The Bone House - Brian Freeman [28]
'Were there any arguments?'
'Between Glory and Tresa? No.'
'How about between you and Glory?'
Troy flushed. 'Just on Saturday. Glory was really pissy with me. I don't know why. That's one of the reasons I left her at the pool. She'd been giving me shit all day over the stupidest things.'
'Did something happen?'
'No, that's the thing. We'd been having a great week.'
'When did it start?' Cab asked. 'I told you, it was Saturday.' 'Not Friday night?'
Troy stopped. He chewed his fingers again. 'Well, that night she went to see Tresa dance, and I stayed back at the room watching basketball. Glory came back around ten thirty.'
'How did she seem?'
'She was quiet,' Troy said.
'Upset? Angry?'
'I'm not really sure,' Troy admitted. 'I was watching the game. I know I should have paid more attention, but I didn't. I found out the next morning that Tresa hadn't done well in the dance competition, and I figured Glory was just disappointed for her.'
'What did Glory do when she came back to the room?'
'She took a shower. I remember thinking she was in there a long time.'
'Then what?'
'She came out and sat down next to me. She had a towel on, and I thought maybe she wanted to have sex, but when I tried to kiss her, she pushed me away. I asked what was wrong.'
'What did she say?' Cab asked.
'She said it was nothing.'
'That's all?'
'She told me that she saw someone she knew.' Troy blinked nervously, as if he realized he'd forgotten to share something important.
'Someone she knew?' Cab leaned forward. 'Who?'
'She didn't say.'
'Did you ask?'
'Yeah, but she didn't answer me. She didn't make it sound like it was a big deal. She just said she was going to bed.'
'Did you ask her about it the next day?'
'No, she didn't say anything more about it.'
Cab laid this nugget of information down in his head and stared at it. Someone she knew?
Not a stranger. Someone who sent her running through the dark corridor of the hotel in tears, nearly colliding with the hotel bartender, Ronnie Trask. And the next night Glory wound up dead on the beach.
It still could have been a random assault. Boy meets girl, boy rapes girl, boy kills girl. Sometimes it happened that way, but Cab was beginning to wonder if Glory's death involved a more personal motive.
'Did you see anyone you knew during the week?' he asked. 'Anyone that Glory would have known?'
Troy shook his head. 'Nobody,' he said. 'Nobody except Mark Bradley.'
* * *
Chapter Ten
Cab found a bag of organic plantain chips in the drawer of his desk. He ate them one at a time as he reviewed the interview notes gathered by the police with guests at the hotel throughout the day. He also reviewed the crime scene photos, and as he studied the body and imagined how Glory Fischer had ended up in the surf, topless, strangled, he found his memory going back to Vivian Frost.
The girl he'd asked to marry him. The girl who had said yes.
It wasn't a big leap from Glory to Vivian, not that they looked alike or had anything in common about their lives. What they shared was the similarity of their deaths.
Glory, a dead body on a beach in Florida. Vivian, a dead body on a beach north of Barcelona.
A dozen years later, he could still picture her face, vivid both in life and death. He'd always assumed that the memory would fade, but it didn't work out that way, no matter how much he tried to outrun her. She followed him as he moved from place to place and job to job. Whenever he felt the urge to let down his guard, Vivian was there, reminding him that trust was a dangerous thing. Lala and the other women in his life since then had paid the price.
That was another reason he hated beach bodies. They came with a lot of baggage.
Vivian Frost. His mother had warned him that he was falling too hard and too fast. Tarla Bolton was a Hollywood actress, which meant by definition that everyone was trying to screw her. She'd tried to protect her