And it was. Rita, in her ten-gallon hat, her fishnet stockings red today, bringing us our plates of crawfish and shrimp and Dungeness crab. Rita loved that we were detectives. Wanted to know how many shoot-outs we’d had, how many car chases we’d been on, how many bad guys we’d killed.

She placed our plates on the table and moved the pitcher of beer off the case file to put our plastic utensils somewhere, and the warm wind picked up the folder and the plastic sporks and tossed them to the deck.

“Oh, dear,” she said.

I got up to help her but she was quick. She scooped up the folder and closed it, caught the one stray photo between her thumb and index finger just as it had lifted off the deck and headed over the railing in a gust. She turned to us and smiled, her left leg still up in a half pirouette from when she’d lunged for the photo.

“You missed your calling,” Angie said. “Shortstop for the Yankees.”

“I had a Yankee,” she said, as she looked down at the photo she’d caught. “Wasn’t worth shit in the sack, always talking about—”

“Go on, Rita,” I said. “Don’t be shy.”

“Hey,” she said, her eyes fixed on the photo. “Hey,” she said again.

“What?”

She handed me the folder and the photo and dashed off the dock inside.

I looked at the photo she’d caught.

“What was that all about?” Angie said.

I handed the photo to her.

Rita came running back onto the dock and handed me a newspaper.

It was a copy of the St. Petersburg Times, today’s edition, and she’d folded it back to page 7.

“Look,” she said, breathless. She pointed to an article midway down the page.

The headline read: MAN HELD IN BRADENTON SLAYING.

The man’s name was David Fischer and he was being held for questioning in the stabbing death of an unidentified man found in a motel room in Bradenton. Details in the article were sketchy, but that wasn’t the point. One look at a photo of David Fischer and I knew why Rita had handed it to me.

“Jesus,” Angie said, looking at the photo. “That’s Jay Becker.”

18

To get to Bradenton, we drove 275 south through St. Petersburg and then rode up onto a monstrous bridge called the Sunshine Skyway, which stretched over the Gulf of Mexico and connected the Tampa/St. Petersburg area with the Sarasota/Bradenton landmass.