“Had you seen the couple in the boat before?”
“I saw them once having a drink with Boggs up on the top deck.”
“Do you have any idea where they live?”
“No idea at all. You want me to give Boggs a message when he comes back?”
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Stone wrote his cell number on his card. “There’s a hundred in it for you if you’ll call me when he returns—or if you see the couple again.”
“I can always use a hundred,” the woman said, stretching out between the boats to take the card.
Stone and Dino drove back to the Marquesa.
“Evan Keating is … what’s the word?” Dino asked.
“Elusive,” Stone replied.
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12
STO N E , A S E A R L I E R requested, picked up Annika Swenson at a small, pretty conch house on South Street. She was dressed in white—lacy top, linen pants—with a yellow sweater thrown over her shoulders. Stone put her in the car.
“I booked us a table at Louie’s Backyard,” she said. “Straight ahead, I’ll direct you.”
Louie’s turned out to be a large clapboard house on the beach with a big deck out back overlooking the water. They took a table on the deck, ordered mojitos and asked the waitress to call them when their dinner table was ready. The sun was going down.
“The light is beautiful here,” Stone said.
“Always,” Annika replied.
“What brought you to Key West?”
“A job in the ER here. I was a late finisher from med school—
Johns Hopkins—and by the time I finished my internship and residency, I was already thirty-five. I had had enough of cold winters, so when I got the Key West offer I jumped at it.”
“Were you born in this country? I think I detect a slight accent.”
“No. I was born in Stockholm. My parents moved to Miami 5 2
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when I finished college, and I came with them and applied to Johns Hopkins.”
“Do you prefer the United States to Sweden?”
“Yes, I think so. At any rate, I never think about moving back to Sweden. I do miss some of the Swedish attitudes.”
“Attitudes about what?”
“Sex, mainly. Americans have so many hang-ups about sex. Things are simpler in Sweden.”
“I’ve heard that, but I haven’t encountered it.”