“Was he alone?”

She shook her head. “There was a girl with him. She looked like a prostitute. I’d seen her with him before.”

“Your height, your build, same color hair?” I said.

She nodded. “She was an inch or two shorter, but not so you’d notice unless we were standing side by side. She was Cuban, I think, and her face was very different from mine. But…” She shrugged.

“Go on,” Angie said.

“They took me in the room. Price was stoned on something. Flying and paranoid and raging. They”—she turned in her chair, looked out at the water, and her voice dropped to a whisper again—“did things to me.”

“Both of them?”

She kept her eyes on the water. “What do you think?” Her voice was ragged and thick now. “After, the woman put on my clothes. Sort of to mock me, I guess? They put a bathrobe around me and drove me to the College Hill section of Tampa. You know it?”

We shook our heads.

“It’s like Tampa’s version of the South Bronx. They stripped the bathrobe off me and pushed me out of the car, drove off laughing.” She raised a quaking hand to her lips for a moment. “I…managed to get back. Stole some clothes off a line, hitched a ride back to the Ambassador, but the police were everywhere. And a corpse with the sweatshirt Jay had given me was lying in Price’s room.”

“Why’d Price kill her?” I said.

She shrugged, her eye wet and red again. “I think because she must have wondered why I was going through the ice machine. She put two and two together, and Price didn’t trust her. I don’t know for sure. He was a sick man.”

“Why didn’t you contact Jay?” I said.

“He was gone. After Price. I sat in the shack we had on the beach and waited for him, and the next thing I know he’s in jail, and then I betrayed him.” She clenched her jaw and the tears came in streams.

“Betrayed him?” I said. “How?”

“I didn’t go to the jail. I thought, Jesus, people have probably seen me with Price, maybe even with the dead girl. What good would it do if I went to visit Jay in jail? All it would do is implicate me. I flipped. I lost my mind for a day or two. And then, I thought, the hell with it, I’m going to go get him out of there, have him tell me where his money is so I can post bail.”

“But?”