the pool water. There was a spit of man-made beach to the left of the pool, with a volleyball net, and, to the right and straight ahead, dockage for ten boats. Farther along, mangroves took over, and there were a few pathways where the trapped sediment had formed soft earth. In the small saltwater pools that bordered the paths, tiny fish whipped around with silvery speed. The Coco-lime Resort was something of a best-kept secret. The island, named Coco-belle by the Bryson Agency years before, was a quick boat ride away, yet somehow no one had ever seemed to notice the models who all gathered there, along with an entourage of technical pros, a dozen times a year or more.

But then, people in the Keys tended to be that way, at least in the middle Keys. Privacy was respected.

“So this is the takeoff point?” Luke said.

Chloe grinned. “Yes. I guess you’ve never been here.”

“Nope.”

As they parked the car, Chloe told him, “The place is owned by Ted and Maria Trenton. Ted has a son and two daughters from his first marriage, all in their twenties, and they manage the place and tend bar—when they open the bar, which isn’t always. Maria and Ted have two boys, a two-year-old and a three-year-old, and she’s younger than Ted’s oldest son. She’s Brazilian, and she’s only been in the States about five years, but she has almost no accent at all, and she’s also fluent in Spanish and Italian, as well as her native Portuguese. Myra comes here a lot, actually. She’s friends with the Trentons.”

“So where do we find the Trentons?”

“The main office, of course.”

It was the middle of the week, so there were only a few other cars in the graveled lot. Chloe led him around the pool and over to the new building. The office was on the south side, where Ted and Maria and their toddlers also had an apartment.

Maria answered their knock, and Chloe saw that she was pregnant again. Maria was a petite woman with ink-dark eyes and hair, and a heart-shaped face. “Chloe!” she said, and gave her a hug. “What are you doing here? It’s Tuesday. The shoot isn’t for another two weeks. Almost two weeks. Anyway, not now.”

Chloe gave Maria a hug in return and stepped back. “I drove down with my friend Jack Smith. He’s a designer, and this will be his first time out on Coco-belle. I wanted to show him around before the craziness of the shoot. Congratulations! I see there’s about to be an addition to the family.”

Maria blushed, tousling the heads of the toddlers hiding behind her legs. “A girl, so they say. I’m happy. I love my little boys, and I am fine either way, but…a little girl will be nice. How do you do, Mr. Smith?”

“I’m fine. It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Luke said smoothly.

“Come in, come in,” Maria said. “Are you staying for the night?”

“Unfortunately not. I have to work tomorrow,” Chloe told her.

“So?” Maria said. “Two hours—you are back in downtown Miami. You should stay. We have only three couples
here tonight. The weekend is fully booked, though, thanks be to God. But tonight…Ted can barbecue out by the pool and we can spend some time catching up.”

“We didn’t plan to stay, Maria. We didn’t bring anything with us,” Chloe said.

“You may not know this,” Luke said with a grin, “but there’s all kinds of shopping in the Keys.”

Chloe stared at him, startled, and frowned. What on earth was he thinking? She should insist immediately that they go take a quick look at Coco-belle, then head back to the city, for the sake of her own sanity, if nothing else.

She didn’t want to go back, though. She wanted to spend time. Not so much here, or even with the Trentons. She wanted to spend time with Luke. Even if she got hurt in the end.

She groaned inwardly. He wasn’t the kind of guy she should want, not even for a night. He wasn’t any more capable of a real relationship than she was, and she didn’t want to be a casual “call of nature” in his life. She understood why he kept his distance from her. She just didn’t know if she could do the same.

“We could stay—Maria is right,” Luke told her. “If we leave here at six in the morning, we’ll beat all the traffic. I’ll have you home by eight, and you can change and be in your office by nine.”

He wanted to stay, she thought, and she already knew him well enough to know he never did anything without a reason. Did he think that Maria or Ted would be able to tell them something about the missing Colleen Rodriguez?

Luke hunkered down, facing the toddlers at eye level. “Hello. I’m Jack,” he said.

“Sam, Elijah, say hello to Mr. Smith,” Maria said. The little boys smiled, then ducked farther behind her legs. “You like children?” she asked him.

“Children are little people—they’re just not jaded by the world, that’s all. What’s not to like?” he said.

Maria nodded approvingly at Luke, then said, “Please, Chloe, stay.”

“But Jack really wanted to see Coco-belle,” Chloe protested.

“Bill is here—my husband’s oldest son,” Maria explained to Luke. “He can run you out, and when you get back, I have closets full of toothbrushes and shampoo—we are a resort, after all. I can lend you a bathing suit and a T-shirt to sleep in, and one of the boys will have trunks that Mr. Smith can use.”

Maria sounded so hopeful, but Chloe didn’t think she had much choice anyway.

“That’s wonderful!” Luke said enthusiastically.

“You have your favorite room, Chloe,” Maria coaxed. “And Mr. Smith can stay right next door.”

Chloe smiled and gave in. She knew when she was beaten.

They wouldn’t actually have to leave at six, either. She didn’t really need to be in the office until ten, and her first appointment wasn’t until eleven.

“I’ll call Bill and tell him to get a boat ready,” Maria said.

She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket, placed the call and explained what he needed to do, then snapped her phone closed. “Go on down to the docks. Bill will run you
over. You’ve got an hour or so of daylight left, if you’re scouting for locations, Mr. Smith.”

“It’s Jack, please,” Luke said. “And thank you for your hospitality.”

Chloe glanced over at him, amazed at the way he took on his assumed identity as easily as he might slip into a jacket.

“We’ll barbecue at about eight,” Maria said. Then she hustled the children away, muttering to herself about the evening’s menu.

Chloe led the way down to the dock, shaking her head. “I can’t believe you want to stay here. You might have mentioned it to me before you started pushing the idea.”

“What? It’s no big deal. We’re two hours away from Miami. We didn’t take off in a spaceship or land in a foreign country.”

“That’s not the point,” she said.

He glanced at her, clearly amused. “This is hardly an act of piracy or seduction,” he told her.

No, sadly, she thought. And yet, if he did want her, could she handle it? She was afraid she would care too deeply, because it was so hard for her to become involved at all that once she fell, she knew she would fall hard.

She prayed that she wasn’t blushing.

“That’s not the point, either,” she said.

They were nearing the docks when she saw Bill Trenton. He was twenty-nine, just a few years her senior, hardworking, and married, with a three-year-old, so his son and his half brothers were a perfect age to play together. All Ted’s older children liked their young stepmother, but then again, their mother had passed away when they were young from
a rare form of cancer, and it had taken their father a long time to fall in love again, so they were happy for him.

He gave her a hug, just as Maria had done. “What a surprise!”

“Bill, meet Jack Smith. He designs swimsuits, and he’s going to do a catalogue shoot when Bryson does its calendar.”

“Cool,” Bill said, shaking Jack’s hand. “Nice to meet you. So I hear you want to see Coco-belle. It’s only a short hop over there. We’ll take my little old Donzi down there,” he said, pointing to his speedboat. It was old, but it was still a beautiful boat. A classic.

“Thanks,” Luke told him as they walked down to the boat. Luke hopped aboard easily, but being Luke—even though he undoubtedly knew she was quite capable of stepping aboard on her own—he turned and offered her a hand.

Chloe accepted, chastising herself for being truly pathetic, but the bottom line was that she liked the feel of his hand. The strength of it. The warmth of his living flesh.

“Hey, would it be too much trouble to circle the island before going ashore?” Luke asked, releasing one of the lines.