Sunset Beach(88)

“Would you like to come up to my place and watch some videos?” Corey asked, waggling his eyebrows.

“Sorry,” Drue told him. “You’re much too nice a guy to make that sound even remotely smutty.”

“Too nice, or too gay?”

She smiled.



* * *



Corey’s condo was on the second floor, with two sets of French doors that afforded sweeping views of the point where Boca Ciega Bay flowed into the Gulf. A pair of worn tufted-leather Chesterfield sofas separated by a contemporary glass and brass coffee table sat atop an antelope-hide rug. The walls were dotted with framed color photographs of vintage neon signs.

“My ex was a fine art photographer,” Corey explained. “I should get rid of these because they remind me of him, but the thing is, I love to look at them.”

“He does beautiful work,” Drue commented.

“Did. As far as I know, he hasn’t picked up a camera in a couple years. His new boo is a rich doctor, so Scott doesn’t have a reason to work. He’s now a proud member of the idle rich.”

Corey gestured toward the open-plan kitchen, which was separated from the living room by a black granite-topped island. “I’m just gonna take a quick shower. If you’re thirsty or hungry, help yourself to anything in the fridge.”

She walked around the living room for a while, staring at the photos. She recognized a couple of the signs as belonging to local landmarks, including the Sunken Gardens on Fourth Street, the Thunderbird Motel, just down Gulf Boulevard in Treasure Island, and the El Cap, a family-owned bar also on Fourth Street.

After a while, she wandered into the kitchen. The contents of Corey’s refrigerator were laughably boring. Four bottles of O’Doul’s non-alcoholic beer, a jar of cashew butter, a head of kale, a bunch of carrots and a cellophane bag full of small brown squares that looked like fudge.

She helped herself to one of the squares. It was chewy and tasted vaguely of dried fruits and nuts and unidentifiable herbs, with an unpleasant aftertaste. Drue spat it into the trash and opened an O’Doul’s, which didn’t taste much better.

Corey emerged from the bedroom area, carrying his laptop. He set it up on the counter and Drue handed him the flash drive.

The screen filled with the black-and-white image of a woman dressed in a uniform smock and jeans, her face partially obscured by the bill of a baseball cap, exiting a room and pushing a laundry cart down the narrow hotel corridor.

“That’s her?” Corey asked, leaning in to look. “Jazmin?”

“Yes,” Drue said. “The time stamp shows that it’s 1:32 A.M. And that’s the problem. Despite her mother’s insistence that she wasn’t working that late, clearly she is working.”

“Did the police talk to anybody who saw her working that night?” he asked.

“Don’t know,” Drue admitted. “Her best friend, Neesa, told me that she and Jazmin took their dinner break together at seven that night, and that’s the last time she saw Jazmin.”

“There’s not a lot to see, is there?” he said. “Just hotel corridor, elevator and the walkway to the laundry room. And of course, the housekeeper pushing that cart. You don’t even really get a look at the girl’s face.”

Drue rewound the video and watched it again from the beginning. She pointed at the shot of the woman entering the hotel room at 11:05 P.M. “See? That’s her. The video is grainy, but you can see her chin. I saw several photos of Jazmin on her Facebook page. She had a very distinctive chin. Kind of pointy, with a little cleft in it. Come to think of it, Aliyah has the same cleft.”

The video progressed, and Drue and Corey watched it two more times. “Something keeps bugging me about this thing, but I can’t put my finger on what it is,” Drue said. “I really wish I could watch all the video from that day that shows Jazmin.”

“You’d watch eight hours of housekeepers walking up and down hallways? It’d be like paint drying,” Corey pointed out. “But you know what I notice? Does it strike you as strange that there’s nobody else around in this video clip? I mean, when we were there, that hotel was pretty busy.”

“May is still their busy season,” Drue said. “Jazmin was killed in September. I don’t know what September is like over here, but in Fort Lauderdale, things are totally dead that time of year.”

“Yeah, maybe you’re right,” Corey said.

“Although … Zee’s report said there was a Shriners convention going on then.”

“I didn’t see any fezzes in that clip, did you?”

“They could have all been at a banquet, or partying down at the pool, or staying in a different part of the property,” Drue said. Her stomach rumbled loudly, so she got up and went back to the refrigerator, taking another square from the cellophane bag and popping it into her mouth, grimacing as she chewed.

“What are you eating?” Corey asked.

She shrugged and kept chewing. “Energy bites? You said I could help myself to anything, right?”

Corey fetched the bag and held it up. “These? You ate these? They’re Bitzy’s protein chews.”

Drue paused midchew. “Who’s Bitzy?”

“My Pekingese. Well, Scott’s. I still dog-sit her sometimes.”