“After she died, when he got back from the hospital, I heard him talking with Julian and Graham. He was enraged that the three killers had been arrested by the police, instead of dealt with. The best thing that ever happened to those three kids was that they got caught with the gun on them and confessed. Otherwise, my father would have hired a top lawyer to get them off, bought a judge or two, and then had them tortured and killed as soon as they hit the street.” She chewed her lower lip for a moment. “My father is the most dangerous man alive.”

“We’re starting to hold that opinion ourselves,” I said.

“Who got shot in the Ambassador Hotel?” Angie said.

“I don’t want to talk about that.” She shook her head, then brought her knees up to her chin, placed her feet on the edge of the chair, and hugged her legs.

“You don’t have a choice,” Angie said.

“Oh, God.” She laid her head sideways on her knees for a moment, her eyes closed.

After a minute or so, I said, “Try it another way. What made you go to the hotel? Why did you suddenly think you knew where the money was?”

“Something Jay said.” Her eyes were still closed, her voice a whisper.

“What did Jay say?”

“He said Price’s room was filled with buckets of water.”

“Water.”

She raised her head. “Ice buckets, half filled with ice that had melted. And I remembered the same thing at one of the motels we stayed in on our way down here. Price and me. He kept making trips to the ice machine. Just a little ice each time, never filling the bucket. He said something about liking the ice in his drinks to be as cold as possible. Fresh from the machine. And how the ice at the top was best because hotels never replace the dirty ice and water at the bottom of the machine. They just kept chugging ice in on top of it. I remember knowing he was full of shit, but couldn’t think why, and at the time I was too exhausted to care. I was also starting to get frightened of him. He’d taken the money from me our second night on the road, and wouldn’t tell me where it was. Anyway, when Jay said that thing about the buckets, I started thinking about Price in South Carolina.” She looked at me, gave me her sparkling jade eyes. “It was under the ice.”

“The money?” Angie said.

She nodded. “In a trash bag, laid flat under the ice in the machine on the fifth floor, just outside his room.”

“Ballsy,” I said.

“Not easy to get to, though,” Desiree said. “You have to move all that ice; your arms are pinned in through the small door of the machine. That’s how Price found me when he came back from his friends’ house.”