Rona Palacio had been one of several people who called police headquarters the moment she’d seen the drawing of her one-time employee in the newspaper. When Jake arrived, she was eager to talk, distressed to know that such a horrible thing had happened to one of her people—and devoid of answers.
“She was barely here at all,” Rona said, sitting behind her desk, nervously tapping the eraser end of a pencil. “When she came in, she was lovely, bright, vivacious, willing to work all hours, and she seemed a perfect addition to the company. You certainly don’t have to be attractive to sell real estate—I mean, people want someone efficient who can get answers, who knows codes and is capable—but as pretty as she was, with so much energy…well, it didn’t hurt.” Rona Palacio was an attractive woman herself, Jake thought. Middle-aged, with perfectly coifed silver hair, slim and handsomely dressed in designer attire. Appearances definitely counted in her book.
“Apparently,” Rona continued, “she had no family, no close family, anyway—at least that’s what she said when she explained her move to this area. She said she’d been working in the middle of the state. All of her references checked out. She’d come to Miami because she’d some friends down here, and because no matter what was going on in the world, people were going to want to live in Miami. She was here maybe three weeks, and she had just started selling…and then she called in and said the world had changed, she was going in a different direction. I tried to talk to her about it, of course. But that’s all she would say. I never met any of her friends, and I don’t think any of the other agents did, either. I have her last known address in the files, and a list of our people so you can talk to them yourself…but I don’t know what else to give you. I would love to help, what happened must have been so horrible…. If there’s no family, the firm will handle the funeral. Not that she was with us long, but…it seems like the right thing to do.”
“That’s up to you, Ms. Palacio,” he said. “What about her work area?”
“I’ll show you her desk and her computer. But we’ve had other agents working there since she left, of course.”
“Of course. But anything might be helpful.”
Minutes later, he had lists of agents and an address, and had been escorted to Cassie Sewell’s former work station. A friendly young assistant with wide eyes and a definite empathy for the dead woman helped him go through the computer and find the properties she had been representing. With another list in his hands, he knew that the legwork and interviews were now going to be endless. Well, they’d wanted something to go on; now they had it.
He spent much of the morning speaking with Cassie Sewell’s fellow agents. The company wasn’t large, and the people who had worked with her were more than willing to talk to him; unfortunately, they had little to tell him beyond what he had already learned from Rona Palacio. Cassie had been lovely, friendly and yet, in her way, a loner. She had only talked to two of them before she left, telling them what she’d told Rona: that she’d chosen a different life and was leaving the company.
No one had ever seen her with a friend. She hadn’t even spoken about friends, other than saying she had some in the Miami area.
Franklin from the FBI called while he was in the middle of a session with one of the real estate agents, and he excused himself. He had to hand it to Franklin; the man had been through endless files, put agents in the middle of the state to work and already knew a great deal about their victim. The national computer had compared their crime to several others around the country, but nothing matched—other than the cases from five years earlier. He’d discovered that Cassie had worked real estate in Orange County as well, and people there had gotten to know her better than her co-workers in Miami had. She had been friendly and thoughtful, religious, and at one time had considered becoming a nun. She had been greatly liked by those with whom she worked. She had resigned, letting everyone knew she was moving down to Miami because she had made some new friends from the area, and thought that she might have a better opportunity to meet the right kind of man in a church group. However, after running through the parishioner lists of several local Catholic churches, they had so far come up with nothing. He decided to visit a number of priests in person that afternoon, bringing the picture with him.
“Think she got mixed up in something that promised more than Catholicism?” Franklin asked. “Listening to her profile, it seems the obvious conclusion. And since you’re going by the theory that something has been reawakened down here…”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“We’ll get something now that we know who this woman was,” Franklin said.