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“Cops?” He thought she was being followed by cops.
Patsy was wrong. This man wasn't any good at all. And if he'd ever been good, liquor had soaked up his skills.

He nodded, eyes half-closed. “Off-duty.”

She stared at him, Taylor on her hip. “I'm being followed by off-duty cops.”

His chin fell to his chest in confirmation.

“Taylor, don't, honey.” She pulled the baby's fingers out of her mouth, kissed them, all the while watching the older man. Logic told her he was a farce, laughable, a waste of her time and money. Despite logic, she believed him. She preferred not to, but she did.

Frowning, Tricia dropped onto a wooden stool at the end of a long revolving rack holding plastic bags filled with clean clothes. Positioning Taylor on her lap, she pulled a package of crackers out of her bag and held it open for the boy, who happily crammed a pudgy little fist inside.

“San Diego cops?”

“Yep.”

She wanted to yell at the drunk. Tell him he stank. That he wasn't earning his keep. And she felt strangely fond of him at the same time.

Swallowing, she peered over at him, not sure whether or not to like him, whether to continue this conversation or just run.

“And there are two of them?”

When all he did was nod, she wanted to scream. And cry.

“One of them is a woman?”

“They both are, although my source in San Francisco tells me the best people-finder in Northern California just returned from a high-paying San Diego stint last month.”

“Oh.” She blinked, her nerves jumping beneath her skin. The man on the beach? Had he been looking for her? Recognized her, after all? Reported back? Or not recognized her and given up?

But that didn't explain…

“You're sure both of these women are following me?”

“Positive.” It was strange how a man could be such a complete, unwashed, disgusting bum and yet instill such confidence. “I saw them together in a bar,” he was saying, “found the best-looking guy I could and paid him to hit on them, get them talking.”

“One of those women was trailing me yesterday morning.”

His only response was the protrusion of his lower lip, which Tricia couldn't translate at all.

Taylor dropped a cracker and she bent to pick it up, kissing the baby on the neck as she straightened. He threw himself forward again, obviously wanting to have another go at this entertaining game. She took a spill-proof cup of juice out of her bag and handed it to him.

And then there was nothing left to do.

“So who hired them?”

She knew, just didn't want to hear the truth, to face
the truth, to know that money had tentacles she couldn't escape. Not that she would ever stop trying.

“Fire chief named Scott McCall.”

Taylor slid slowly off her lap onto his feet, the waiting dirty hands of the ex-detective steadying him. Tricia watched in slow motion, her gaze locked with that of the disheveled man holding her son upright. He was watching her intently, his watery eyes oddly compassionate.

She opened her mouth, but didn't know what to say. The room was spinning so completely she had no real comprehension. Scott McCall was having her followed, and her drunken detective was offering support. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, her husband had been charged with the murder of her best friend.

With one hand clutching the leg of her jeans, Taylor stared up at the smelly man with both hands around his waist, and even he was acting out of character. There was no recoiling as usually happened with strangers. The baby didn't hide his face against her, didn't cry. He just stared.

So did Tricia, desperately trying to hold on to any sense of reality. Sounds came from a distance, as though her head was buried in cotton. And she was hot. Too hot.

“What's wrong?”

She heard Patsy's voice. Hadn't seen her friend come in. Didn't see her now. But she felt Patsy's hand take hers, felt the other woman's arm around her. “Come on, honey, let's get you upstairs. Doris! Come get the baby!”

“No!” Tricia couldn't see much, her peripheral vision almost as dark as her heart, but she could see Taylor. With a fumbling hand she grabbed for him, catching his arm on the third try. “I can't leave him!” She could hardly believe that shaky, terror-filled voice was hers. She might not have believed it if she hadn't felt the scrape of those words passing through her dry throat.

“I know. Doris will bring him up,” Patsy said, her voice uncharacteristically upbeat and as carefree as if they were discussing whether to put mustard and pickle on the hamburgers. Tricia wondered if her smelly drunken detective preferred hamburgers to hot dogs.

And like an electrical switch inside her, that thought took her outside the engulfing fear to experience a second's relief. It gave her a tenuous grasp on awareness, a brief liaison with the strength she was going to have to find deep within.

She stared at the two people hovering over her, at the baby who was reaching happily toward his friend Doris, toddling forward as she came in from the front of the store.

“I'll be okay,” Tricia said, trying out her voice, reassured by her ability to make it sound more normal. “I just need to sit for a second.”

“You need to come upstairs, have something to drink and maybe eat and spend the afternoon with nothing to do but relax. Sleep if you can, watch old sitcoms on TV or listen to music.” Patsy pulled Tricia off the stool, holding one strong arm around her for support as she
walked her toward the stairs. “I'll call Shauna in to watch the store so Doris can keep Taylor upstairs, close to you, but for these next few hours, madam, you will have no responsibility except not to think. Got that?
No thinking.
No worrying.”

Tricia, walking slowly as she tested her shaky legs, nodded. It sounded like heaven.

“At least until dinnertime tonight, you are absolutely forbidden to make any decisions other than whether to chew or sleep. Got it?”

Still too weak to prevent the tears that sprang to her eyes, Tricia glanced over at her friend. “Thank you.”

Patsy, her tough and capable companion, just nodded, brown eyes glimmering. There was a story there that Tricia wanted to hear.

She hoped, one day, she'd have the opportunity.

Miller faded silently into the distance, but Tricia knew she wasn't finished with him yet.

A
mazingly, Tricia slept. Opening her eyes to the setting sun that shone in on her through the sheer white curtains on the bedroom window, she lay on the pillow-soft mattress, completely relaxed, trying to figure out where she was and why. The safe, peaceful feeling dissipated almost instantly.

