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“Take a walk?” she said when he rolled down the window.
He looked down the long expanse of the pier. A road to nowhere, ending in the big waters where Tampa Bay let out into the Gulf of Mexico. He looked over at the bridge. Over three hundred people had committed suicide from the Sunshine Skyway.
“A long walk off a short pier?” he said.
She smiled but it was sad. He slipped his phone into his pocket, climbed out of the car and they started to walk, a stiff, humid breeze whipped at them, pushing her hair around wild like snakes on the head of Medusa. She tamed it with an elastic, dug her hands into her pockets.
When they’d passed the last fisherman, she came to a stop, leaned against the concrete railing.
“The last time we got together I upset you,” she said after some awkward moments passed.
He saw himself in her face, in the long nose, and the dark, deep-set eyes, in the angle of her mouth. His sister, half sister. What did it mean?
Alice was my sister, Gemma had said recently, when they talked about the new DNA discovery.But she was a stranger, too. Always to herself, always closed off from us. Left as soon as she could and never came back.
“It wasn’t just you,” he said now to Cat. “I was upset about a lot of things. Piper had left me. I just felt like I had to make a decision—between the past and the present.”
She nodded slowly. “And can they be separated?”
“I think so,” he said. “Maybe.”
She reached into her pocket and pulled out an old photograph—square and creased, faded. Henry slipped his glasses from his jacket pocket, and took the photo from her.
A slim man in a black suit smoked a cigarette, his dark hair slicked back. He leaned against some kind of stone ledge, a city behind him, palm trees dark in the gray background. His eyes were lidded, smile wan. The resemblance was uncanny; Henry could be looking at a picture of himself. The date stamp read November 1980, four years before Henry was born.
“Is this him?”
“Yes.”
“Where did you get the picture?”
“From his sister. She lives in Miami. She popped up a while ago in my relative group. We had lunch.”
“Love connection?”
“Not exactly,” she said. “But she had information about him that she was willing to share. In fact, unlike Marta, she was aching to get it off her chest. Henry, he was a bad man.”
“Bad how?”
“Do you remember the Miami Slayer?”
Henry shook his head.
“In Miami in the ’80s someone was breaking into the homes of single woman, waiting for them to return, then raping, torturing, and killing them. There were seven women in total between the year of 1982 and 1990 when the perpetrator was finally caught.”
Henry didn’t say anything. He wondered how much West could hear, if he was still on the line listening; he’d never ended the call, hoped it had transferred to the phone from the Bluetooth.
The photo in his hand took on a different energy, a kind of darkness emanating from it.
“Our father, Roy Alfaro was tried and convicted, sentenced to death,” said Cat, her voice strained. “He died in prison in a yard fight in 1989 in the Union Correctional Institution waiting for execution. The same prison that held Ted Bundy.”
The information landed like a punch to the gut. Henry felt physically ill, like he had in the bar. He drew in a breath, released it, willed himself to be solid.
“All those years as a young man, hanging around Miami, raping and killing, he was donating his sperm.”
The world was spinning. “Are you sure about this?”
“I’m pretty sure, yeah,” she said. “It’s what his sister told me. And my research confirms it. There’s no DNA evidence stored for him, the technology back then wasn’t what it is today. So we can’t one hundred percent confirm paternity. But his sister was a twenty-five percent match for me. So...”
