"He didn't have a gun in his hand and your guys haven't found one. And he came from the wrong direction. If the vic was shot in the back, This suspect was in the wrong place to do it, and Ed, don't call grown women girls. It's so '70s."

O'Brien snorted, then looked up at the overcast sky. He sighed. "Look, Maggie, unless this was a gang thing you know we suck at this. If you can help..."

"Sure Ed. It was my job to be looking out for crime in this place, so I'll do what I can, but right now I don't know any more than you do. I want to talk to Carbondale."

I moved over to where Gabe Carbondale was sitting.

"Gabe?" I said gently.

He looked up, unseeing.

"Gabe!" I yelled to get his attention. "Did you see anyone?"

He shook his head. He was shivering.

"What were you doing here?"

"Walking Buster. Oh c.r.a.p, where is he?" He shook his head and gagged. "I'm going to be sick again." He leaned over and dry heaved.

"Buster's over there." I pointed to the giant Great Dane sitting on a toppled gravestone.

Gabe saw the coroner's crew taking the body away and retched again.

"You can go now. Sergeant O'Brien arranged for someone to take you home." Gabe called Buster and they lurched into a squad car.

I walked over to the place where the body had fallen.

Cops were still combing the leaf-strewn ground to find the spent slug of the ricochet. I was glad it wasn't my job to look for it. Gray skies were darkening and it was bitterly cold, though still early afternoon.

At a distance, a uniform officer was talking to a young woman. She was wearing layered sweaters, a navy plaid skirt, and heavy woolen tights. She wore a light blue wool cap pulled over black hair, and from what I could see she had an attractive face. She nodded. The officer left, and she walked directly across the street.

I wanted to talk to her, so I followed her. It's something private eyes do. She walked south on 11th, crossed the Mews, turned right and went up Washington past the Moyer & Jones lumber yard, to the corner of 13th. She entered the front door of a big row house that had been divided into apartments.

Lights in each of the apartments were on except the one on the ground floor. In a minute a light came on in there too. I could see her through the window talking off scarves and then going into another room.

My cell chimed. It was Gabriel Carbondale.

His voice was high pitched. "Maggie, can you come over? I'm so confused, this is all... I was only talking about gangs and vandals, but this is... Can you come right now?"

I walked back down Washington to Gabriel Carbondale's house on 10th Street. After all, he was the paying client.

When Gabriel and Suzanne Carbondale lived together in this historic row home, two doors south of Amanda Knightbridge's, Suzanne had been responsible for their home's decor. I'd been there a couple of times, but not since Suzanne left six weeks ago. At that time, the place was bright and comfortable with beautiful details. Suzanne liked subtle art that made you think and laugh.

She had a number of abstract paintings by local artists. She'd even bought and framed one of my sketches of the Mews and hung it in the kitchen next to a lovely Matisse collage print.

Gabe Carbondale answered the bell. His face was gaunt and his eyes were hollow from shock and hurling. He seemed relieved to see me and agitated at the same time. Though indisputably pompous, Carbondale was fairly handsome, but right now he had a mean-old-man face. He looked as though he was going to yell, "You kids get outta my yard!" at any second.

The house had totally changed. Instead of light airy colors, the living room was the dark green of Jaguar sports cars. There was a pair of 19th century hunting prints over the fireplace and duck decoys on the mantel. The leather sofa was still in place, but there was a huge plasma flat screen on the wall.

The room looked so self-consciously masculine that the word overcompensating was ringing in my ears. Nothing of Suzanne remained, as though Gabe was trying to erase her. But then I guess if I'd been dumped the way Gabe was, I also might want to wash that gal right outta my hair.

Buster woofed h.e.l.lo from behind the closed kitchen door.

Gabe said, "Samson's here. The police told me I shouldn't be alone and Samson was walking by."

Samson Henshaw, former architect now realtor, sat stonily in an arm chair. He lived in the Mews with his wife Lois, the one who had been at the neighborhood meeting and spouted her incongruous comment.

Henshaw was tall and craggy. Straight women would probably find him ruggedly handsome. He had regular features and a good head of dark brown hair, but he seemed terminally sad, like a Ba.s.set off his Prozac. His general Squidward aspect had intensified since he and Lois first moved to the Mews.

Washington Mews has a gossip network that moves faster than rabbits on Red Bull. According to Cora Martin, one of the linchpins of communication, Samson's problem was domestic.

And right now the scowl he was giving Gabe behind his back was verging on pure loathing. Since when did Samson hate Gabe?

Gabe grunted me back to the present. He said, "Look, Maggie, I need to tell you about something." He glanced at Samson, hesitating.

