The Apostle. J. Kerley A.

you know that?”

      “Bermuda’s a dot in the Atlantic. You get to know water. This close to the Bay there’d be a tide effect. Charts might help. I’ll make a few calls.”

      “First we got a date at Missing Persons.”

      The Missing Persons department at MDPD was overseen by Rod Figueroa. We’d had a rocky start a year ago, but he’d overcome some personal demons in the interim and was now a solid cop. Figueroa was tall and well-built, with long blond hair over an attractive but slightly lopsided face, the result of a jet-skiing accident when he was a teenager. He was also openly gay, another difference from last year.

      I laid out our story. All we had on the body was an approximate height since, like Kylie Sandoval, the corpse was charred and covered with burned fabric. Figueroa opened a file and nodded as he flipped through pages.

      “We had a woman in first thing this morning, Carson. Said her twenty-five-year-old daughter was supposed to pick up her kid a bit past four in the a.m.”

      “Four a.m.?”

      “The daughter does night stock at a Publix. When the daughter didn’t show up, Mama called the store. The night manager said the kid, Teresa Mailey, left on schedule. According to the mother, you could set your watch by the daughter.”