Riley ordered a vodka and seven and drained it while standing at the bar, then ordered another and took it over to a table. He wasn't even out of the country yet, and already he had had enough of Barbados and their problems.

He had slept on the plane from Seattle to New York, but there was a delay somewhere, and Riley found himself facing a seven-hour layover in La Guardia. With the time change, his plane hadn't touched down until a little after 10 PM. The next flight to Barbados didn't leave until five in the morning.

Riley had walked through the deserted airport to the gate where his plane would eventually depart. The desk at the gate was abandoned, and a few people had stretched themselves across several airport chairs and fallen into what had to be a very uncomfortable sleep.

The industrial carpet in this wing of the airport was worn bald in places and had stains big enough to be confused for a pattern. The upholstery on almost every chair was ripped in one place or another, and the stale air had the hint of urine.

Riley had backtracked until he found a bar. Sitting at the table, he drained half of his drink and pulled a sheaf of papers from his carry-on and began leafing through the reports on the Barbados crime scenes.

After ten minutes of not really reading any of it, Riley put the papers back into the FedEx envelope and called Dimes.

No answer.

He ordered another $8 drink and drew a crude replica of the sketch he had made that morning. He put X's where each body had been and circled the two that were cops. Below it he wrote "Charles Larry? Missing??" and underlined it.

That was it. That was all he had.

It was going to be a long trip.

***

By the time the flight finally left for Barbados Riley was exhausted, but still couldn't sleep. He was sitting at a window, the seat next to him empty. The aisle seat held a small blonde who was currently more dedicated to her sleep than Riley was. She had her chair reclined, and her head rested on pillow tilted towards Riley; her mouth hung open, and she snored slightly.

Riley watched her for a few seconds. She had a small nose, with a spattering of freckles across it. Her eyelids twitched as she slept. Riley smiled and sifted through the papers, hoping to actually read the reports this time.

Everything in them was handwritten. And not everyone who had written something had great handwriting. Riley was starting to believe that, instead of a photocopy machine, the Barbados Police had scribes dedicated to making copies of documents by hand.

Weekes had said that their killer had a body count of 6, but the police only had five corpses; all with the same MO. The bodies had all been dumped in a sugar canefield. The cause of death was blunt trauma to the head. Based on the shape of the blow and some wood fragments found in the wounds, forensics speculated that a cricket bat was the weapon of choice. All of the women were found naked, and their clothes had never been recovered. None had been sexually assaulted, although two had engaged in sex within their last twenty-four hours. All of the women were tied, one of them post-mortem, usually with their hands and feet behind them. There was no evidence of semen on or around the bodies. A few of the women had been cut; always post-mortem.

And there were postcards.

Weekes had included photocopies of the postcards the killer had left on each of the victims. The quality of the photocopies in the package were so bad that Riley couldn't make out any of the pictures. The report described them as "nothing special." Typical tourist postcards, that also happened to be the killer's way of keeping track of his body count.

The first body to be found with a postcard, and presumably, the third victim, had three vertical slashes on it:

|||

The next card had four, and the next had a slash across all four. The last card showed his body count as six.

The first body found had no postcard, but the same MO. This was either number one or two. Which meant there was likely still a body in a canefield somewhere that hadn't turned up yet.

The woman in the aisle seat started to cough and sat up. Riley looked over at her as she was wiping a small line of drool from the edge of her mouth. She blushed when she saw him looking.

Riley smiled at her and said, "Don't worry about it. You're just lucky I didn't fall asleep, or we'd be wading in drool."

She laughed and moved her hand from her mouth. Glancing down at Riley's papers, she seemed interested in what she saw. Riley hastily shuffled them into a pile and slid them back into his FedEx envelope.

"Sorry, I wasn't trying to be nosy," she explained.

Riley nodded and said, "I know."

"But those pictures, and documents... wow. Are you a cop? Or a writer?" she asked, and when Riley didn't answer, she continued, not in the least embarrassed. "I am fascinated by that kind of stuff. In college, I always wondered if I was in the wrong field. I studied dramatic arts because I was good at it. But I can't get enough of those true crime novels. I often wondered what it would be like..."

Riley heard the woman talking, but he tuned her out. He was more focused on what was the reports under his arms and was not interested in small talk. She was good looking to be sure, but Riley was too preoccupied even to pretend to be interested. Soon the plane would be touching down on an island he hadn't seen in twenty years, and he wondered if he would be able to balance his apathy with his need to do his job and be as unbiased as possible. More than that, he wondered how Dimes was doing with the case in Seattle.

"Are you still with me?" the woman questioned.

Riley realized that she had just asked him a question; one he hadn't even heard.

"Not really," he said, "I'm sorry." He glanced at her and saw her light blue eyes search his.

With a small sigh, she said, "It's alright. It wasn't important. I'll be right back," she said and slipped out of the seat.

She lied of course. She never came back until the plane landed and she needed to get her carry-on.

***

There was a wall of heat waiting for Riley as he stepped off the plane.

Riley had instantly started to sweat as he stood on the stairs overlooking the tarmac. He squinted his eyes against the blinding light, and drank in the hot, humid air. He didn't remember it being this hot. The heat wafted up from the tarmac as he made his way towards the arrival lounge praying that the marvel of air conditioning had reached the island.

Inside the building was better only in that he was out of the direct sun, but if anything it was hotter in the arrival lounge. The heat mixed with impatience as the immigration lines crept forward and Riley wondered how anyone in this line could think be thinking this was a great start to a vacation.

