Sunset Beach(99)

“And who were the guests at these little soirees?”

Drue ticked off the names she’d been given. “Shelnutt, Herman Byars, Boone for sure.”

“How about the hotel manager?” Hernandez asked.

“Jorge didn’t mention him.”

Hernandez sipped her Diet Coke. “Did Jorge say anything about Jazmin’s relationship with those guys?”

“He said she never specifically complained about any of them. But he doesn’t have a high opinion of the management staff at his old place of employment.”

“That makes two of us,” Hernandez said. “How did you manage to track down Neesa? I’ve been wanting to question her again, but she’s been in the wind for nearly two years now.”

“Jorge told me she hangs out at Mister B’s. The country music club in Seminole. Sure enough, one of the bartenders pointed her out to me, and eventually we got to chatting. She got pretty talkative after I started buying the drinks,” Drue said. “And even more so on the drive home.”

She placed her cell phone on the desktop and played back her tape of Neesa’s conversation.

“Interesting,” Hernandez said, when the tape ended. “But totally illegal to tape somebody in this state without their knowledge. Still, you got her to admit to being a petty thief, and whoring herself out to the head of housekeeping to get herself out of trouble.”

“So, what do you think?” Drue asked, secretly pleased with her own sleuthing abilities.

The detective shrugged. “I think it’s probably time to revisit Herman Byars, and probably Brian Shelnutt too.”

“My turn,” Drue said. “Can we talk about that video?”

Rae Hernandez stood and closed the door to the office. “I know I’m gonna regret this,” she said, as she motioned for Drue to join her in front of the computer monitor on her desktop. “One of our tech guys put this together. It’s all footage of Jazmin Mayes on September fifteenth, from the time she arrived at the hotel until the last time she’s seen alive.”

She tapped some keys, and a grainy black-and-white image of a dimly lit parking lot filled the screen. As Drue watched, a cab pulled into view and a woman dressed in a short-sleeved T-shirt and jeans climbed out of the backseat.

“This is at 2:45 P.M. and shows Jazmin arriving late to work, in a cab,” Hernandez commented.

The next sequence, a half hour later, showed Jazmin in what appeared to be a locker room. As she watched, Jazmin spun the dial of a padlock, opened it and placed her pocketbook inside. She donned a uniform smock, then sat on a nearby bench and removed her street shoes before donning a pair of white tennis shoes. As she was finishing up, another woman, dressed in a housekeeping smock, entered the room and began talking to Jazmin. The woman was black, and her hair was worn in a spiraling coronet of cornrows.

Drue squinted at the screen. “Is that Neesa Vincent?”

“Yeah. I thought you just met her.”

“Her hair’s different now,” Drue commented. While the women talked, Jazmin took a cell phone from her pocketbook and stashed it in the pocket of her jeans, then reached inside the locker again and pulled out a white baseball cap.

“Watch this part,” Hernandez commented.

Neesa and Jazmin were engaged in a spirited conversation, with Neesa making wild hand gestures, once even grabbing Jazmin by the collar of her smock. Jazmin appeared agitated too, shaking her head emphatically and poking Neesa in the chest with her forefinger.

“Looks like they were having a pretty serious argument,” Drue said. “Did you ask Neesa about that when you questioned her?”

“We did,” Hernandez said, stopping the video. “She claimed it was just some misunderstanding about scheduling. Said Jazmin had agreed to swap days off with her, and then backed out at the last minute. She also said the two worked things out later that night.”

“Did you believe her?” Drue asked.

“At the time, we had no reason not to,” Hernandez answered.

The detective restarted the video. Jazmin donned her baseball cap and left the room, pushing a housekeeping cart. Neesa, however, lingered. She pulled out her own phone, pausing to light a cigarette, before tucking the lighter in her pocket. The video showed the housekeeper walking toward the locker room door, opening it and waving the smoke outside.

“Wonder who she was calling?” Drue said.

Hernandez cued up the video and Drue watched for another hour as Gulf Vista’s security cameras captured the young housekeeper trundling her cart down narrow hotel hallways, pushing it in and out of rooms, and eventually, at the 7:30 P.M. mark, entering a drab room with vending machines and five or six tables and chairs.

“The break room,” Hernandez said. The video showed Jazmin entering, inserting coins into a soft drink machine and retrieving a drink. Then she sat at a table, alone. She removed her cap, talked on her cell phone, then appeared to be typing something into the phone.

“Did you find Jazmin’s cell phone after she was killed?” Drue asked.

“No.” Hernandez shrugged. “Unfortunately, Jazmin was in the habit of buying cheap burner phones at Walmart, because she couldn’t afford a contract. Probably the killer took that phone and destroyed it. We got Yvonne Howington to try calling it, off and on for the next three days, but there was never an answer.”