Lizzy confirmed that Hayden would be at Swim Club, training bright and early. So there I was, pulling off Ponce de Leon onto a road that I had forgotten was called Stanford Drive. It seemed somewhat prophetic, but I wasn’t sure of what. I parked to the side of the loop at the end, near the Whitten University Center. It was a permit zone, but I’d be out of there before any traffic wardens even clocked in for their shift.

  I wandered through the student center and out to the pool. I had spent many an hour in this pool during recovery sessions—more with the football team than baseball. Back in the sixties, it was designed by someone who had clearly been tripping on some kind of pharmaceutical. It was fifty meters long, so it could accommodate international standard competition and training, but it was twenty-five yards wide, which allowed for more lanes in the short-course format still favored by the NCAA colleges. The pool was also split in two, with a deep section in the middle where the diving boards were located and two sets of short lanes across the pool on either side.

  The half of the pool closer to the student center had a lifeguard who looked bored out of his mind. The swimmers there seemed like they were just casually getting some laps in. On the other side of the diving area, two coaches paced the concrete deck, watching their charges in the water.

  I strolled past the lounge chairs and watched the coaches. They were both young, both in polos and short shorts. One was a woman, and the other a man. Hayden was one of those names that didn’t offer a clue either way, so I was suddenly unsure which to approach.

  “Hayden?” I asked as I walked up.

  The guy, with dark hair and eyebrows like caterpillars, looked up at me. He smiled but in that hesitant way, as if making his mind up about whether it was warranted or not.

  “Help you?” he said.

  “Miami Jones. I’m a UM alum.”

  “With a name like that, you’d have to be.”

  “Exactly. I wasn’t sure if you’d be here.”

  “I’m always here.”

  “Out of term?”

  “Most of our students are off campus, but swimmers train year-round to stay in shape.”

  “I get that.”

  “You played baseball, huh?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Your photo’s still in the gym. College World Series champs.”

  “You’re more observant than the average bear.”

  “I stand around a lot, waiting for students to recover during weight sessions.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  He shrugged. “How can I help?”

  “You hear about Forrest Simpson?”

  “Yeah, I did, but . . . did I hear it wasn’t suicide?”

  “The sheriff’s office doesn’t think so.”

  “Man. What the hell?”

  “I’m helping the investigators look into it.”

  “You’re a cop?”

  “No, private investigator. But I was doing some work for the swimming association. You knew Forrest?”

  “Briefly.”

  “At Stanford?”

  “Yeah. He came over in my senior year, after Tokyo.”

  “You didn’t get to a Games?”

  “Nah. Wasn’t quite good enough in the end.”

  “But you stayed in the business?”

  “Yeah. I love swimming. I love being part of a team. You must know how that feels.”

  “I do. I miss it.”

  “Yeah. I got lucky.”

  “How so?”

  “UM was looking for an assistant coach. I applied and got it. So here I am.”

  “You work with the swim team?”

  “I help Dirk, the head coach.” He glanced at the female coach farther along the pool deck. “Sam and I both do. Plus, we do swimming lessons for students and alumni.”

  “Early mornings.”

  “I like it. At least it’s not cold.”

  “What can you tell me about Forrest?”

  “Not much. I didn’t know him that well. Not sure anybody did, to be honest.”

  “Why’s that? Not a nice guy?”

  “I wouldn’t put it like that. He was fine. But he just never really fit into a clique, you know?”

  “Outsider?”

  “Kind of. I mean, at Stanford, we were pretty tight, but some people are in, to various degrees, aren’t they? Forrest was a good swimmer, and he worked as hard as anyone. He’d get invited to things—parties and days out or whatever—and sometimes he’d come and sometimes not, but even when he did, he was never really into it. Like he preferred to sit on the sidelines and watch.”

  “I’ve heard him described as a busybody.”

  “That seems a bit harsh.”

  “Anyone not get along with him?”

  “You mean enemies? Not that I saw.”

  “He was on a scholarship at Stanford?”

  “Yeah, full ride.”

  “And you?”

  “Partial. We had a lot of good swimmers. World-class. I was NCAA-ranked, and at some schools that meant you were top of the pile, but not at Stanford.”

  “So why did you go? Why not go somewhere you could get a full scholarship?”

  “I wanted to study at Stanford, and swimming made that affordable. Plus, I wanted to train under Coach Kel.”

  “Kellie Almonde?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You were at a different school before?”

  “I did my freshman year at the College of Marin.”

  “And Coach Almonde poached you?”

  “Poached. I wouldn’t call it that.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “Recruited. Marin’s a two-year college, so pretty much everyone’s objective was to transfer to a four-year program. I was lucky that Coach Almonde saw me compete and offered me a transfer and a partial ride. I wouldn’t have been able to do Stanford otherwise. I owe it all to her.”

  “You liked her? As a coach?”

  “She’s the best. She doesn’t have the most swimmers on the national team for nothing.”

  “You want to do what she did?”

