We took the Florida Turnpike and about an hour and a half later, we zigzagged through some side streets until we pulled up in front of a sign that said HOMESTEAD MOBILE HOMES.
"No!" I said as we pulled up at Fabiana"s address. Beyond a rusty mailbox was an obviously deserted double-wide trailer with broken windows.
"I"m the manager. Can I help you?" called a very dark black man beneath the retractable awning of another trailer across the street.
As we stepped up, I saw that he was sitting on a faded wooden grapefruit crate and that he was working a paper or something in his dark, nimble fingers.
"We"re looking for Fabiana Desmarais," I said.
"You cops?" the man said without looking up.
"No, we"re lawyers," I said.
"I"d tell you even if you were cops," the old man said with a yellow grin. "Fabiana and her snooty mother took off in the middle of the night about two years ago. No forwarding address."
"You wouldn"t happen to have her social security number on file?" Charlie said, glancing at the rusted trailer.
"Since she owed me six months" rent, I actually tried all that skip trace stuff. Number they both gave me was fake. Maybe they went back to Haiti like the old battle-ax of a mother kept threatening. Said America was an uncultured cesspool. America! I used to say to her, "How many illegal American immigrants they got paddling shark-infested waters into Haiti on tire rafts last time you checked?" "
"Oh, well. Thanks for your time," Charlie said.
"You know what Fabiana"s mother reminds me of? This," the old man said, holding up the piece of paper he"d been working. It was an origami cobra. He made a hissing sound as he twirled its tail between his fingers.
"Nice," Charlie said. "Thanks again."
"Well, at least we didn"t get bit," Charlie said as we got back into the hot car. "Are you finished now, or do you need some more face time with the origami man?"
I scrubbed at my forehead with my fingers. "We need to speak to Justin again."
"Up in Raiford?" Charlie said. "You were just up there."
"If he doesn"t give us anything, then it"ll be on him," I said.
Chapter 81.
IT WAS COMING ON THREE by the time our chartered Cessna twin-prop arrived in Raiford on Tuesday. All this flying was costing a fortune, but an innocent man"s life was at stake-and I was billing everything to my Global 100 firm. Charlie called and made arrangements with the warden as we were driving past the growing crowd of protesters outside the prison grounds.
Harris looked stunned as Charlie and I met him in the lawyer visiting room.
"Back again so soon?" he said to me.
"Hate to interrupt your reading," I said, tossing him a bag of mini pretzels.
"Hey, thanks. They"re my favorite," he said, actually sounding pleased. He ripped open the bag with his shackled hands, dumped the pretzels onto the interview table, and ate one.
"OK," I said. "I got you something, Justin. Now you have to give us something. We need to speak to Fabiana, but she"s no longer living in Princeton. She left and didn"t leave any forwarding info. Do you have any clue where she might have gone?"
"You kidding me?" he said with his mouth full. "I haven"t spoken to Fabiana since she threw the engagement ring I bought her in my face a decade and a half ago. That b.i.t.c.h wants me dead, and she"s going to get her way. You"re digging a dry hole."
"You know what I"m sick of, Justin?" I said, suddenly smashing one of the pretzels on the table with my fist. "You and your att.i.tude. You don"t want me to try to save your life? That"s not macho, that"s just stupid. Or just come out and say it. Have the guts to say, "I did it! I killed Tara Foster!" "
He gaped at me with his open mouth for a moment before he closed it. "But I didn"t," he said, spitting crumbs.
I held my hand to my ear. "Holy moly! Did I just hear someone actually defend himself?"
"Who"s running the show here, Charlie?" Harris said.
"Isn"t that obvious?" Charlie said, eyeballing me.
"Fine. Try her cousin Maddie," Harris said. "She was the one who actually introduced us."
"Maddie what," I said, thumbing my iPhone.
"Maddie Pelletier," Harris said. "She"s a teacher at the high school in Key West now. She was always pretty cool to me. She even writes sometimes."
I thumbed the phone book app. "I got a Madeline Pelletier on Fogarty Avenue."
"That"s her," Justin said.
I stood. "We have to go, Justin," I said. "But we"ll be back."
"Yeah, for the execution," Harris mumbled.
"No, dumba.s.s," I said, pointing at the barred gate. "To open that door and let your mother hug you again."
Chapter 82.
"HEY, WHO WANTS A BEER BRAT?" Peter yelled, smiling, as he snapped barbecue tongs in front of his smoking grill.
With the festive smell of charring jerk chicken and chorizo sausage, the cries of running children and Neil Diamond playing softly from his backyard speakers, the barbecue seemed more like a birthday party or a christening than an event for the surviving family of serial killer victims.
It was an eclectic group: black, white, brown, rich, poor, even a gay Protestant minister. Death didn"t discriminate. Peter knew that firsthand.
The barbecue was actually one of several events planned for the group this week. Tomorrow, a chartered bus and plane from Miami would take all of them to the governor"s mansion in Tallaha.s.see for a sit-down and some more press coverage, Peter hoped. Then it was over to Raiford on Friday for an all-day camp-out vigil before Harris"s midnight execution. An exhausting schedule for these poor folks but one that he hoped would provide some closure.
Knowing that Jeanine was actually still alive disqualified Peter"s membership in the group, but, hey, who was he to burst everyone"s bubble with a technicality?
Besides, she"d be deader than grunge music once he went back up to New York and hunted her down after the execution.
