Page 81 of Sunset Beach
“The big motel on St. Pete Beach?”
“Yeah. It’s a good twenty minutes south of Sunset Beach. His manager vouched for him, said he’s a good guy. And he’s got no police record. I interviewed him myself. He was really torn up about his girlfriend’s death.”
“Does he still work at the Silver Sands?” Drue asked.
“As far as I know, but remember, it’s going on two years now since all this happened.”
“Did Jorge know anything about a coworker sexually harassing Jazmin?”
Rae shook her head, but her eyes were fixed on the baseball diamond, where her son was now shagging balls in left field.
“No. If some dude was bothering her, she didn’t tell him. And before you ask, Gulf Vista’s HR woman denied that Jazmin filed any kind of a complaint. But I got the impression that nobody at that hotel filed any complaints. It wasn’t that kind of corporate culture, if you get my drift.”
“Lutrisha told me that another employee, a guy named Larry Boone, was coming on to her, grabbing her and making lewd comments. She said it ended after she sprayed him in the face with Windex. Did you guys happen to check him out?”
Rae was focused on the baseball field again. “Come on, Dez,” she yelled.“Let’s see some hustle out there.” She turned to Drue. “This is his first game with his new travel team. He needs to make an impression on the coach or else spend the season riding the bench.
“Larry Boone?” she asked, turning back to the subject at hand. “The engineering guy? Yeah, we talked to him. We talked to all the male employees. If I remember right, Boone got off work at eleven that night.”
“The same time Jazmin was supposed to get off,” Drue said. “What did Boone tell you?”
“He lives way up in Hernando County, so he had about an hour commute to get home.”
“Did anybody confirm his whereabouts?”
“At the time, he was separated from his wife, living alone in a double-wide trailer on his brother’s property on the river up there.”
Drue felt a blip of excitement. “So he didn’t have any proof that he was home. He could have been at the hotel.”
“But he’d clocked out. And at the time we didn’t have a witness who could place him there.” A half-smile played across her lips. “That’s good info about Boone. We’ll definitely take another look at him.”
“Lutrisha said the housekeepers all called him Scary Larry,” Drue said. “I looked him up online. He works at an Ace Hardware store up in Brooksville.”
Hernandez scribbled something in pencil on the margins of her scorebook.
“You said you talked to all the male employees who were working that night,” Drue said. “Did you also interview hotel guests?”
“We interviewed as many as we could round up,” Rae said. “It was a real shit show. There’d been a convention of Shriners. Half of ’em were hungover, the other half just wanted to check out and get back to Peoria or wherever the hell they were from. But we never really believed this was a stranger-to-stranger killing anyway.”
“Why’s that?” Drue asked.
“The nature of the crime,” Rae said. “Jazmin wasn’t sexually assaulted, but she was badly beaten around the head and face. That’s not typically astranger-to-stranger crime. Somebody had some kind of anger issues with her. And remember, she was strangled. We figure the assailant was a man because there aren’t a lot of women who have the strength, or the stomach, to do something that violent.”
Drue thought that over. “I read Zee’s reports. I thought it was interesting that so many of the employees who worked directly with Jazmin left the hotel not long after she was killed.”
“Lot of turnover there,” Rae agreed. “Head of housekeeping, engineering, the security guard who was first on scene and called the cops. When I asked the hotel manager about it, he said that’s the nature of the hospitality industry.”
“And the manager was never a suspect?” Drue asked.
“Gene Wardlaw? No. He wasn’t even in town. Ironically enough, it turns out he was interviewing for another job at a hotel in Daytona Beach. Which he subsequently took.”
Drue let out a long sigh.
“Yeah. It’s frustrating as hell, not being able to find the guy who did this. Yvonne calls me every Sunday night, like clockwork, asking for updates. I tell you, it haunts me sometimes.”
“It’s haunting me, and I haven’t been working it for the past two years,” Drue admitted. She glanced at the detective, trying to gauge just how sympathetic she might be to her cause.
“I even went over to the hotel and checked out the laundry room where she was killed,” she added.
