The Syndrome

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 sca

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.

Conch House Eat Place

10-08

$21.03

Sarasota Sunglasses

10-09

$226.05

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 ke

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

Adrie

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 co

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 ke

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 I

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. Co

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—a

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.

Longtime resident Calvin F. Crane was shot to death yesterday evening as he sat in his wheelchair on the boardwalk at La Resort, watching the sunset.

According to police, Crane, 82, was killed by a high-powered—and apparently silenced—rifle. The shot, which severed the elderly man’s spine, is believed to have been fired from one of the high-rises overlooking the beach.

Crane was pronounced dead on arrival at Sisters of Mercy Memorial Hospital.

Sources close to the police called the crime a baffling one. “The man was dying of cancer,” the sources said. “Doctors gave him a year to live at the outside.”

Crane’s Jamaican nurse, Leviticus Be

Adrie

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.

Adrie

As was Adrie

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.