“Are you from the police?” she said.

He shook his head, unable to speak.

She wore a faded T-shirt and jeans, both of which looked like they’d been slept in. Her feet were bare, her sandals on the floor mat of the car, and he found himself worrying that she might cut her feet on the glass or pebbles that littered the city street.

“Are you a private detective, perhaps?”

He nodded.

“A mute private detective?” she said with a small smile.

And he laughed.

22

“My father,” Desiree told Jay two days later, once they’d begun to trust each other, “owns people. That’s what he lives for. He owns businesses and homes and cars and whatever else you can think of, but what he really lives for is the owning of people.”

“I’m starting to figure that out,” Jay said.

“He owned my mother. Literally. She was from Guatemala originally. He went down there in the 1950s to oversee construction of a dam his company was financing, and he bought her from her parents for less than a hundred dollars American. She was fourteen years old.”

“Nice,” Jay said. “Real fucking nice.”

Desiree had holed up in an old fisherman’s shack on Longboat Key, which she’d rented at exorbitant rates, until she could figure out her options. Jay had been sleeping on the couch, and one night he woke to Desiree screaming from a nightmare, and they both left the house for the cool of the beach at three in the morning, both too rattled to sleep.

She wore only a sweatshirt he’d given her, a threadbare blue thing from his undergraduate days with LSU embossed on the front in white letters that had chipped and flaked over the years. She was broke, he’d discovered, afraid to use her credit cards on the chance her father would notice and send someone else to kill her. Jay sat beside her on the cool white sand as the surf roared white out of a wall of darkness, and he found himself staring at her hands clasped under her thighs, at the point where her toes disappeared in the white sand, at the glow from the moon as it threaded through the tangles in her hair.

And for the first time in his life, Jay Becker fell in love.

Desiree turned her head and met his eyes. “You won’t kill me?” she said.

“No. Not a chance.”

“And you don’t want my money?”

“You don’t have any,” Jay said, and they both laughed.

“Everyone I care about dies,” she said.

“I know,” Jay said. “You’ve had some shitty luck.”

She laughed, but it was bitter and fearful. “Or betrays me like Jeff Price.”