“Like that,” I said.

“So what else have we accepted as truth that we might be looking at from the wrong angle?”

“Desiree,” I said.

“What about her?”

“Everything about her.” I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, and looked through the bars of the railing at the bay below, at the three bridges cut across the placid water, each one fracturing and distorting the shafts of moonlight. “What do we know about Desiree?”

“She’s beautiful.”

“Right. How do we know that?”

“Oh, jeez,” she said. “You’re turning Jesuit on me again, aren’t you?”

“Humor me. How do we know Desiree is beautiful?”

“From pictures. From even a short glimpse on the bridge last night.”

“Right. Our knowledge, seen by our own eyes, based on our personal experience and contact with the subject and that one aspect of her. And that’s it.”

“Come again?”

“She’s a beautiful woman. That’s all we know about her, because that’s the only thing we ourselves can testify to about her. Everything else we know about her is hearsay. Her father tells us one thing, but he feels completely different. Doesn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“So is what he originally told us true?”

“About the depression, you mean?”

“About everything. Lurch says she’s a beautiful, wonderful creature. But Lurch works for Trevor, so we can pretty much figure he was full of shit.”

Her eyes were lighting up now. She sat forward. “And Jay, Jay was obviously wrong when he told us she was dead.”

“Exactly.”

“So all his perceptions about her could have been wrong.”

“Or blinded by love or infatuation.”

“Hey,” she said.

“What?”

“If Desiree didn’t die, whose body was that with Jay’s sweatshirt and a shotgun blast to the face?”

I grabbed the phone from the room, brought it out to the balcony, and called Devin Amronklin.

“You know any cops in Clearwater?” I asked him.

“I might know someone who knows someone.”

“Can you see if they’ve ID’d a female shooting victim found in the Ambassador Hotel four days ago?”

“Give me your number.”

I did, and Angie and I turned our seats until they were facing each other.

“Assume Desiree’s not all sweetness and light,” I said.

“Let’s assume even worse,” she said. “Let’s assume she’s her father’s child and the acorn never falls far from the tree. What if she put Price up to the robbery?”

“How’d she know the money was even there?”

“I don’t know. We’ll deal with that one later. So she puts Price up to the robbery…”

“But Price figured after a while, ‘Hey, she’s a bad seed. She’ll screw me over as soon as she gets the chance,’ so he ditches her.”

“And takes the money. But she wanted it back.”

“But didn’t know where he hid it.”

“And Jay comes along.”