“Was she dressed in her pajamas or regular clothes?”

“Regular clothes.”

“So the probability was she died the night before. She hadn’t been to bed.”

Cookie nodded. “That makes sense.”

“Over the last few days leading up to my aunt’s death, did she talk to you about anything she was concerned about?”

“Like what?” Cookie asked, looking curious.

“Anything out of the ordinary. Did she mention a person? An event? Something she’d seen, perhaps at night?”

“No, nothing like that. Was she worried about something?”

“Yeah, I think she was,” said Puller. “And it looks like she might have had good reason to be.”

CHAPTER

18

PULLER SAT IN HIS RENTAL and called the medical examiner, Louise Timmins, and after that the attorney, Grif Mason. Timmins was a practicing physician busy with patients until six that evening. Mason was out of the office at a meeting. Puller arranged to meet Timmins at seven at a nearby café and he left a message with Mason’s office to call him back when he returned.

He called Jerry, the driver, who confirmed what Cookie had already told him but added, “She looked tired, and worried about something.”

Puller thanked him, clicked off, and thought back to Cookie’s commentary. Upper arms stiff, hands normal. Rigor started in the upper extremities before moving outward. Then it went away in the reverse order. She had not been dead long enough for the process to start reversing.

Puller thought through the possible timetable. She had mailed a letter at six p.m. and her body was found at eleven a.m. the next day. Puller didn’t think she had died the moment she had returned from the mailbox but probably later that evening. So stiff upper arms told Puller that rigor was just beginning on his aunt’s body. That meant that when Cookie found her she had been dead probably about twelve to fourteen hours. That number could be skewed by the Florida heat and humidity, which would speed up a body’s decomposition, but it at least gave Puller a range to work with. If Cookie found her shortly after eleven her death might have occurred around ten the previous night, give or take. Or about four hours after she mailed the letter.

Puller checked his watch. It was past three in the afternoon and he didn’t yet have a place to stay. Now it was time to find a bed.

Right as he put the car in gear he spotted it. A vehicle parked at the curb four car lengths down from him and on the other side. It was a tan Chrysler sedan, Florida plates that began ZAT. He couldn’t see the rest because the plate was dirty. Perhaps intentionally so, he thought. The reason this was significant was that Puller had seen this very same car parked across the street from the funeral home.

He eased the Corvette from the curb and slowly drove off. He checked his rearview mirror. The tan Chrysler started up and pulled out.

Okay, that was progress. Someone was interested in him. He took out his phone and snapped a picture of the Chrysler’s reflection in his rearview mirror. There looked to be two people inside, but the sun’s glare made it difficult to see much detail.

He drove up and down the main strip right off the water but easily gauged that all of these places would be far beyond his budget. He began driving off water, block by block. He checked prices at the second and third blocks and found them to be so high he wondered how anybody could afford the places on the water.

He finally got on his cell phone and did a search of lodgings in the area by price. On the fifth block from the water was one that landed in his sweet spot, a residence inn called the Sierra, where one could rent by the day or week. Eighty bucks a night, breakfast included, or you could get it down to four-fifty for the full seven days paid in advance. Actually it wasn’t all that sweet for a guy whose salary was paid by Uncle Sam, but it was going to have to do.

The three-story building was a block of ragged stucco with an orange terra-cotta roof, which was in as bad shape as the stucco. It was sandwiched between a gas station on one side and a building undergoing renovation on the other. The narrow street it was on had nary a palm tree. What the streets did have in abundance were old cars and trucks, some on cinderblocks, others looking as though they were close to being so. It didn’t seem to Puller that any of the rusted vehicles were from later than the 1980s.

He looked in his rearview for the Chrysler but didn’t see it.

A group of barefoot kids in shorts and no shirts was running up and down the street, kicking a soccer ball with great skill. They all stopped playing and stared when Puller pulled up in front of the Sierra in his Corvette. When he got out, they stared even harder and drew closer.

He grabbed his bag from the passenger seat, shut and beeped the doors locked with his key fob, and strode up to the kids.

One of the boys looked up at him and asked in Spanish if that was his car.

Puller answered in Spanish that it was actually being rented by a friend of his named Uncle Sam.

The boy asked if Uncle Sam was rich.

“Not as rich as he used to be,” answered Puller as he walked toward the Sierra’s little front office.

Puller paid for two nights, got his room key and instructions on where and when breakfast was served. The woman behind the desk told him where he could park his car. She gave him a key card to access the garage.

“I can’t leave it on the street?” said Puller

She was a small Latina with straight dark hair. “You can, but it might not be there in the morning.”

“Right,” said Puller. “I’ll put it in the garage.”

When he got back to the car the gang of boys had surrounded it, touching it and whispering.

“You like cars?” Puller asked them.

They all nodded their heads.

“I’ll let you hear the engine.”

He got in and fired it up and revved the engine. They all jumped back at the sound, looked at each other and started laughing.

Puller drove to the garage area that was on a side street next to the Sierra. He put his key card in an electronic reader and the large metal door rose, revealing a large space beyond. He pulled through and the door automatically closed. He parked the car, exited via a side door of the garage, and walked back to the Sierra.

At the corner he saw one of the boys who had been admiring his car. He had brown curly hair and looked about ten or eleven. Puller noted the skinny, undernourished frame. But he also saw that the boy’s muscles were hard and his features determined. His gaze was wary, but then Puller figured around here one had to be careful.

“You live around here?” asked Puller in English.

The boy nodded. “Sí.” He pointed to his left. “Mi casa.”

“What’s your name?”

“Diego.”

“Okay, Diego, I’m Puller.” They shook hands. “You know Paradise really well?”

Diego nodded. “Very good. I live here all the time.”

“You live with your mom and dad.”

He shook his head. “Mi abuela.”

So his grandmother was raising him, thought Puller.

“You want to earn some money?”

Diego nodded so vigorously that his soft brown curls bounced up and down. “Sí. Me gusta el dinero.”

Puller handed him a five-dollar bill and then took out his cell phone. He showed him the picture of the Chrysler.

“Keep an eye out for this car,” he said. “Don’t go near it, don’t talk to the people in it, don’t let them see you watching, but get the rest of the license plate for me if you can, and what the people inside look like. Entiendes?”

“Sí.”

Puller held out his hand for the boy to shake. He did so. Puller noticed the ring on the boy’s finger. It was silver with a lion’s head engraved on it.