“He didn’t seem like a creep when we met,” Tanya said. “He had the most gorgeous eyes, this amazing deep blue, like a mountain lake you just wanted to dive naked into, and long, dark black eyelashes. He reminded me a lot of a young Pierce Brosnan. And oh my God, was he funny. He’d tell these hilarious stories, in that Irish accent of his, and you never knew if they were true or not, but it didn’t matter, because that was Rooney.”

“Where’d you meet him?”

“I don’t really remember,” Tanya said airily. “He was just around. And one day, he asked if he could buy me a drink and I said yes, and the next thing I knew, we were a couple.”

“Did he have a job? Friends? Other people you knew in common?” Letty pressed.

“Yes, he had a job,” Tanya said, clearly pissed off. “God! Do we have to talk about this right now? I came up here to forget about Rooney, and it doesn’t help when you want to interrogate me like I’m on a witness stand or something.”

Looking back on it now, Letty realized, someone—the cops, maybe even Joe DeCurtis—really had interrogated Tanya, and once again, she’d managed to talk her way out of a jam.

For as long as Letty could remember, her sister had gotten into what their mother affectionately termed “youthful scrapes”—shoplifting a tube of mascara from the drugstore, getting kicked out of school for selling diet pills stolen from a friend’s mother, and once “borrowing” an elderly neighbor’s Buick for a weekend-long drunken joyride with her boyfriend that had ended when she’d smashed the car into a telephone pole. But Tanya had always walked away from those youthful misdemeanors by batting her eyelashes and placing the blame solidly on someone else’s shoulders.

What, Letty wondered, was the truth about Tanya and Declan Rooney? The date on her arrest record showed that she’d been right here, at the Murmuring Surf, ripping off old ladies when she claimed to be living in Atlanta and working as a model. Obviously she’d lied. Were they really married?

Once again, she was grateful for Florida’s “sunshine law,” which made public records so readily available. This time, she found what she was looking for on the state’s Bureau of Vital Statistics website. She typed in Tanya’s name and Declan’s name and waited a moment, holding her breath as she waited for results.

She finally exhaled when the red letters appeared on screen. NO RECORD FOUND.

Letty thought about it. This didn’t necessarily mean they weren’t married. Tanya had been using an alias at the time of her arrest, so maybe Declan Rooney had one, too?