The next morning I got up earlier than I wanted to and drove to Jacksonville to visit the Duval County Courthouse. They knew me there, so it didn’t take long to find the records I was looking for. Sheryl Conroy had legally changed her name a little over five years ago. Nothing spectacular -- just a straight change from Sheryl Theresa Conroy to Teresa Conroy, no H, no middle name. If she’d actually been trying to establish a new identity, she’d done a pretty cruddy job. Then, most people don’t really know how to do a good one.

Once I got back to Dayton County I stopped at the judicial annex and had a look at the records there. I located a marriage license for Dave Tanner and Teresa Conroy after about half an hour. It told me precisely nothing that I hadn’t known already. Sooner or later I was going to have to backtrack Sheri’s history, but at the moment I had things I wanted to take care of in the here and now.

I got home and called Dave Tanner. He actually picked up this time, which I took as a good sign.

"What the fuck do you want?" he said.

Okay, maybe not.

"To meet and talk," I said.

"Not really sure I want to talk to you right now, Matt."

"I don’t care what you want, Dave," I said. "But you better start caring about what you need. Right now, you need to talk to me."

There was a long pause. "I suppose you’re right," he finally said. "Where and when?"

"The Palace, around six. Kind of talking we have to do calls for a few drinks."

Tanner actually laughed a bit at that. "You’re not kidding," he said. "Okay, see you at six."

I hung up and got a beer from the fridge. I went to the door and opened it to go out to the deck, and there stood Jonah Cooper with his hand raised to knock. He blinked at me.

"I suppose you’re wondering how I did that," I said.

"Wondering if you’re gonna offer me one of those," he said, nodding at the beer. I nodded and grabbed another and we went out and sat on the deck. We each lit cigarettes and regarded the perfect summer sky.

"What brings you to North Beach?" I said.

"Social call."

"Uh-huh."

Coop took a swallow of beer and looked out at the ocean. "I’d hate to live up here," he said. "Too many potheads and thugs and goddamn hippies on this end of the island. But Jesus Christ, you got yourself a view."

"A thug and a goddamn hippie live right downstairs," I said. "Gonna arrest them?" My downstairs neighbors were Steve, an aging flower child who spent his time smoking pot and whittling driftwood sculptures, and Monster, a six-foot-nine ex-bouncer with a jailhouse tattoo of the words "Fuck you" on his chest. They were among my favorite people.

"Hell no, I’m off duty," Coop said. He drank some more beer and kept looking at the ocean. "Guess you’ve backtracked your girlfriend a bit by now."

"A little. I know she was born Sheryl Conroy and changed her name about five years ago."

"Yeah," Coop said. "Anything else?"

"Not yet."

"So you hadn’t found out she was picked up twice in Duval County for prostitution six, seven years back?"

"No," I said.

"Don’t sound too surprised."

"She had a bunch of coke on her and she picked the local hot-sheets hotel for our meet," I said. "No, a prostitution arrest or two does not surprise me."

"Fair enough," Coop said.

"Ever convicted?"

"Nope. Both times the charges went away. First one wasn’t exactly airtight, and it’s not like she was murdering orphans, so who cares, right? Second time she solicited an undercover cop, which should’ve been pretty solid. Those charges went away, too."

"How?" I asked.

"Cop recanted. On the stand."

I sat up. "The hell you say."

"Yep," Coop said. "Said he’d made the whole thing up. Said she’d offered to fuck him and he’d taken her up on it, which is bad enough, but that no money changed hands. Said he made up the solicitation rap. Got bounced right the hell out of the Jacksonville PD for it, too."

I had a thought. "She wasn’t picked up on some street corner in those arrests, was she?"

"Nope," Coop said. "She was offering, um, the deluxe service at her place of employment."

"Let me guess," I said. "She was a stripper at a place called Kisses. Offering blowjobs in private booths."

Now it was Coop’s turn to sit up straight. "You backtracked her a bit more than you said."

"No. It was just a guess," I said. "Kisses figures in this somehow."

"How?"

I didn’t want to mention Ria just yet, for some reason. "Not sure yet," I said.

Coop grunted. "One of these days you’re gonna play things a little too close to the vest and I’m gonna have to whip your ass a bit," he said.

"That’s a hell of a thing to say to a man when you’re drinking his beer."

"Buy better beer and I’ll be nicer," Coop said. He took a long pull off his bottle and we watched the ocean a bit. Out on the dunes, a golden retriever in a jaunty red bandana was running around, wearing that world-loving grin common to all golden retrievers. He looked pleased with the way his day was turning out. He glanced up at us, barked a short hello, and disappeared behind the dunes.

"You know who owns Kisses, at least on paper, right?" Coop said.

"Not a clue."