Gabe's cell phone rang and he literally jumped into the air, hunching his back like a startled cat. He picked up the phone and held it to his ear. Then he remembered to say, "h.e.l.lo?"

He paused listening for a long time as if he'd forgotten how to speak. Finally he cleared his throat and said, "Yes, it, uh, made my hair stand on end. I'll not sleep one wink. Yes, she's here now." He listened again staring at the floor and finally said, "Yes, thank you, good-bye." He clicked it off, turned, and focused his eyes.

"Who was that?" I asked at the height of nosiness.

"That Staplehurst woman from the museum. She heard about the... you know... I guess it's already on the newspaper's web site. She wants you to stop by her office with a copy of the crime report and you can sign something, and then she can submit the grant. She's on deadline."

It seemed a little insensitive to me that less than an hour after the murder Piper Staplehurst jumped on it as the proof she needed for the grant. Of course, maybe the streaming news hadn't touched on Gabe as the prime witness.

Gabe looked at his cell and then turned to me. "Maggie, I could have been shot." He cleared his throat again. "Dead as a doornail. If I'd gotten there earlier, it might have been time for me to shuffle off this mortal coil." He shrugged, and sweat beaded on his forehead. He put his hand over his eyes and took a deep breath. Gabe Carbondale's shocky face had turned as white as The Lost Bride's. He dropped his cell. The cover cracked and the phone bounced into Buster's water dish by the hearth.

"c.r.a.p," he said, reaching for it.

"You'll have to get another one now. They never work after they've been in water." Samson snorted grimly.

"I have another one around here somewhere," Gabe said vaguely.

"Gabe, most murders happen between people who know each other. This wasn't aimed at you," I said, trying to be rea.s.suring.

"Murder! It wasn't murder. It was a gang thing."

"No, it was murder. An unarmed man was killed by another person with a gun. That's kind of the definition of murder, Gabe," I said.

His face went even whiter.

Samson slapped his hand on the chair arm impatiently. He'd gotten roped into playing nursemaid and he didn't like it.

I said to Gabe, "Do you want me to keep working on the crime in the cemetery? Things are a little different now."

"Huh? Oh, no, don't go on. Crime has been established surely, so the game is up. You can just send me a bill for last night."

"OK, but I think I'll continue to look into it on my own a little."

"Huh? Why?"

"Because murder messes with my feng shui. I don't like it when someone is killed on my watch. Tell me again what happened from your perspective."

Gabe Carbondale paused to think, then took a deep breath and said that Buster had wanted to go out. "So I put on his leash and walked him over to the graveyard. We went up the main trail then turned right to loop around and, just as I got near the fence, I heard a shot. I looked up, saw someone in a blue down jacket running, then another shot and he fell down as cold as any stone. I didn't see anything else."

He'd skipped saying, I screamed like a twelve year old girl, closed my eyes, and fainted. But I couldn't blame Gabe. No matter how macho you are, you never know how you're going to react when faced with blood and fear. At least once a year, one of Farrel's burly male woodworking students has an eyes-roll-back moment after a careless slip of a chisel.

I'd seen some horrific traffic deaths while I was on the highway patrol in Indiana after grad school. I was the first woman on the force in that part of the state, so a slew of unwelcoming veterans turned up to watch me fall apart at my introductory pile-up. I didn't, though. It took all my concentration but I was able to remove myself from the b.l.o.o.d.y scene and view it as though it was a painting. It was a valuable skill.

"Did you hear anything? Think carefully. You heard the shots and the sound of someone running and...?"

He shook his head. "Wind in the trees?"

Samson Henshaw said, "Look Gabe, I really have to go. You're OK right?" Without waiting for an answer, Henshaw went to the door and jumped ship.

Gabe was still shivering. He should have called someone like Cora Martin for support. She'd have made him tea and cookies, covered him with a warm blanket, and had him watch some cla.s.sic movie on TV.

"Gabe, see if there's a game on. I'll make you something to eat."

I went down a little hallway, pa.s.sed a half-bath, and turned left into the kitchen. One of the biggest indoor pets in the world shuffled over to me. I petted him lavishly. He was black and white like a Holstein cow. Suzanne named him Buster, not only because his huge wagging tail busted things, but because his markings were like Buster Brown saddle shoes.

Yet this Buster was way too big to live in a shoe. In fact, he was almost too big for this kitchen. Great Danes are the couch potatoes of large dogs. They like to relax and be petted. They love people. I guess that doesn't describe all Great Danes, but it describes Buster. He was a very loyal dog. Loyal to Suzanne. Suzanne had walked out on Buster too. I wondered if Buster was as p.i.s.sed off about that as Jessie.

