You Only Die Twice Read Online Free PDF Page A

Neither appeared linked to a missing woman.
    The detective had visited Tiffany’s too. I imagined him, with his smelly cigar and unpretentious swagger, bombarding the staff with blunt questions. No one recognized the dead woman’s picture. Copies were faxed to other stores, but that was a long shot. She probably didn’t buy the earrings herself.
    â€œShe looked like the kinda broad guys buy presents for.” He sounded wistful.
    I sipped red wine and wondered about his marital status. For as long as we had known each other, he had never mentioned his personal life.
    â€œWant to bet that the call will come tomorrow?”
    â€œFrom your lips to God’s ears, kid.” He raised his glass.
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    Tomorrow came and went. So did the next day and the day after.
    â€œEvery right turn I make is a dead end,” Rychekcomplained at our next strategy session a week later. “It’s like she dropped outa nowhere.” Her fingerprints had come back NIF, Not In File. No criminal record. “It’s like she came to Miami to die,” he said. “Why she hadda do it on my watch, I dunno. What the hell did she have against me?”
    â€œMaybe she’s foreign, a tourist, and the folks back home haven’t missed her yet. What did Wyatt say?”
    Dr. Everett Wyatt, one of the nation’s foremost forensic odontologists, sent one of the nation’s most savage serial killers to Florida’s electric chair by identifying his teeth marks, left in a young victim’s flesh.
    Rychek shrugged. “He says her dental work looks like it was done in the States.”
    Like the jail, the streets, and the court dockets, the morgue was overcrowded. Rychek said the administrator at the medical examiner’s office was talking burial.
    â€œWe don’t come up with answers soon,” the detective said, “they’re gonna plant her in Potter’s Field.”
    The prospect made me order another drink.
    Backhoes dig trenches twice a month and prisoners provide free labor as Dade’s destitute and unclaimed go to their graves in cheap wooden coffins. Stillborn babies sleep forever beside impoverished senior citizens, jail suicides, AIDS victims, and unknown corpses with no names and no one to mourn them. Their graves are marked only by numbers at the county cemetery, otherwise known as Potter’s Field, in the hope that a John, Jane, or Juan Doe will one day be identified by a loved one eager to claim and rebury the body. That rarely happens.
    â€œNo way,” I said.
    â€œRight.” The detective’s jaw squared. “Somebody must miss her.”
    He took it personally. So did I.
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    Rychek left and I wandered back to the beach, contemplating endless horizon and big gray-and-green sky, over a wine-dark sea. Who are you? I asked her. Who wanted you dead?
    She appeared in my dreams that night, trying to answer, eyes alight with desperation, pale lips moving beneath sun-splashed whirls of blue water. I reached out to her, over and over. But the water, like something cunning and alive, kept her just out of my grasp.
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    â€œHow can somebody like you and me just get lost?” I groused to Lottie the next day. She straddled a chair she had pulled up to my desk after deadline for the first edition.
    â€œMaybe she wasn’t like you and me,” she said, thumbing idly through my Tiffany catalog, with its sterling silver baby cups, jewelry, and crystal.
    â€œWell, if she shopped there regularly,” I said, “she wasn’t. But rich people are missed quicker than the rest of us. And there’s a child out there somewhere with no mother. Where the hell are her relatives, neighbors, coworkers, her boss, her best friend? Hell, you’d think her hairdresser would report her missing, if no one else. She looked like high maintenance.”
    â€œDern tootin’. By now, she’s due for a touch-up, a manicure, another bikini wax. The