She thought he was being sarcastic with her. There was nastiness at the back of his throat. When he hung up, she pressed the phone to her lips and wondered why she’d lied to him. She did want Justin’s murderer caught. She did know things that no one else knew. Without her, the police would write it off as another drug killing. A cocaine statistic. Everyone would believe that he was something that he wasn’t.

Justin would say: It doesn’t matter, Peach. We all die, we’re all dust. Legacy is a fiction.

But it did matter.

She could tell them something important to help them find the truth. They were searching his apartment, but that wasn’t where the answers were. He had another place, but she didn’t know where it was. A safe house. A hideaway.

Peach looked up the number for the St Petersburg Police Department, and she called, still sitting on the floor. When the receptionist answered, she asked for Detective Curtis Clay. She would talk to him; she would give him what he wanted this time. Everything she knew.

‘One moment, ma’am,’ the woman on the phone told her. And then: ‘What was that name again?’

‘Detective Curtis Clay.’

‘I’m sorry, ma’am, there’s no detective working here by that name. Maybe you have the wrong location. You may want to try Tampa or one of the other Gulf cities.’

‘He said it was St Pete,’ Peach insisted.

‘I’m very sorry, ma’am, we don’t employ a Detective Clay. Would you like me to ask another—’

‘It’s my mistake,’ Peach interrupted sharply. She hung up the phone.

6

Like thousands of other foreclosure homes around the Tampa peninsula, the house on Asbury Place was slowly becoming an eyesore. The previous owners had abandoned the property in April, leaving Florida to move in with family in Salisbury, North Carolina. Grass in the yard had grown six inches high, mixed with weeds that had gone to seed. The fifty-year-old elm tree bending over the roof had dropped thick crooked branches that littered the driveway. Rust stains dripped down the stucco from sagging gutters. The windows were boarded over and spray-painted with graffiti.

For the bank, the house was one more property on a long spreadsheet. It was the fifth house in the same neighborhood to suffer the same fate. No one had time to look after all of them.

The house was two blocks from the placid bay waters.

Two blocks from Diane Fairmont’s walled estate.

That was the crazy democracy of Florida, where million-dollar mansions were next-door neighbors to garbage homes with pickups rusting on the lawn.