Once the rest of the women were identified, Sylvie could see about spreading around the cost of doing business. Sylvie wanted to keep Tatya happy-the werewolf was a good source as well as a quasi friend-so the discussion lasted longer than Sylvie liked, culminating with Sylvie's writing an IOU for another thousand, payable the next month. Sylvie would be willing to take that financial risk, but her business partner, Alexandra Figueroa-Smith, wouldn't. Five hundred dollars had been half of the fee Sylvie had charged Maria Ruben's husband, but $2500 started eating into rent. Sylvie didn't object on any moral ground-never mind that their agreement only covered Maria Ruben-but finances dictated haggling. Tatya wanted a finder's fee for each woman. Sylvie might have a reputation as a vigilante, but she knew when to leave a crime scene the hell alone. That was the moment Sylvie had called the police. Their ethnicity and ages might match up, but their clothes argued they came from different parts of the city: Maria's casual business wear swimsuit and sarong halter top and skirt demure blouse and khaki skirt and one who reminded Sylvie of her sister-a budding fashion plate. Sylvie swallowed disgust, studied the other three women by the sullen gold of the setting sun. A pink barrette-cheap plastic butterfly-floated free, trailing a long bronze lock of hair belonging to a woman barely into her twenties.Īll of them were young, Maria likely the oldest, and all were Hispanic. Maria's short dark hair stuck out like a frightened puffer fish, showing the shock her slack face couldn't. There were four other dead women, drowned, pushed beneath the duckweed surface of an Everglades lagoon, and left to sway slowly in the dark, stagnant waters. So Sylvie had met Tatya at the scene, called the cops, and split without waiting for them to show, spooked. Finding her body could bring its own resolution to the family and was worth every penny. Dead, but no longer lost, and that was something. Delegation had paid off: Three days later, Maria Ruben was no longer a missing person. When things went wrong, really wrong, she was fifteen miles away from the crime scene, haggling with a werewolf bitch over her finder's fee.įive days ago, Sylvie had asked Tatya to keep an eye out and a nose up for a woman who'd gone missing from Alligator Alley, figuring she could turn Tatya's nightly perambulations through the Everglades to good use. For once, when people started dying, Sylvie Lightner wasn't at ground zero.
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