He wasn’t sure he could throw her out naked. He wasn’t sure he wanted to.
It hadn’t occurred to him that she was scared of leaving. Chalk it up to arousal and maybe even a certain ego. Before he knew it, she was on her knees before him. Her eyes were pleading.
And Sheila was good at what she did.
They hadn’t wound up in his bed, but right there, on the couch, where they’d played chess. He’d awakened feeling a dull throbbing in his head. Sex. Like eating food with no taste. Breathing in and out because the lungs did so without the commitment of the conscious mind. He didn’t want to hurt Sheila. They’d both been banged up enough. He didn’t want to talk, either.
Hadn’t needed to.
Sheila had gotten right up, grabbed the red dress and walked to the door, pausing long enough only to look out to make sure it was light. “Thanks,” she’d said, not turning back.
“Hey, my pleasure,” he said lightly, hoping to make them both feel better.
Still, she hadn’t looked back. That was when she had said it.
“Help me, Dane.”
“I’m trying to help you, Sheila. You don’t want to listen to me.”
Then, still with her back to him, “You can’t help it that you don’t love me. I don’t expect you to…. I don’t love you, either…Well, as much as anyone, but…I just…”
Then she’d turned for a minute.
“I need help.”
“Sheila, we can get you some help—”
She’d laughed, cutting him off. “A psychologist for my nympho tendencies?” She shook her head. “You don’t understand. And I can’t…explain.” She had stood in his doorway just a moment longer. In the soft pink light of dawn, he thought he saw a brief look of desperation cross her face.
“I look tough, but…I’m afraid.”
“Jesus, Sheila, then you’ve got to change your lifestyle.” His outburst had brought him to his feet. “Quit picking up strangers and going off with them. Settle down with a different goal in mind, rather than striking a blow against men for all women, or whatever it is you think you’re doing.”
A slow smile had crossed her face. “None of you have ever known just what it was like, being me. And…as for my crusade…Oh, Dane! You just don’t know how fucked up men are.”
And then she’d left.
God, she had needed help! He hadn’t seen, hadn’t known, how much.
It was the last time he had seen her.
Alive.
And now…suddenly, even his palms were sweating. What was the killer going to do next to implicate him?
He had to get to the truth.
Andy Latham lived on the Gulf side of the key.
It was something that had always pleased Kelsey, although she wasn’t sure exactly why. Key Largo wasn’t big enough for her to feel any advantage of distance just because he lived on the other side of US1. But she had never liked Andy Latham, and during all the years when they had been growing up, Sheila had hated her stepfather.
He fished for a living, as many people in Key Largo did. He lived off the main road on a little piece of property that tenaciously clung to the ability to be called land, off a small street that had once been little more than mangrove swamp but had been turned into viable land with fill from the dredging for a nearby hotel harbor that had been built in the late fifties.
It wasn’t more than a ten-minute drive from the duplex to Andy Latham’s house. Once upon a time it had been a pretty decent structure. Back in the fifties, contractors had known the full vengeance of storms. The home had been built well out of concrete block and stucco. It was a small house, two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room and an open back porch that led straight to the dock and Andy’s fishing boat. Kelsey knew the house fairly well because Sheila had lived in it until she had turned seventeen, when she had gotten work at a now defunct seafood restaurant. She had never asked to stay with any of her friends but first had taken a little room at the home of the restaurant owner, then gotten her own apartment on the day she turned eighteen. Kelsey could remember her folks talking about Sheila, saying that they should take her in. But there had been a hesitance in their wanting to do the good deed, and since Sheila had pointedly told Kelsey she wanted to be entirely on her own, she hadn’t pushed the matter.
She wondered now if things might have been different if she had.
Even as she turned off the main road and headed southwest down the poorly kept county road that led to the few scattered houses on the street, the sun seemed to take a sharp drop toward the horizon. There were still some pinks and grays in the sky, which was good, since Latham had no outside lights on, and the front yard was dangerously overgrown with shrubbery and weeds.
So much for it being daylight.
Kelsey couldn’t quite get her little Volvo into the drive, so she parked on the heavily rutted street. Getting out of the car, she wished she had changed into jeans. Twigs and high grass teased her legs as she made her way to the excuse for a front walk, and she was certain that every creepy crawly thing in the brush was making a beeline for her bare legs.
At the door, she knocked, looking at the sky. She reminded herself that she wasn’t afraid of Andy Latham, he was just a scuzz.
“Yeah? What do you want?” Latham demanded, throwing open the door.
The strange thing about Andy Latham was that he wasn’t a bad-looking man. He had been younger than Sheila’s mother by about five years when they had married, Kelsey knew. She reckoned that made him about forty-five now. He was tall, with the lean strength of a man who spent his life occupied in physical labor. When he wasn’t fishing, he worked odd construction jobs and had managed to keep his lean appearance all these years. His face was weathered, like that of many men down here who had spent years outside in the sun. He had keen hazel eyes and a full head of dark hair, only lightly dusted with gray. Tonight, he was dressed decently in jeans that appeared to be both clean and fairly new. He was wearing a polo shirt that also appeared to be clean and even pressed.
“Why, if it isn’t little Kelsey, all grown up,” Latham said before she could speak.
“Hi, Mr. Latham. Yes, it’s Kelsey Cunningham.”
“Come in, come in,” he said, stepping back. Kelsey felt as if he were wearing the look of a spider who had unexpectedly come across a fly already caught it its web.
Looking past him, she could see the interior of the living room. It hadn’t changed much. The old place actually had a coral rock fireplace, and the overstuffed chair in front of it was the same one that had been there as long as Kelsey could remember.
And also just as she had remembered, there were beer cans littering the floor next to it, along with wrappers and leftovers from various fast food chains. Latham had never air-conditioned the place, preferring to leave the