"Jack Redmond."

"No shit?"

"No shit, my friend."

I drank some beer. "And that right there is why Sheri’s charges went away," I said.

Coop finished his beer and leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the deck railing. "I expect so," he said.

We watched the ocean some more. Both of us lit fresh cigarettes.

"You don’t happen to own a .32, do you?" Coop asked.

"Nope. Got a .38 and a .45, though. Slugs in Sheri were .32s?"

"I’m assuming so. Slug in the wall was. Slugs in her’ll have to wait for the Jacksonville ME to do the autopsy, but it’s a pretty safe bet they’re the same."

I thought of Sheri’s lithe, beautiful body being sawn open on a cold metal table. I exhaled shakily and put out my smoke, suddenly feeling ill.

"Well, sorry," I said. "No .32 here."

"Damn," Coop said. "I was kinda hopin’ you did it. Now I’m gonna have to keep detecting and shit."

"Got anything but the slugs?"

"You mean like hair and fiber, DNA, all that CSI shit?"

"Yeah."

"My official answer is that you’re a civilian and I’m not commenting on evidence in an ongoing investigation. My unofficial answer is that Dayton County’s a shitty department and you know it."

"What about that mobile crime lab you guys bought last year?"

The News-Herald, Dayton County’s local weekly, had had a field day with the sheriff’s "mobile crime lab" – a van full of crime-scene processing equipment that had set the county back $850,000. The county didn’t have that many murders, and those it had were pretty easily solvable – they were almost exclusively the result of domestic disputes or drug deals that got out of hand. In the year since the sheriff’s department had bought the MCL, they hadn’t used it once.

"The mobile crime lab was out there," Coop said. "But it ain’t worth shit without people who know how to use the equipment. Fuckin’ Jimmy spent so much on the van he don’t have the budget to hire any crime scene techs. So we got his corn-shuckin’ patrol deputies out there processing the scene last night. I got back from takin’ you to talk to Jimmy, one of those motherfuckers was in there smokin’ a cigarette. Another one had used and flushed the goddamn toilet."

I’d been a PI in the county for seven years and a police reporter for four before that, so I knew the caliber of the average Dayton County patrol deputy. Coop was right. Seeing them handle a crime scene was like watching the Three Stooges doing a calculus problem, and not in a funny way. It was like watching the Three Stooges doing a calculus problem during the Shemp years.

"So you’re saying not to expect much from the scene," I said.

"I’m sayin’ those assholes couldn’t find their own cocks if they hired a crack whore and three faggots as trail guides."

"Homophobe."

"That’s me all over. ’Sides, scene’s a motel room, and the management don’t seem real obsessive about cleaning."

"So even if you had competent crime-scene techs, there’s a lot of, um, superfluous DNA lying around."

"That’s about the size of it. You got another one of these?" Coop held up his empty bottle. I took it from him and went back inside and got two more beers from the fridge.

"Gleason did get a few prints," he said when I came back out. "But I got no doubt they’ll all turn out to be yours. Someone wiped the place down."

I nodded and kept my face impassive, but my stomach lurched. It occurred to me for the first time that there was a very real possibility I’d obliterated the prints of Sheri’s real killer as I was trying to eliminate Tanner’s.

"So what end of this thing are you gonna work on?" Coop said as I handed him his second beer.

"Are you implying you need help, Coop?"

"Hell no, not with the full force of the Dayton County Sheriff’s Office backin’ me up. But you ain’t leavin’ this alone anyway."

I nodded and took a pull off my beer. "Why the fuck you stay with this shit department, Coop? You could get hired on in Duval, no sweat. Live with Tommy in Jacksonville, maybe not have to be so, ah, circumspect."

Coop looked out at the sea. "Grew up here," he said. "Like it here. Besides, Jacksonville I’d be at a different stabbing every day. I never got to where I liked lookin’ at dead people. Here I ain’t got to do it so much. Jimmy Sweeting is a dipshit and a redneck and probably got a little more dirt on his hands than I like, but the pace of the work is right. And my momma’s here."

I nodded and took a sip of beer. "She know about Tommy?"

"Yeah. She think the baby Jesus cries for me, but she keeps it to herself. So what end of this thing you gonna work on?"

"Don’t know for sure," I said. "Guess maybe I’ll start with Redmond and work my way forward."

"Matt, I shouldn’t have to remind you of this, but fuckin’ around with Redmond is a good way to end up facedown in the wetlands."

"Hey, hey, hey. He’s a legitimate businessman," I said.

"Yeah," Coop said. "Just make sure when he has you capped, they do it in Duval County. I already got one case to solve."

"Your concern is touching," I said.

Coop grinned. "Told you," he said. "You should buy better beer."

Next Chapter: EIGHT