Metro Girl (Alex Barnaby 1)

I went back to the kitchen and poked around, but I didn’t find anything of interest. No address book. No notes detailing criminal activity. No maps with an orange trip line. I was feeling more comfortable in the apartment. I’d been there for fifteen minutes and nothing bad had happened. No one had rushed up the stairs wielding a gun or a knife. I hadn’t discovered any bloodstains. Probably the apartment was really safe, I told myself. It’s already been searched, right? There’s no reason for the bad guys to come back.

The marina was next up. Bill worked on a corporate boat owned by Calflex. The boat’s name was Flex II, and it sailed out of Miami Beach Marina. I’d gotten a map and a guidebook at the airport. According to the map, I could walk to the marina. I’d be a puddle of sweat if I walked in my present clothes, so I changed into a short pink cotton skirt, white tank top, a

nd white canvas tennis shoes. Okay, so I’m a bleached blond and I like pink. Get over it.

I’d looked for a second set of keys while picking through the mess on Bill’s kitchen floor. I wanted to leave my duffel bag in the apartment when I went to the marina. I hoped the front door could still be locked. And if I could get it to lock I’d need a key to get back in.

Normally, people keep extra keys on hooks in the kitchen or by the door. Or they were kept in kitchen or bedroom drawers with a collection of odds-and-ends junk. Or, if you were frequently hung over and tended to lock yourself out in your underwear when you stepped off the stoop to retrieve your morning paper, you might hide the keys outside.

I slipped my purse over my shoulder and went downstairs, carefully leaving the door open behind me. At home we kept our emergency keys in fake dog poop. My father thinks fake dog poop is hilarious. Tells everyone. Half of Baltimore knows to look for fake dog poop if they want to burgle our house.

I snooped under an overgrown bush to the right of the front stoop and bingo. Fake dog poop. I removed the keys from inside the pile of poop. A house key and a car key. I tried the house key, and it fit Bill’s front door. I locked up and followed the path to the sidewalk. I pressed the panic button on the remote gizmo attached to the car key, hoping to find Bill’s car among the cars parked there. Nothing happened. None of the parked cars responded. I had no idea what Bill drove. No logo on the key. I aimed the remote toward the other end of the street and didn’t get a hit there either.

I set off on foot and found the marina four blocks later. It was hidden behind a strip of condos and commercial real estate, barely visible from the road. I crossed a parking lot, aiming the remote around the lot as I walked. None of the cars beeped or flashed their lights. I crossed a small median of grass and flowers and stepped onto a wide concrete sidewalk that ran the length of the marina. Palm trees lined both sides of the walkway. Very neat. Very pretty. Wood docks with slips poked into the channel. There were maybe ten docks in all, and most of the slips on those docks were filled. Powerboats at one end. Sailboats at the other end.

The huge cranes that serviced container ships off-loading at the Port of Miami were visible directly across the channel. Because I’d studied the map, I knew Fisher Island sat offshore, at the mouth of the harbor. From where I stood I could see the clusters of white stucco high-rise condos on Fisher. The orange Spanish tile roofs sparkled in the sunlight, the ground floors were obscured by palms and assorted Florida greenery.

There were white metal gates at the entrance to each of the marina docks. The signs on the gates read NO ROLLERBLADING, SKATEBOARDING, BICYCLE RIDING, FISHING, OR SWIMMING. OWNERS AND GUESTS ONLY.

A small round two-story structure perched at the end of one of the docks. The building had good visibility from the second floor, with green awnings shading large windows. The sign on the gate for that dock told me this was Pier E, the dockmaster’s office. The gate was closed, and yellow crime scene tape cordoned off an area around the dockmaster’s building. A couple cops stood flat-footed at the end of the dock. A crime scene police van was parked on the concrete sidewalk in front of the white metal gate.

Ordinarily this sort of thing would generate morbid curiosity in me. Today, the crime scene tape at the dockmaster’s office made me uneasy. I was looking for my missing brother, last heard from on board a boat.

I watched a guy leave the dockmaster’s office and walk toward the gate. He was midthirties, dressed in khakis and a blue button-down shirt with sleeves rolled. He was carrying something that looked like a toolbox, and I guessed he belonged to the crime scene van. He pushed through the closed gate and our eyes made contact. Then his eyes dropped to my chest and my short pink skirt.

Thanks to my Miracle Bra there was an inch of cleavage peeking out from the scoop neck of my tank top, encouraging the plainclothes cop guy to stop and chat.

“What’s going on out there?” I asked him.

“Homicide,” he said. “Happened Monday night. Actually around three AM on Tuesday. I’m surprised you didn’t see it in the paper. It was splashed all over the front page this morning.”

“I never read the paper. It’s too depressing. War, famine, homicides.”

He looked like he was trying hard not to grimace.

“Who was killed?” I asked.

“A security guard working the night shift.”

Thank God, not Bill. “I’m looking for the Calflex boat,” I said. “I don’t suppose you’d know where it is?”

His gaze shifted to the water and focused one dock down. “Everyone knows the Calflex boat,” he said. “It’s the one at the end of the pier with the helicopter on deck.”

That was the boat Bill was working? It was the largest boat at the marina. It was gleaming white and had two full decks above water. The top deck held a little blue-and-white helicopter.

I thanked the cop guy and headed for Flex II. I ignored the gate and the sign that said owners and guests, and I walked out onto the wood-planked pier. A guy was standing two slips down from Flex II, hands on hips, looking royally pissed off, staring into an empty slip. He was wearing khaki shorts and a ratty, faded blue T-shirt. He had a nice body. Muscular without being chunky. My age. His hair was sun-bleached blond and a month overdue for a cut. His eyes were hidden behind dark sunglasses. He turned when I approached and lowered his glasses to better see me.

I grew up in a garage in the company of men obsessed with cars. I raced stocks for two years. And I regularly sat through family dinners where the entire conversation consisted of NASCAR statistics. So I recognized Mr. Sun-bleached Blond. He was Sam Hooker. The guy Bill had said could kiss his exhaust pipe. Sam Hooker drove NASCAR. He’d won twice at Daytona. And I guess he’d won a bunch of other races, too, but I didn’t pay close attention to NASCAR anymore. Mostly what I knew about Sam Hooker I knew from the dinner table conversation. He was a good ol’ boy from Texas. A man’s man. A ladies’ man. A damn good driver. And a jerk. In other words, according to my family, Sam Hooker was typical NASCAR. And my family loved him. Except for Bill, apparently.

I wasn’t surprised to find that Bill knew Hooker. Bill was the kind of guy who eventually knew everybody. I was surprised to find that they weren’t getting along. Wild Bill and Happy Hour Hooker were cut from the same cloth.

The closer I got to Flex II, the more impressive it became. It dominated the pier. There were two other boats that came close to the Flex in size, but none could match it for beauty of line. And Flex II was the only one with a helicopter. Next time I had a billion dollars to throw away I was going to get a boat like Flex. And of course it would have a helicopter. I wouldn’t ride in the helicopter. The very thought scared the bejesus out of me. Still, I’d have it because it looked so darned good sitting there on the top deck.

There was a small battery-operated truck at the end of the pier, and people were carting produce and boxes of food off the truck and onto the boat. Most of the navy blue and white–uniformed crew was young. An older man, also in navy blue and white, stood to the side, watching the worker bees.

I approached the older man and introduced myself. I’m not sure why, but I decided right off that I’d fib a little.

“I’m looking for my brother, Bill Barnaby,” I said. “I believe he works on this boat.”