  “Coach at an international meet? Sure. I didn’t get there as an athlete, but I might as a coach. Long way to go, though.”

  “This is a good program?”

  “UM? It’s decent. I mean, it isn’t Stanford or Cal or even Florida. If we break top twenty-five, we’ll be doing well. We don’t send a lot of athletes to Worlds or Olys.”

  “So you’d have to move on to move up?”

  “Probably.”

  “Would you go back to Stanford?”

  He looked around like he was about to divulge state secrets. “In a flash.”

  “You like Coach Almonde that much?”

  “Yep. She’s the real deal. Plus, I loved the Bay Area.”

  “Sunnier here.”

  “More humid, too. Winters there are a little cooler, but it’s hardly Alaska. And the sun shines a little different.”

  “I know. I played ball in Modesto for a couple years.”

  “So why are you here?”

  “At this point, I’m part of the furniture,” I said.

  “Is that a good reason?”

  “It’s home.”

  “That’s a good reason.”

  “Yeah. Listen, did you know Greg Baxter at all?”

  “Not really. I swam against him at NCAA meets, but we were never on a team together.”

  “But Forrest was.”

  “Sure. Worlds and Olys.”

  “Did they get along?”

  “Did you hear my speech about Forrest staying on the outside?”

  “Yeah, but I mean, was there any animosity between them?”

  “Animosity? I wouldn’t have called it that.”

  “What would you have called it?”

  “Forrest was in a different class from me, right? And Greg was in a different class from him. But with Forrest, I don’t know. It wasn’t so much animosity as jealousy.”

  “Because he won?”

  “Yeah, but it’s more than that. I think Forrest was envious of everything Greg had—his results, his fame. Greg wasn’t the most charismatic guy, but he was a lot more outgoing than Forrest. And I think Forrest was even jealous of his girlfriend.”

  “Whose girlfriend?”

  “Greg’s.”

  “Who was his girlfriend?”

  “You don’t know about Deena?” he said.

  “But she died. Years ago.”

  “Yep. And Forrest talked about her like she was still around. He’d say how great her stroke was or how she did this thing with her tumble turn that cut a tenth of a second from her time.”

  “Did he blame Greg for her death?”

  “I think that might have been wrapped in there, somewhere, but I never heard him say that directly.” He glanced at the pool and watched a swimmer go by using a kickboard.

  “I heard he wasn’t happy after Greg swam the final in Rio.”

  “I don’t know, I wasn’t around then. But he was pretty dark after Tokyo.”

  “He went but didn’t swim?”

  “No, he came to Stanford just after that, and he was in a funk about it for a while, that’s for sure. Can’t really blame him.”

  “But he blamed Greg.”

  “Sort of. Him and Big Time.”

  “Big Time?”

  Hayden chuckled. “Greg’s coach.”

  “Coach Collis?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why do you call him that?”

  “Oh, that’s what everyone calls him. Not his own team, of course.”

  “Why Big Time?”

  “Actually, he’s the one who gives me hope as a coach. He was like me. He’d been an okay swimmer, nothing special. He swam at Creighton University and only competed in one NCAA season before the college canceled the entire swim program in 1990. But eventually, he got a job as a coach at a small program in Iowa, and then years later, Greg and Deena arrive there at the same time—two bolts of lightning. Suddenly, they were winning events at NCAAs and getting ranked as a school. All on the backs of two swimmers.”

  “And then Deena . . .”

  “Yeah. And, of course, Rio went bad, but they bounced back in Tokyo, and Coach Collis rode that all the way out of Iowa and into his own private program in DC. Right into the big time.”

  “You don’t think he earned it?”

  “How do you judge that sort of thing? From what I can see, he’s an okay coach. Not Coach Kel, but he doesn’t see things the way she does. And she’s been there, at the top. But were the Patriots good because of Belichick’s coaching or Brady’s play?”

  “Bit of both, I think.”

  “Probably right. But Brady won a Super Bowl without Belichick. Coaches don’t win anything without the players.”

  “So you don’t think Collis deserves to be head coach of the national team?”

  “Again, how do you judge? He’s tough but fair. He does it the right way. He runs a clean program.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t for sure, but he did kick a student-athlete out of Iowa at one point for doping.”

  “So he might be the right guy for the job?”

  “Maybe. As a coach, Coach Kel is better. But Big Time is better about working the officials and media, and that’s part of the job, too.”

  “Coach Almonde can be a little abrasive.”

  “If you don’t know her,” he said. “She’s driven and doesn’t suffer fools, but she’d bleed for her swimmers.”

  “You really do like her.”

  “I do. Always did, even when I hated her for making me do another set of hundreds.”

  I nodded. I had coaches like that. It was amazing to think that I would walk across hot coals for someone who had made me run so hard and so long in the South Florida sun that I threw up on the field.

  “Is there anything else? I’ve gotta get back to these guys,” he said, gesturing to the water.

  “Sure. No problem. I appreciate your time.”

  “You bet. I hope you find whoever did that to Forrest.”

