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roll down the apron. The driver spotted Marnie, recognized her, and shook his head. He drove east a half block, then turned north toward Flagler.
    “What the hell was that?” said Marnie. “He’s going to Stock Island. They can’t be taking Gomez away.”
    “Hayes wouldn’t call me to shoot scenery.”
    “They keep that van downtown all the time, on Angela.”
    “So he’s rolling empty,” I said. “He got another call.”
    “More important than the mayor?”
    Set into the bordering wall, seven feet from the street pavement, was an opaque door and an access keypad. I nudged the door and bumped a uniformed officer who’d been posted guard. After a beat or two of posturing, he recognized us. He did a double take on Marnie’s height, waved me in, then held up his hand to stop her. “Identification.”
    “Get fucking real,” said Marnie.
    “Rules,” he said.
    “You want me to run a story about your wife’s beaver shots on the Web?”
    The cop went stone-faced. Marnie barged past him and beelined for Teresa.
    I hung back and scoped the scene. Teresa stood twenty yards away, next to a tall traveler’s palm. She wore the white blouse and navy slacks that she had worn before Sam and I left the house that morning. She had added two cell phones, a notebook, silver bracelets, and silver earrings. At five-ten, her height matched Marnie’s. Her brown hair touched her shoulders. Reporters from the Herald , the News-Barometer , and Solares Hill listened to her speech, took notes. She stood with perfect posture, gazed above their foreheads, and held their attention.
    Two dozen people stood around in clusters. This was Key West behind the scenes, the straight-faced parlays, the spin of island power, the roles that needed to be reshuffled with a major player dead. The mayor’s assistant, a young man I knew only as Jay, chatted with the city manager, a tyrant in her forties. Two city commissioners—a hardware store owner and a retired Navy captain—powwowed with a judge and an Aqueduct Authority honcho. The common uniform among the mourners was dark suits and grief. The fixers were identical to Steve Gomez’s brokenhearted colleagues. An outsider like me couldn’t guess their political intents and agendas. But I knew that adjustments were in the air.
    I scanned the cream-colored house, its pillars, its red tile roof. Then I saw him. Down a walkway, under a portico, Detective Sergeant Dexter Hayes Jr. stood alone, staring at the canal.
    I approached him from behind. “You called?”
    “Why don’t I get the cut-and-dried cases?” He kept his eyes on the canal. “Why can’t this be a simple overdose, sleeping pills, with a plastic bag over his head? Where’s his suicide note, his videotaped explanation?”
    “What’s your worry?” I said. “You’ve got nothing to solve, and you’ve got Teresa Barga. Your efficient press-liaison person will explain to the world why a normal man checks himself out for the long run.”
    “She’s been great,” said Hayes. “I don’t know what you’ve been doing or saying to her, but the past few days she’s been a tornado.”
    “I’ve seen her in motion. I call it a tropical storm.”
    He looked at me sideways, not knowing whether to laugh or disagree. He said, “I don’t want to know.”
    Dexter Hayes had grown up in Key West, but he had worked for the city for only six months. He had come from Boynton Beach SWAT to fill the detective slot vacated when Fred Liska ran for sheriff. Dexter was the only son of “Big Dex” Hayes, a large-sized, low-level manipulator who, for years, had run victimless rackets in Key West’s black section. Big Dex had made no secret of his work. Even a newcomer like me knew his legend within months of arriving on the island. Folks assumed that white men controlled Big Dex’s puppet strings. In the mid-Nineties, Big Dex made cash demands, acted too big for his britches, and his protection blew away. Deputies knocked on his door one