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Imani glistened with sweat, her damp running shirt and shorts clinging to her toned body. Her only available time to meet with Jack was early Saturday morning, after a two-hour run. She was renting an estate on Star Island, one of the artificial islands dredged up by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1920s and now home to multimillion-dollar estates, just south of the Venetian Islands. They sat poolside in her backyard, alone at a table beneath the shade of an umbrella. Jack had worked late into the night scouring the internet, and he told her what he’d found.
“The Miami-Dade Police Department has a cold-case website,” said Jack. “Tyler McCormick is there. Which means that whoever called me is suggesting that your ex-husband is connected to a murder that was never solved.”
“That’s crazy,” said Imani.
“Is it?” asked Jack.
Imani drank water through a plastic straw. It was an enormous clear plastic jug, an entire day’s supply with hourly milestones marked along the side, along with words of encouragement to ensure proper hydration.Good start! Keep drinking!Don’t give up! Just a little more!It was probably healthy, but it made Jack want to add,Take a pee!
“I’ve said a lot of things about my ex,” said Imani. “But he’s not a murderer.”
“No one said he is. But maybe he knows something.”
“You mean like a cover-up?”
“It doesn’t have to be anything incriminating. It could be just somethingShaky wouldn’t want the world to know about his connection to a young man who was the victim of a brutal murder whose body was put on display in the bay.”
“Connected how?”
“It’s speculation on my part. But I’d like your reaction to one possibility.”
“Sure.”
“There were a few more newspaper articles written about the crime before the victim was identified as Tyler McCormick. The first one reported that there was a message left on the victim’s body. It said ‘goodbye girl.’”
“I thought you said Tyler McCormick was a man.”
“He was. But with a message like ‘goodbye girl’...”
“Maybe gay or trans,” said Imani, following him.
“Which leads me back to Shaky. Any possibility that there’s something he wouldn’t want the world to know about his connection to Tyler McCormick?”
“You do realize that Shaky and I were married at the time this happened, right?”
“All the more reason for him not to want anyone to know.”
Imani drank more water. By Jack’s estimate, only fifty-six more ounces to go!
“Shaky is borderline homophobic,” she said. “There’s no way he was having an affair with a man.”
“I’m just floating the possibility,” said Jack.
“Why?”
“Frankly, we need a silver bullet to make Shaky’s lawsuit go away. I’m nervous about moving forward in front of a trial judge who apparently never got over the fact that Governor Swyteck thought someone else was more deserving of an appointment to the Supreme Court. I have no idea who called to plant this bug in my ear about Tyler McCormick. But if I can get Shaky nervous about questions I might ask him on the witness stand that could connect him to a homicide victim, I might be able to convince his lawyer to drop the case.”
“If your theory is that Shaky is in the closet and trying to hide a relationship he had with another man, I think you’re going down a rabbit hole.”
“Maybe there’s another angle. What else can you tell me about this time period? What was going on in Shaky’s life?”
“Twelve years ago? Some bad shit.”
“Bad in what way?”
“Shaky was CEO of EML Records. They were bleeding money, like everyone else in the industry. This was before the streaming services helped get music piracy under control. People were downloading everything, and there was no end in sight.”
“Did Shaky have an answer?”