It took an hour for Riley to make it through the line. The man behind the counter had small beads of sweat on his head and the distinct air of someone who knew that no matter how nice he was to the people in the line he still had to sit here for the rest of his shift. There is no time off for good behaviour in government jobs.

At the baggage-claim the skycaps were busy helping whichever tourist looked the richest, the most clueless, or had the most luggage. None of them paid any attention to Riley, a single black man with one bag. He shook his head; glad he was only visiting.

"There you are." A hand landed on Riley's shoulder and another grabbed for his bag, "Let me get that."

Riley spun around and came face to face with Troy Weekes, Detective At Large, who had somehow managed to find Riley even though he had hadn't told anyone his flight information. Despite the years Riley recognized Weekes, who was no longer the short scrawny kid he had been in school. The man in front of Riley was easily six-four and had eerily long arms and a hand that could probably wrap all the way around a basketball.

"I got it," Riley said and tightened his grip on his bag.

"Sure, sure. No problem. Just wanted to help. You've been in the air for a long time, you know?" Troy led Riley around the line for Customs, raising one hand to the customs agent behind the counter. "I found him, man. Thanks. See ya later."

"How'd you know what flight I was on?"

Weekes laughed, a loud nervous burst, "I told you, John, we like to keep track of our local boys. We know where you are," he nudged Riley in the ribs with his elbow. Frosted glass double doors opened on an area where people waited eagerly for their relatives and friends to emerge from customs. A metal barricade kept everyone a respectable twenty-five feet away from the doors. Troy pushed his way through a small throng of people clogging the walkway and stopped in front of a police car, parked illegally.

"Let's get you to the hotel. You must be ready to drop, nuh?"

Riley let Weekes take his bag from him and deposit it in the trunk of the car. A single one-way road ran through the airport for arrivals and departures. At this point, it was three lanes wide, one for taxi pickups and two for through traffic. Weekes had parked in one of the two lanes on this road reducing it to one lane and causing traffic to back up.

Riley took a long look around before getting into the car. The airport was not like he had remembered it, but then nothing would be. Across from where he stood Riley noticed the girl who had been next to him on the plane; the drooler. Another girl stood close to her talking with a taxi driver, but she appeared to hardly be listening as her friend tried to negotiate the driver's dialect. As Riley watched, she looked over at him and caught his eye; her hand went to her mouth and wiped subconsciously. Riley raised one hand to her and then ducked into the police car.

"Accra Beach, then, right?"

"Yeah," Riley put one hand on the dashboard to steady himself as Weekes threw the car around a large roundabout going at top speed. He had decided not to keep asking Weekes how he got his information.

Once they settled in on the main highway, a two-lane road at this point, Riley relaxed a little. He was having a hard time adjusting to driving, or being driven, on the wrong side of the road, but was distracted enough by the way the island looked that he wasn't paying much attention to the driving, or Weekes' monologue.

Riley was tense, and a knot of anxiety settled in his chest as he looked out of the window, watching the scenery. For most of the drive, they were flanked on either side by sugar cane. Occasionally the cane would give way to unkempt grassy fields with cows or sheep held back from the road by electric wire. When things started to look more commercial and built up Weekes turned left off the highway and took the car down a hill on to the South Coast road. Traffic picked up considerably, and several small white vans with Taxi lights on their roofs careened past them or dodged them coming the other way.

"Those are the maxi-taxis," Weekes said at one point, "They're like buses, but with a higher fatality rate."

***

The hotel was nicer than he expected. Of course, his opinion of the island was based almost twenty years in the past and had a healthy serving of bad memories, so anything was an improvement over what he expected. The desk clerk greeted him with a smile and gave Riley a form to fill out. Weekes wandered over to a large fountain in the middle of the lobby while Riley did the paperwork.

As soon as the key was in Riley's hand Weekes was at his side again, picking up his bag, "I'll give you a quick tour, then show you the room, yeah?" he said and led the way out of the lobby.

They stepped outside onto a small path and Riley was blinded by the sunlight.

"This is the pool. Don't mind the hours posted over there, they use that to control the younger tourists when they get rowdy."

A small bridge took them over the pool where a team of four girls was taking on four very burnt men in water volleyball. On the far side of the pool was a circular bar, half of which edged up to the pool and had a few underwater bar stools; needing another drink was no reason to get out of the water.

"The beach," Weekes opened his arms wide as he presented it.

The white sand beach glared brilliantly under the sun. Riley squinted, his eyes almost closed against the sunlight. He would need to buy a pair of sunglasses. Soon.

Riley stared out at the sea for a moment. He was accustomed to the gray colour of the Pacific and the Puget Sound. On clear days the water in Lake Washington would turn a deep blue, but the colour of the water in the tropics was something Riley had forgotten. The sea was turquoise, bright and glistening. Further out where the water deepened it turned a light shade of blue, and further out still it turned the deep blue colour of seemingly bottomless water.

"Your room," Weekes consulted Riley's key, "is over here."

Riley was about to turn when he noticed a girl in the sea turn to say something to a friend and get sideswiped by a wave. He watched the progression of foam as the wave stormed the beach and waited for her to pop up. Once the wave had done its damage and petered out she surfaced, one hand moving her hair out of her face, the other quickly working to readjust her top and ensure that it stayed put as she stood. Preoccupied with adjusting her top she stood up. Her bright green bikini had been dragged down and bunched up just low enough to afford Riley, and everyone on the beach, a glimpse of her ass. She was probably a new arrival as well; her skin was pale and she had no visible tan, or burn, lines. Riley watched as the friend responsible for the distraction shouted something and the girl sank immediately back into the water.

He smiled to himself and turned to follow Troy back into the hotel.

Beaches had definite perks.