He was flipping some peppers and onions when the minister formed a prayer circle around the pool.
"In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit," Peter said along with everyone as he took his place between his beaming wife, Vicki, and the minister.
Across from them, his new best friend, Arty Tivolli, the multimillionaire, smiled approvingly.
The closing on the golf course was scheduled for a week after the execution. Peter would be splitting the six percent commission with the broker. In two weeks" time, if all went well, he"d be handed a check for three and a half million dollars.
And it all would go well. He of all people would see to that.
An hour later as everyone was lining up along the seawall in lawn chairs to watch the sun set, Peter"s cell rang.
"Hey, Peter. How"s it going? It"s Brian Cogle from the Boca PD."
"Of course, Bri. What"s up?" Peter said to the crusty old cop. He knew everybody who was anybody in South Florida law enforcement. It was all about the networking.
"Just wanted to let you know that we got a visit from Harris"s mouthpiece, that son of a b.i.t.c.h Charlie Baylor. He was asking about the hairs."
"Those, huh?" Peter said, frowning. Baylor was such an a.s.shole.
"There was a woman with him, too. A lawyer. He got some help."
s.h.i.t, Peter thought. That was all he needed to upset the apple cart. Some eleventh-hour crusade. If Justin Harris was given a stay, who knew how p.i.s.sy Tivolli would get. Now was not the time for the unexpected. Harris needed to be in a pine box by next week.
"Any chance your boy at the lab who squelched the hairs will squeal?" Peter said. "If there"s any friction, I"d be willing to make it worth his while."
"Pete, c"mon. Don"t insult me," Cogle said. "I got it under control. The lab rat is my geeky little brother-in-law. I"m his son"s G.o.dfather. Besides, he"d get canned. Not a chance."
"Good," Peter said. "Like I told you before, Brian, getting rid of them was the right thing. Showing that there was a second person at the crime scene would have complicated the whole case and gotten that son of a b.i.t.c.h off. You did the right thing, brother. I"ll never forget it."
"Don"t even mention it. Had it been my wife, I know you"d do the same for me," Cogle said. "You going up to demonstrate at the execution?"
Behind Peter, the gathered crowd began to ooh and aah as the sun began to descend over the gulf. Peter squinted out at the water as the sky turned the color of a new penny.
"Wouldn"t miss it for the world, Brian," Peter said.
Chapter 83.
WE HAD TO DRIVE UP to Jacksonville to get a direct flight back to Key West, so it was almost nine p.m. by the time we spilled out of a puddle jumper back at the Key West airport.
We had our cabdriver take us directly to Madeline Pelletier"s house on Fogarty Avenue, not far from Key West High School. The front yard of the small stucco house she lived in was strewn with toys.
"Yes?" said the pretty, pet.i.te teenaged black girl who answered the door.
"Can we speak to Maddie Pelletier?" Charlie said.
"Mom," the girl called back into the house. "It"s white people."
"h.e.l.lo," said a not much older version of the girl who"d answered the door a minute later. "I"m Maddie. Can I help you?"
"Hi, Maddie. Sorry to bother you so late. We"re lawyers representing Justin Harris. Could we speak to you?"
"Oh, wow. Poor Justin," she said, shaking her head. "I pray for him. What can I do for you?"
"Well, we actually need to speak to your cousin Fabiana," I said. "But we can"t seem to find her."
"Do you think Fabiana can help Justin?"
"Justin claims that he and Fabiana were on an all-day date at the Miami Seaquarium the day he was accused of killing that girl," Charlie said.
"But Fabiana said it was a lie," Maddie said.
"We know," I said. "But we have some new information and just need to ask her some questions. We really need to speak to her."
"That"s what helped the jury to convict Justin?" Maddie said with a stunned look on her face. "I had no idea. If I didn"t know any better, I"d say her mother is behind this somehow." Maddie shook her head. "I"m not sure what to do. My aunt Isabelle, Fabiana"s mother, is a very old-school Haitian, very suspicious of everything. She stopped speaking to me for years after she found out that I introduced Fabiana to Justin at a bar. She"ll go crazy if she finds out I sent you."
"She won"t find out from us," Charlie said.
"Aunt Isabelle runs a pretty successful Haitian restaurant near South Beach in Miami. It"s called the Rooster"s Perch. She and Fabiana live in Little Haiti. Hold the door. I"ll get the address for you."
Charlie and I stared at each other as we waited.
"Is this what I think it is?" Charlie said. "Are we actually making some progress?"
"Shhh," I said. "Hold your breath. We don"t have the address yet."
Chapter 84.
AFTER AGREEING that neither one of us could physically set foot on another airplane until morning, Charlie and I decided on dinner instead.
"I"ll behave, too. I"ll drink only light rum," Charlie said as our taxi let us out on crowded Duval Street.
We sat in a booth at Jack Flats. The place had an awesome, long, beat-up wooden bar and old black-and-white photographs of cigar factory workers who had populated the island in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Outside the open stall-like doors, Duval was the same as ever. Think a drunken Greenwich Village block party in New York, with flip-flops. Only it was even crazier now that the Independence Celebration was in full swing.
I stared, amazed, at the Yanks-Rays game playing above the crowded bar beside a neon Dolphins helmet. I"d been so busy in the last few crazy days, I"d almost forgotten that there was a sport called baseball. I needed to call Emma as well. I decided I"d text her once I got back to my hotel.