  We shook hands, and I walked away, the sun starting to send spears of light across the pool, the dull gray water turning an inviting turquoise.

  I went back out to the car. When Lizzy had given me the paper, I suspected the hours spent driving all the way to Miami would be wasted time. Today, I learned nothing about Forrest that I didn’t already know. I also didn’t know more about Greg or Coach Almonde, and I didn’t know more about who had killed Forrest.

  As I got in my car, I thought about Forrest’s diary app. I would have to give it a fresh look when I got back to West Palm.

  Because I now knew who BT was.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I didn’t go straight home. I cruised—if bumper-to-bumper traffic can be considered cruising—over to the South Beach marina and collected Lucas. He was directing his team to keep things in order while he was away. Then he shot me his weary smile as if all was right with the world, but it had taken him a hell of a lot of work to get it that way.

  He grabbed a small cooler and hefted it into the back of my SUV. As we headed out, I asked him how business was. He told me people used to come to the marina to have a good time but now they seemed hell-bent on having a bad one.

  “Attitude is everything,” he said in his Australian drawl. “A poor kid in Africa with just enough to eat and one pair of shoes but the right attitude can manage a smile. A rich guy with a boat and a bad attitude is just a bastard waiting for the heart attack.”

  We crawled out of Miami and into Lauderdale. Traffic eventually opened up, but not enough to trouble the speed limit. It was midmorning by the time we reached South Florida National Cemetery in Lake Worth. The city of Lake Worth had changed its name to the rather ridiculous Lake Worth Beach in order to attract more tourists, as if more traffic was going to help. But the locals didn’t bite. I knew no one who tacked beach onto the end of the place-name.

  The cemetery had been an expanse of manicured lawn when I first visited, and might have been mistaken for a golf course by passersby. Now it looked like . . . a cemetery. Rows of headstones will do that to a place.

  After parking, Lucas grabbed his cooler, and we walked in. We found the plot we wanted by memory, a white marble headstone among too many others. Lucas placed his cooler on the grass and then fell to his knees, though not in prayer. Lucas didn’t tend that way. He always said that it wasn’t possible that any deity could exist who would allow the horrors he had seen in his life to happen.

  Lucas took a kitchen sponge from the cooler, dipped it into the ice water, and wiped down the headstone. It wasn’t so much that the thing was muddy or in disrepair; the VA kept their graveyards in the condition they deserved. It was more like a guy with an old Cadillac that he loved and washed in his driveway every day, even when it clearly didn’t need it. Lucas gave the headstone a spritz—front, back, sides—then pulled a small towel from his pocket and wiped it down, and only then did he flop around and sit on the grass.

  I waited at the end of the plot like a preacher until Lucas was done, then sat beside him. He pulled three bottles of Yuengling from a six-pack in the cooler and opened them, tossing the caps back in on top of the ice. He handed one to me. Then he tipped one onto the grass at the base of the headstone.

  “Cheers, Lenny,” he said.

  “Cheers, my friend,” I said.

  We waited for the beer to empty out, then Lucas and I touched bottles and took a sip. It was still the morning, but some traditions must be observed.

  “How are things in West Palm?” Lucas asked.

  “Steady.”

  “How’s this fostering thing going?”

  “I have a home visit tomorrow. I have to do a test.”

  “Crikey.”

  “Yeah. But they’re saying once that’s done, we should be good to go.”

  “And then you’ll have little ones.”

  “Well, we could get anyone. From an infant to a seventeen-year-old. And we could have them for a few hours to who knows how long.”

  “It’s all a bit loosey-goosey?”

  “That’s the nature of these kids’ lives—lack of stability. It’s one of the things we’ll try to help with.”

  “Well, good for you. Lenny would be proud.”

  “I hope so.”

  “No hope about it. He didn’t do anything like that—not formally—but he took in his share of lost souls.”

  “I know. I was one of them.”

  Lucas smiled. “Me, too.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “I kind of always pictured you two as a unit.”

  “True enough. But when I was really down and out, he picked me up. He got me here, to America. Gave me the time I needed to fix myself.”

  “How did you end up here in the States?”

  “I had done one or two things that had earned me the thanks of a grateful nation, so I was told. Lenny knew someone who knew someone who pulled some strings and got me residency. That was that.”

  “That sounds like Lenny.”

  Lucas nodded, and his watery eyes took in the surrounds. Sitting in the sunshine in the rising humidity, he looked older than I remembered. He was willowy and rough and tan, but a smile split across his face, maybe remembering his old friend.

  “How about you?” he asked. “Work good?”

  I told him about the dead swimmer. And the various suspects, none of whom really fit.

  “I thought Coach Almonde might have something to hide, being a little too aggressive in recruiting these swimmers. That’s why I was in Miami. But it seems like all the athletes who came to her did so for the right reasons. And there’s this other guy—he’s the head national coach now. His greatest crime is that he rode his athletes’ coattails into a better job. There isn’t a coach in history who put a good team together who couldn’t be accused of that.”