We shook. He was extremely tall, with broad shoulders, muscular forearms, a mop of curly, dirty-blond hair, and a close-cropped beard of the same hue. I didn’t think cops could grow beards, but maybe the rules were relaxed for detectives here in Wahoo.
“Why don’t we step over here, out of the fray?” He pointed to the worn wooden picnic table near the back door of the warehouse.
We walked in silence and sat opposite each other at the table, which was pockmarked with cigarette burns and carved initials. A lamp above the door had come on, casting a sickly yellow light over us.
He set a worn brown leather portfolio holding a yellow legal pad on the table in front of him, then clicked a pen three times. I waved off a circling mosquito.
“Can you spell your name and give me your contact information? Address and cell phone, please.”
“Here’s my details.” I reached into the pocket of my cargo pants and pulled out a Gator Queen business card. This probably wasn’t the networking Vera had in mind when she told me to hand them out.
I pushed the card toward him and spelled my name.
“You’re a local?” He tilted his head.
“Born and raised in Wahoo. Left for college in Boston and stayed for a while. Just returned in November.”
“What did you do up there?”
“I worked at a zoo. My specialty was reptiles.”
“Reptiles?”
“Yeah, I was the assistant to the assistant director of the Slimy Scaly Spectacular.”
He blinked, and I quickly followed up with, “It was a permanent exhibit at the Boston Zoo. Iguanas, crocodiles, pythons. You get the picture.”
“And now?”
“I’m a gator trapper. And I’m helping my sister with her new romance bookstore in town. It’s opening soon.” I flipped the card over and tapped on it twice.
He shook his head. “Romance bookstore?”
“It’s all romance novels. Most popular genre of fiction. Readers will come from all over. We hope,” I offered warmly, but I was met with silence.
I ran my tongue over my top teeth, wondering if he wanted me to talk more. I decided to keep quiet for once.
“So you and your sister are bookstore owners and in your spare time, you’re...”—he picked up our glossy red business card and turned it over—“Gator Queens?”
He said it like he wasn’t quite sure if I was playing a prank.
“The bookstore’s really her business, and the trapping operation is mine, but we’re planning on helping each other. It’s a family business, the trapping at least. Our dad was known as the Gator King. He was kind of a local celebrity. I wanted to keep his business alive. We grew up catching gators with him. I’m sure you’ve heard of him, Logan Andrews.”
“I haven’t.”
So, he was new in town. I expected him to elaborate, to tell me how long he’d been on the force. But he didn’t.
“Why’d you come back to Wahoo, Maggie? Quite a change from Boston.”
“Yeah, it is. I wanted to be near my sister. We’re twins, and both our parents are gone. Dad passed not long ago. There’s nothing like Florida, you know? I wanted something familiar. The pandemic made my sister and me realize that we were too far apart.”
I didn’t say that I’d taken the biggest risk of my life, walking away from a good job in a smart city to come home to semi-rural, weird Wahoo. I’d taken a chance on starting a new business at the tail end of a global pandemic in a shit economy. Some days, I barely understood the decision myself.
And now that I’d stumbled upon the dead body of my biggest nemesis, I was really rethinking things.
The detective stared at me, and I noticed even in the dim yellow light that his eyes were a piercing, electric blue. Even though I was completely innocent of any crime, I still felt like he was pinning me down and trying to entice me to confess something. Sweat bloomed on the back of my neck.
“Tell me why you were here at this abandoned warehouse, close to dark, by yourself.”