Long Shadows (Amos Decker, #7)(65)

“Yes. She was thirty-eight. I know because those are from our honeymoon in Mexico. It was my second marriage and Patty’s first.”

“No kids?” said Decker.

“I had two from my first marriage. Patty didn’t want children and I was fine with that.”

“Do you know anything of her earlier life?” asked White.

“She was from the West Coast originally. She moved to Florida at some point. She was a paralegal for a while and then got the job at the courthouse. She had no family to speak of. Or she never mentioned any.”

Decker picked up one of these photos and brought it over to show White and Andrews.

They both gaped, while Kelly looked confused. He said, “Is her picture important somehow?”

Andrews held the photo of Alice Lancer on his phone next to Kelly’s picture. Now Kelly gaped.

In the photos, the two women looked like nearly identical sisters.

“My God, what the hell does that mean?”

Decker said, “We ran a check on Lancer. We know that she was adopted and her adopted parents were killed in a plane crash. But I think we may know who her biological mother was. Your wife. We’ll have to confirm it with DNA.”

This was the memory that had come back to Decker earlier. It was the reason why Patty Kelly had looked familiar to him when he’d first seen the woman’s picture. It was because she so closely resembled her daughter, Alice, even as an older woman. Now comparing the women’s images at around the same age, it was clear they were probably related.

“What in the hell is going on?” exclaimed Kelly.

“Your wife and Alice Lancer and Alan Draymont, the man she said was asking about directions, were apparently involved in something together,” said Decker. “Lancer and Draymont are dead. They were killed at different times but in the exact same way and left in the exact same spot. But before all that happened Lancer, or someone acting for her, sent your wife a text message telling her to run. And she did.”

The entire time Decker was talking Kelly seemed to be growing smaller and smaller until the couch threatened to swallow him.

“D-dead?”

“If your wife wanted to hide out somewhere, where would she go?” asked White.

Kelly gummed his lips and looked hopelessly confused. “I…I don’t know. I mean, I never thought she would have to hide from anything.”

“Okay, let me recalibrate the question,” said White. “Where would she go to get away from things? Meditate? Chill?”

“We have a little beach cottage in Key Largo. I inherited it from my parents. I call it a cottage but it’s really just a fishing shack. If I fixed it up I could probably get some good money for it, but I never got around to doing that. I haven’t been there in a couple years, but Patty loved it. She could really get away from it all there, she said. And she loved the movie. You know, the one with Bogart and Bacall?”

“Yeah, and the murderous gangster played by Edward G. Robinson,” Decker amended. “We’ll need the address, right now.”





Chapter 46



T?HOUGH IT WAS AFTER ELEVEN, they got on the road right away.

“Should we alert the local cops about this?” Andrews asked as they drove off.

Decker shook his head. “No. I don’t want them to spook Kelly into doing something stupid or going even deeper into hiding. Let’s just get there as fast as we can.”

Andrews steered them to I-75 and took it across Florida west to east. Then they turned south on the Florida Turnpike and took it to Route 1.

“Okay, we’re five minutes out,” said Andrews.

Decker looked at his watch. The trip had taken a little over three hours.

“Stop just short of the place,” he said a few minutes later.

They pulled down a narrow lane that paralleled the beach. It was quiet and still, and clouds covered the moon, throwing everything into a grim darkness.

Andrews stopped the car. He said quietly, “It must be that one down there at the end.”

Steve Kelly hadn’t been exaggerating. The homes here really were little more than fishing shacks, some near to falling down, others in little better shape. The tide was coming in and the breakers were noisy.

They got out and started to walk quietly toward the house, keeping off the street.

“There’s her car out front,” said White softly.

It was indeed the SUNNY license plate on the white Camry.

Decker took the front, and White and Andrews went around back. The yard was littered with palm leaves and trash and rotting fish heads. The shacks on either side were dark, and there were no cars in front of them. It seemed the only shack occupied was the Kellys’.

Or was it?

Decker edged up to the front door and peered into the small window to the left of the door. He slipped his gun from its holster and placed his finger near the trigger.

He stepped to the side of the door and knocked.

“FBI, Mrs. Kelly, open the door.”

He could hear movement inside.

“I’ve…I’ve got a gun,” said a woman’s tremulous voice.

“So do we,” said Decker. “I’ll slide my credentials under the door. Take a look at them. We need to talk.”

He did so and a few moments later the door opened, revealing a woman who looked like a decades-older version of Alice Lancer. She had on jeans and a light blue sweater. Her feet were bare. She had a gun in her right hand and Decker’s credentials in her left.