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patrol. I handed it up to the detective bureau.”
    “I didn’t say a word,” I said, holding up my palms in defense. She went quiet.
    The waiter came back. I ordered coffee and stared up into the canopy of the banyan, following the branches down into the thick mass of tangled roots that formed the trunk.
    “So what has changed?” I asked.
    “They started turning up dead.”
    “The rape victims?”
    “The users, the hookers, then just women in the neighborhood.”
    “But not older women?”
    “No.”
    The coffee came and she knew enough about my habit to wait until I’d taken two long swallows.
    “So that’s their more serious problem? They might have a serial guy out there?” I said.
    “We’re working the possibility.”
    Richards declined dessert.
    “So when can I get an inside tour?” I asked, taking a chance.
    “You’re awfully pushy for an ex-cop who’s left the job behind him, Max.”
    “Consider it a favor for Billy.”
    She looked into my face again. A grin pulled at the corners of her mouth.
    “OK. I’ll consider it as such. I’ll have to get a waiver for a ride along, but your name is not exactly unknown. You do remember Chief Hammonds?”
    Hammonds had been in charge of the abduction case. We did not hold a mutual trust.
    “I would never hold either of you responsible if something should happen,” I said.
    A long moment passed. “Tonight then,” she said, catching me off guard. “Meet me at ten in front of the office.”
    She got up, bent to kiss me on the cheek and walked away before the bill came.
    “Thanks for lunch.”
    I watched her from our back table vantage point, heels clicking on the flagstone, never looking back so I could see if there was a smile on her face.

9
    I called Billy’s office. He listened to my description of the meeting with Mary Greenwood and then my lunch with Richards.
    “What’s with you two? Maybe we should get out for a sail again, heh?”
    “No.”
    I refused to let his silence lead me to say more. I waited him out.
    “She have anything to add?”
    I told him about the rapes and murders in the area where his dead women lived.
    “She’s going to give me a tour of the zone late tonight. All right if I wait it out at your place?”
    “I’ll call Murray at the desk and I’ll bring some takeout,” he said and clicked off.
    I took A1A north, through the condo canyons and past blocks of motels and businesses catering to the tourist crowd. On occasion there would be a stretch of thick green only interrupted by iron gates guarding driveways that twisted up to the backs of beachfront mansions. The huge flat paddles of sea grape leaves billowed up next to the road and twenty-foot high fans of white bird-of-paradise twisted in the wake of the cars. I passed a landscaping truck, mowers and string trimmers being loaded in the back by a crew of men. I thought of the whiskey-laced conversation I’d heard between three old dockside fishermen. One night they were betting on how long it would take the prodigious Florida ferns and vines and water plants to sprout through all the asphalt and concrete and reclaim the land if there were no humans here to cut it back.
    “Thirty years and it’d be back to the high tide line,” said one.
    “Hell, fifteen,” said another.
    “No more’n ten.”
    The argument went on but not one of them ventured that it couldn’t be done.
    Billy lived in a new beachfront high-rise. I’d stayed with him there during my first few weeks in South Florida. His penthouse apartment was spacious, decorated in expensive natural wood and hung with collected art. His pride was the curving wall of glass that faced out over the Atlantic. The wide porch was always bathed in fresh salt air. The only sound was the low hum of wind nibbling at the concrete corners and the brush of breakers on the sand below. It was the exact opposite of everything Billy had grown up in.
    I parked my truck in a visitor’s spot out front. Inside the ornate lobby,