Cab unfolded the paper. It was a copy of a newspaper article from ten years earlier, featuring a photograph taken at the Bok Sanctuary in the wake of the murders. He saw bodies prone on the dais. Police. Shell-shocked survivors, including his mother, Diane, and Caprice, all of them ten years younger and ten years more innocent.

Someone had written across the photograph in a blood-red marker.

I’m back. Miss me?

3

City of Tampa.

The mural, like an oversized picture postcard, was painted on the brick wall of an ad agency building across the alley between Franklin and Florida Avenues in the northwest corner of downtown. Peach saw it every day when she squeezed her two-tone 1980s-era Thunderbird into spot 52. Each block letter spelling out the city’s name featured a cartoon rendering of a different local tourist attraction. The Sulphur Springs Water Tower. The Plant Museum.

Places she’d never found time to visit.

The window was open, letting in the heavy evening air, making her clothes damp. Peach didn’t mind; she hated the cold and loved the heat, even during the ferocious summer days. She stared at the mural, wondering why she’d never visited the Plant Museum in the years she’d lived here. Justin had told her once that the bronze sculpture of the Spinning Girl inside the museum looked like her, with her hair cut way up her forehead, her far-away eyes, and her breasts as shallow as Florida hills. She figured she should go see the sculpture sometime and see if it spoke to her. Maybe, in another life, she’d been the artist’s model. Peach was a firm believer in reincarnation.

She left the engine running and turned on her radio. She hadn’t felt like listening to music these past two weeks, but she could go for some Train or Bruno Mars or even Adele, although she was pretty much over Adele now. She punched the channel for the satellite pop blend, but instead of her sad songs, she heard some awful, screechy opera in a language that was probably German or Russian, where the words needed a lot of spit.

Justin.

Justin with his Beethoven T-shirts. He’d switched the channels on her radio again, and she was only finding out now. I’m telling you, Peach, there’s not a note of music worth listening to that was written after 1849.

She shut off the radio and got out of the car. Next to her T-Bird, in spot 51, was a ten-year-old silver Mercedes SL convertible. For its age, it was in perfect condition, washed every week, sporty engine purring at eighty miles an hour on the back roads. Her brother Deacon babied it, just the way their older brother Lyle had. She ran the pad of her little finger along the chassis. Smooth. Lyle would have been pleased that the two of them still owned the car.

He’d only owned it for a month before …

Before.