She slept until about two that afternoon, then took a bus to Paradise Beach. She refused to talk to anyone there, but the young Greek men persisted. Eventually, she moved to the nude, gay part of the beach where macho Greek Romeos were afraid to be seen. She stripped naked and read a book, undisturbed. That night she went back into town and spent her time talking with jewelers and souvenir sellers. Enough bar boys. One of the jewelers invited her to dinner at a fashionable restaurant. She had a great time and he was a perfect gentleman.
He walked her to a taxi and invited her to attend a Greek festival to be held in three days to honor a saint. She thanked him but said she was leaving the island in two days and promised to stop by his shop before she left.
Then, like so many other backpackers, she simply disappeared. No one paid the balance of her hotel bill – also not unusual in Mykonos. The hotel owner simply threw out whatever she'd left behind, reported nothing to the police, and rented the room to a new pretty woman from another midnight ferry.
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Andreas Kaldis knew why his six-foot-two-inch body was crammed into a midget-sized window seat on a plane to Mykonos, and he didn't like it one bit. He'd been 'promoted' from the Greek police force's number one ass-kicker in central Athens to its chief dog-and-cat protector for Athenian weekenders. At least that's how he saw it. Thirty-four-year-old hotshot homicide detectives like one thing: catching killers. For them, the worst punishment imaginable was being taken away from the action. His promotion to chief of police for one of the smallest of the Cyclades islands meant just that: being as far away from what he was born to do as Andreas could imagine.
Ninety miles and less than thirty minutes from Athens by plane, or three hours by high-speed ferry, Mykonos was approximately one and a half times the size of the island of Manhattan and had become to Athens what Andreas understood 'the Hamptons' were to New Yorkers. Rich and superrich Athenians – together with thousands of wannabe celebrities from all over Europe – flocked to Mykonos on holiday. Many built mega-million-euro summer homes on the island or paid London hotel prices for far less than English five-star service.