“I can see it in your eyes, you’re suspicious that it wasn’t natural. Even if he was very old and dying.”

“Old, sick, what have you, the timing sounds a little too coincidental,” I said. “Just before you could get up there to talk to him.”

“I’m still going up. Maybe they know something up there.”

“Like who Santangelo was in contact with other than you and my husband?”

“Bingo.”

He looked at me expectantly, so I gave him what he was looking for. “But if there’s something in writing…”

Meadows wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Changes everything.” His eyes drifted off like he was calculating something. “Could be a very valuable thing,” he said, and the way he said it made me think of eBay or a large advance on royalties, but Carlo would call that uncharitable. “Now what makes you think there’s something in writing?”

I hesitated, but thinking of what I wanted from him in the way of history on Beaufort, I took Hickock’s letter out of my tote and laid it on the bar, safely away from the condensation on his glass.

Meadows read the letter. Either he was a slow reader or he went over it several times before finally admitting, “I knew it. This is the biggest thing since I got Hickock’s and Smith’s bodies exhumed.”

I nodded. “This could be the biggest thing ever.”

Meadows was smart enough to not ask if he could keep the letter. I asked if I could join him when he went to visit the abbot. We talked a bit more about what he knew, and he corroborated the progression of Hickock and Smith down to Miami, then their stopping for a couple of days in Sarasota around the time the Walkers were killed. Then he finished his drink and we agreed to meet at his office the next day to go over the files he had. Yes, yes, he said, the drug cases, too. He offered to drop me off at my hotel, but I told him I had a rental car and would just as soon have another glass of wine to relax after the long flight.

So he left first. I watched him go out the front door and start to turn left to where I knew he had parked his car. I looked down at the check he had signed, and that was when I heard that old noise of a car backfiring, only this was three cars all backfiring in succession. My head jerked back up to see the rear end of a white car going past the front window, and Meadows thrown backward against the plate glass. He slid down the glass leaving a trail of blood. The window didn’t break because Meadows had stopped the bullets. Must have been small-caliber semiautomatic and the assassin was a good shot.