Buster woofed quietly, then lay back down on the floor. I stepped over him to find some beer and something with which to make a few sandwiches.

Buster got up and went into the laundry room, which also served as the back vestibule. He barked.

"What?" I asked.

He looked at me, tilted his head, then swung his doggy b.u.t.t around knocking over a stack of cardboard boxes. I felt a gust of cold air as he went out his dog door into the fenced backyard.

The kitchen was in order, but my sketch and the other framed art pieces were gone from the wall. This room had also been de-Suzanned.

Buster padded back in and settled in the middle of the floor. I filled his food bowl in the laundry room and picked up the cardboard boxes his tree-branch-sized tail had spilled. One box's lid had come off. In it I spied my framed sketch, the Matisse collage print, some of Suzanne's kitchen tools. Nothing she really needed. Gabe had just packed up what she'd left and pushed it out of sight, if not completely out of mind.

Peanut b.u.t.ter and jelly sandwiches were the best I could do. I found a tray and carried the food and a bottle of beer into the living room.

I sat down and asked him to go over the shooting one more time. He told me the same story.

"You said you wanted to talk to me about something? What was it?" I asked. Maybe it was that he was still frightened or needed me to make him a sandwich.

"Oh, well, just that this shooting makes crime in the cemetery a foregone conclusion. And so I won't be..."

"You won't be paying me any more. I get it."

Chapter 5.

I went home to the loft.

This small factory building was payment for what turned out to be a very dangerous job. At the time real estate was low, and the value of a quarter-block-long factory building in a residential area was pretty scant. Still it was a fascinating, mostly raw s.p.a.ce, so I dove in.

I'd put a tool-belt-load of sweat equity into making the loft livable. The bright, comfortable s.p.a.ce was mostly one big high-ceilinged room that served as a living and dining room with a fancy open kitchen on one side. There were two bedrooms-a bigger one where Kathryn and I slept and a smaller one for guests. There was also a fabulous master bathroom, a well-designed laundry room, and a smaller bathroom next to the guest room. The huge floor-to-ceiling windows offered panoramic views of the Mews and the city beyond.

On the top floor of the building, which is reached via a spiral staircase in the loft's living area or by the main stairs or freight elevator in the hall, is a large open s.p.a.ce roughly divided into four quarters: an extensive gym for working out, an art studio so as not to let my art school education go to waste, a storage area, and a large corner that was rapidly becoming a two-story office for Kathryn.

I enjoy it all, but right now it felt empty. So I went down to the second floor office of my step-sister Sara and her law partner Emma Strong.

Attorney Sara Martinez was sitting at her desk in her office, flipping the pages of a bound brief. Her dark chocolate hair was drawn back in a pony tail. Her skin tones looked even and healthy as always. She was stylishly dressed for work, but still seemed comfortable.

I'm such a contrast to my younger sisters Sara and Rosa. With light brown hair and green eyes, my skin is so pale white that at the beach I have to steep in 100 sun block. Kathryn and I have that in common, which made our choice to vacation in Northern Florida in January, where the temperatures are moderate and sunny days are short, a perfect one.

Sara said without looking up, "Buenas tardes, querida hermana."

"Quieres ir a la Cocina Thai a cenar? Estoy loca del hambre."

"Donde esta tu novia habanera? Por que ella no come contigo? La estas tratando bien o es que ella esta disponible ahora? Dame su numero y yo le mostrare un buen tiempo!"

Sara looked up and wiggled her eyebrows but then stared at me. "Que paso?" she asked me seriously.[1]

My poker face has served me well in the detective trade, but Sara has always been able to tell when things were wrong with me. When her mother married my father, we became instant friends, even though she was younger. She'd decided to teach me Spanish, and my new stepmother Juana agreed wholeheartedly. I committed to the hilarious lessons and soon was able to share secrets with my new family that my sweet but seemingly befuddled father couldn't understand.

Knowing something that a grownup didn't know was enormously attractive to a child who'd felt her life was out of her control. It wasn't so many years later that I realized my father was faking his inability to understand us for my sake. Which made me love him and miss him all the more, once he was gone.

In those days, when something was heavy on my mind, Sara could tell. Just as she could tell now.

"What is it?" she asked more softly.

"Someone was shot in the cemetery today. I was there," I said simply. "He died."

"Did you shoot him?"

"No, but I couldn't save him."

"You can't save everyone, querida," said Sara softly.

"Forget the menu ladies. We have a curry to die for and fresh roast pork. And spring rolls, just made. Be right back."