Sunset Beach(70)

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Drue asked.

“Zee has a fast and loose relationship with the finer points of the law,” Hernandez said. “But he knows people, so he gets away with stuff.”

“I talked to Lutrisha Smallwood,” Drue said eagerly.

“The gal who found the body? Not exactly the most helpful witness.”

“She was afraid of repercussions from hotel management, I think. She still is. Did you know she’d gone back to work there?”

“That’s news,” Rae said. “I thought she was working in the bakery at Publix.”

“She told me she couldn’t get enough hours there,” Drue said. “She also said that the hotel manager called all the housekeepers into a meeting not long after Jazmin’s murder, to tell them that Yvonne’s lawsuit against the hotel could force the hotel into bankruptcy. Which spooked everybody more than they already were.”

“Those bastards,” Rae said. “They stonewalled our investigation every way they could. I can’t prove they destroyed crime scene evidence before we got there, but I’ve always believed somebody did. What else did Lutrisha tell you?”

“For starters, she admitted that she and Jazmin were closer than she originally let on when she was interviewed by the police.”

“Big surprise,” Rae said.

“She told me that she’d sometimes cover for Jazmin, when she was going on a date. Instead of going home to shower, she’d shower and change in a vacant room at the hotel, which was a firing offense. She said Jazmin’s boyfriend had once worked at the hotel, but left to take a job at another motel. Have you talked to him?”

“Jorge? Yeah. But he had an alibi for the night of the murder. He works at the front desk at the Silver Sands.”

“The big motel on St. Pete Beach?”

“Yeah. It’s a good twenty minutes south of Sunset Beach. His manager vouched for him, said he’s a good guy. And he’s got no police record. I interviewed him myself. He was really torn up about his girlfriend’s death.”

“Does he still work at the Silver Sands?” Drue asked.

“As far as I know, but remember, it’s going on two years now since all this happened.”

“Did Jorge know anything about a coworker sexually harassing Jazmin?”

Rae shook her head, but her eyes were fixed on the baseball diamond, where her son was now shagging balls in left field.

“No. If some dude was bothering her, she didn’t tell him. And before you ask, Gulf Vista’s HR woman denied that Jazmin filed any kind of a complaint. But I got the impression that nobody at that hotel filed any complaints. It wasn’t that kind of corporate culture, if you get my drift.”

“Lutrisha told me that another employee, a guy named Larry Boone, was coming on to her, grabbing her and making lewd comments. She said it ended after she sprayed him in the face with Windex. Did you guys happen to check him out?”

Rae was focused on the baseball field again. “Come on, Dez,” she yelled. “Let’s see some hustle out there.” She turned to Drue. “This is his first game with his new travel team. He needs to make an impression on the coach or else spend the season riding the bench.

“Larry Boone?” she asked, turning back to the subject at hand. “The engineering guy? Yeah, we talked to him. We talked to all the male employees. If I remember right, Boone got off work at eleven that night.”

“The same time Jazmin was supposed to get off,” Drue said. “What did Boone tell you?”

“He lives way up in Hernando County, so he had about an hour commute to get home.”

“Did anybody confirm his whereabouts?”

“At the time, he was separated from his wife, living alone in a double-wide trailer on his brother’s property on the river up there.”

Drue felt a blip of excitement. “So he didn’t have any proof that he was home. He could have been at the hotel.”

“But he’d clocked out. And at the time we didn’t have a witness who could place him there.” A half-smile played across her lips. “That’s good info about Boone. We’ll definitely take another look at him.”

“Lutrisha said the housekeepers all called him Scary Larry,” Drue said. “I looked him up online. He works at an Ace Hardware store up in Brooksville.”

Hernandez scribbled something in pencil on the margins of her scorebook.

“You said you talked to all the male employees who were working that night,” Drue said. “Did you also interview hotel guests?”

“We interviewed as many as we could round up,” Rae said. “It was a real shit show. There’d been a convention of Shriners. Half of ’em were hungover, the other half just wanted to check out and get back to Peoria or wherever the hell they were from. But we never really believed this was a stranger-to-stranger killing anyway.”

“Why’s that?” Drue asked.

“The nature of the crime,” Rae said. “Jazmin wasn’t sexually assaulted, but she was badly beaten around the head and face. That’s not typically a stranger-to-stranger crime. Somebody had some kind of anger issues with her. And remember, she was strangled. We figure the assailant was a man because there aren’t a lot of women who have the strength, or the stomach, to do something that violent.”