The checks were more or less transparent. Rent and utilities accounted for more than two grand. Duran’s fees took another big bite. There was forty-seven dollars a month to the cable company, a couple of checks to the vet. Payments to Visa, and checks to Harlow’s (Nikki’s hair salon).

So much for the checks.

The next envelope was from Chevy Chase Bank, which was the issuer of Nikki’s Visa card. Curious, she scanned the transactions, trying to make sense of them—which wasn’t hard. Marvellous Market: $19.37. Safeway: $61.53. America Online: $19.95. Amtrak: $189.60. Blockbuster—

Huh?

The Amtrak entry didn’t say where she’d gone, but subsequent charges made it obvious: Hertz (Orlando): $653.69. La Resort at Longboat Key: $1,084.06. Tommy Bahama’s @ St. Armand’s Circle: $72.91. Moe’s Stone Crab: $18.94. She looked at the dates.

All of the Florida transactions, or what looked like Florida transactions, were in the same time period, October 7 and October 12. About a week or two before Nikki died.

Which made sense. This was when Nikki had taken Jacko to the kennel. Dimly, she remembered Duran telling her that her sister had missed an appointment about a week before her suicide, and that the last time he’d seen her, she had been tan. And not just tan, she said she’d been at the beach. Some beach. A beach whose name her sister didn’t remember, or wouldn’t say.

But there it was: Longboat Key. Which was—where?

Adrienne was excited now, but frustrated, too, because Nikki’s laptop had gone up in smoke with the house in Bethany Beach. If she had a computer, she could look it up—and not just the place, but La Resort, too. Maybe the Mayflower rented laptops—but, no. A phone call to the front desk elicited an apology, and the information that the easiest thing to do would be to go to Kinko’s. There was one just up the street, about two blocks away.

A moonlighting college kid took her credit card, and signed her on to AOL. She put Longboat Key into the Lycos search engine and hit Return. Seconds later, she was looking at an aerial photograph of an eleven-mile long barrier island off the coast of Florida. Switching to a map, she saw that the island was about an hour south of Tampa, and connected to Sarasota by a causeway.

Which raised the question: what was Nikki doing there? Did she have a boyfriend? Maybe, but if she did, you’d think that she’d have mentioned it. What, then? What was important enough to make Nikki put Jacko in a kennel—which Adrienne happened to know her sister thought of as a “dog jail”—and then take a train all the way to Florida. And why a train? She wasn’t afraid to fly.

She tapped her foot. Thought about it.

Oprah. She’d go to Florida to audition for Oprah (“The Devil made me do it!”). But wouldn’t Oprah buy the tickets, and wouldn’t they be plane tickets? And wasn’t Oprah in Chicago, anyway?

What, then?

The truth was there was only one thing that had interested Nikki in the past year, and that was Satanic Abuse. It was all she talked about. So… maybe there’d been a conference of some kind. A conference for “survivors.”

She decided to try Nexis, recalling the Slough, Hawley’s user-ID and password. When the search screen came up, she entered Longboat Key—and satanic and limited the search to the past year. The computer digested the information, and came back with… absolutely nothing. No stories. So she revised the search words, substituting recovered and memory for satanic.

This time, six documents were listed. But five of them turned out to be variations on a story about a conference on Marine Ecology. The conference had been held at the Holiday Inn on Longboat Key over the weekend of October 9. And at that conference, a great deal of time seemed to have been spent discussing how well the manatee population had recovered from its decimation by red tide, and how the memory of that event was still fresh in the minds of marine biologists. The remaining article concerned stolen cars that the Longboat Key police department had recovered with the help of memory chips.

She tried a new search, this time deleting the words memory and recovered. Maybe if she just found out what had been going on at Longboat Key from October 7 to the 12th, she could take it from there. Connect the dots.

Her new search yielded ninety-eight stories. She looked through the KWIK cites, which listed the headline, the name of the newspaper it appeared in, the date, and the byline. Most of the pieces were useless—announcements of Wine Fests, gallery openings, tennis tourneys and golf matches. But there was one story that was different from all the others, and it almost stopped her heart when she saw the headlines:

Now she knew why her sister had taken the train. You can pack a rifle on the train… She pulled down the text of a story published October 11 in the Tampa paper.

Adrienne read on, scanning the stories, galvanized by the words “sniper” and “high-powered rifle.” According to the newspapers, the Jamaican caretaker had not realized that his charge had been shot—until someone screamed, and he saw the blood. “I didn’t hear a thing,” he told police, “or see anyone with a gun.” Neither, it seemed, had anyone else, which led the police to suspect that the killer had used a “suppressor.” Adrienne remembered the fat black tube in the lime-green case under her sister’s bed.

Complicating the investigation was the fact that the caretaker had wheeled Crane from the beach to the pool area before he realized that his charge had been shot. The fact that the victim had been moved made establishing his location at the time of the shooting difficult, which in turn made it impossible to reconstruct with any accuracy the trajectory of the bullet. Because of this, determining the position from which the sniper fired was “nothing but a guessing game,” according to police.

Adrienne read the stories about the shooting, and searched for follow-up articles, hoping against hope that the case had been solved. But, of course, it hadn’t. Two weeks after the murder, the police had no motive, no suspects, no useful witnesses, and no weapon. They were mystified.

As was Adrienne. It seemed obvious that her sister was involved, maybe even responsible—but why?

Sitting back in the plastic chair that she’d been given, she looked up at the fluorescent lights, and stretched. She wasn’t a cop. She didn’t know how to run a murder investigation. But she knew that most investigations were as much about the victim as the perpetrator. Moreover, in this particular case, she had a distinct advantage over the police: that is, she had a good idea who the killer was.