Bush walked right by her. Short, suave, confident. He swung his briefcase in his hand, and he marched down the corridor without a sideways glance. He was whistling again. She saw his head bobbing in time to the tune on his lips. His suit looked as lush as silk, and his shoes had a mirror shine. Moments later, the office lights went off again, and she was alone, hugging her knees and staring into nothingness.

She gave him ten minutes to make sure he was gone. She knew she should leave quickly, but before she did, she checked Bush’s office one last time. She unlocked the door. Unlocked the filing cabinet. Opened the drawer.

The file on Justin was gone.

Bush had taken it.

13

Cab parked his Corvette in a gravel driveway outside a white bungalow on the shore of Lake Hamilton, which was a long, slow drive from the Gulf in the center of the state. He climbed from the cold sports car into the afternoon heat. The temperature was in the nineties, and the sky over the lake was cloudless and baby blue. It was Sunday, July 1, and if the weather forecasters were right, Chayla would reach central Florida by Independence Day and surge ashore with sixty-mile-an-hour winds. Right now, the rotating storm, which looked like the Milky Way inching through the Caribbean, felt a long way off.

He wore a dark navy suit and burgundy-framed Gucci sunglasses. He’d polished his leather shoes that morning, and though the shine never lasted more than a day, Cab liked to keep them that way. Standing in the hot sun, with his hands in his pockets, he felt sweat gathering on his skin like a glaze brushed on St Louis ribs.

The house where Rufus Twill lived was old and unkempt. Spanish moss dripped from the trees and made decaying brown piles on the roof. The aluminum siding was crusted with dirt. Dead flowers drooped from clay pots dangling from the gutters. Twill, who’d spent twenty years as a reporter for an Orlando newspaper, was living on Social Security disability income now. He lived alone. Never married.

Cab rang the doorbell, and when no one answered he removed his sunglasses and peered through the oval window in the house’s red front door. He could see through the small living room to the patio windows looking out on the lake, but he didn’t see anyone inside. He wandered to the rear of the house, where a wide lawn, with overgrown grass and weeds, sloped toward the water. He saw a rickety dock with a new, brightly painted airboat tied to one of the posts. Twill lived on the southeast shore of the kidney-shaped lake, and Cab could see trees and thick marshes lining the far banks. He walked out to the dock and picked his way to the platform over the dirty, shallow water. Overhead, a bald eagle floated on the air in graceful circles.