Taylor! Where was Taylor? Flying off the bed, Tricia stumbled as her bare feet hit the wood floor. When she'd gone out the door and down the hall, she grew calmer, realizing she was at Patsy's—remembering that she had a friend, someone who'd taken care of her while she'd been incapable of doing it herself.

Slowing to a more normal pace, she pulled her T-shirt down over the waistband of her jeans, yanked the rubber band out of her hair, releasing a ponytail that had become scraggly at best. And, looking in every door she passed, found the bathroom, ignored it for now, and then found Taylor. The baby was asleep on a double bed in what was obviously Patsy's guest room. Her friend had
insisted Tricia take her own room, saying the mattress was divine.

She'd been right about that.

Doris, ever-present playmate to her son, dozed in a large, overstuffed dark-brown armchair in the corner, reading glasses perched on the end of her nose and an open book in her lap.

The room was a lot like Patsy. Nothing fancy or colorful, but solid—solid wood, thick comforter on the bed, large and comfortable-looking armchair. Everything was serviceable, usable. Nothing extravagant or unnecessary.

How had she spent the first thirty years of her life thinking she needed more than this? Her baby, healthy, safe, sleeping peacefully—and friends to watch over them both.

“You're awake.”

Startled, she jerked back from the door to see Patsy standing a couple of feet away in the hall. She was wearing the light-blue cotton drawstring pants and lace-trimmed tank top Tricia had made for her.

“Yeah.” She ran a hand self-consciously through her hair. “Sorry I slept so long.”

“I was hoping you'd make it through the night.”

She couldn't stay. This was Patsy's place. But she felt her skin cool as she realized it had to be close to seven with the sun almost set, and she had no idea where she'd be putting her child to bed for the night.

“You're staying here,” Patsy said, watching her.

Tricia shook her head, Patsy's white walls and wooden floor her only tangible reality. “I can't.”

“Of course you can,” Patsy said. “Furthermore, there's absolutely no reason you shouldn't. And at least one damn good reason not to go back to McCall's house. At least not tonight.”

Scott. The pang in her chest returned, duller, but still too intense. “He's at the station, anyway.”

Patsy's brown eyes narrowed. “You
want
to go back to his house? Sleep in his bed tonight?”

“No.”

“I didn't think so.” She grabbed a bag Tricia hadn't noticed on the floor outside Patsy's room. The overnight bag she'd packed with the few essentials she was taking from this life into the next, knowing when she left South Park this morning that she wouldn't be returning.

“You came prepared.”

Patsy didn't mention the fact that Tricia had brought that bag along before she'd known about her lover's duplicity.

“I can stay in a hotel….”

“Not here on Coronado, and that little boy's tired,” Patsy said, nodding toward her guest room. “He played until almost four. I suspect we'll be able to get him up for dinner and that will be that.”

Especially since seven was his normal bedtime. With another pang, one of complete guilt this time, she wondered how life had become so impossible that even
the simplest things no longer made sense. It was almost her son's bedtime and he wasn't even up from his afternoon nap.

 

Dinner was a surreal affair and yet, looking at it from the outside, Tricia supposed everything seemed normal enough. A woman cooking dinner for friends, setting the table with forest-green earthenware dishes and plain shiny silverware. Serving pork chops, rolls and asparagus straight from the stove, pouring sun-brewed iced tea into tall glasses. And the final touch, the plastic bowl of mashed pork and asparagus she'd prepared in a blender that until then, as she'd pointed out with her slightly acerbic grin, had only been used to make daiquiris.

Yeah, on the surface things could have seemed normal. If you didn't realize that the baby was sitting in a hastily borrowed high chair, or the guests were homeless.

Just as they were about to sit down, Tricia heard a shuffling gait on the stairs leading up to Patsy's apartment door, followed by a hesitant knock—almost as though the person knocking wasn't quite sure that was the right thing to do…or that an answer to the summons was desired.

Patsy dropped the napkins she'd grabbed from a cupboard. Bending to scoop them up, she mumbled, “I didn't think he'd actually come.”

“Who?” One hand on Taylor's shoulder, Tricia was
ready to run. There was a back door through the kitchen, and a fire escape. She could—

“Miller.”

“Miller?”
She stared at her friend, wondering if that new textured bob had somehow short-circuited the woman's brain.

Glancing at the door, Patsy put the napkins on the table. “I had a feeling you might want to talk more once you got some rest. So I told him that if he found somewhere to clean up, he could come for dinner.”

Mostly numb, Tricia nodded, watching from beside Taylor's tray where she was supervising the baby's attempts to feed himself with his fingers. Patsy wiped her hands on her pants and ran a hand through her newly styled blond hair on her way to the door, almost as though she was trying to impress the drunk.

Only good manners—and years of living in the public eye—kept Tricia's mouth from falling open as Miller stepped into the room. In a button-down blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up his forearms and a pair of clean jeans he'd probably stolen, with clean hair and a shaved face, the man had probably attracted the attention of every woman he'd passed on the street.

“You should do that more often,” she said, when Patsy just stood there.

He shrugged, shoulders still bent with the weight of life. “I'll be drunk again by midnight,” he said. “And it doesn't pay to shave drunk. Too many cuts.”

“You ever think about sobering up?” she asked, and
then could have slapped herself. Like she had any kind of life to show for the great decisions
she'd
made.

“Every time I'm sober.”

“And?” Patsy, moving toward the table, turned back to him.

He took one look at her, his eyes traveling blatantly up and down her body, and said, “Drunk's easier.”

 

With dinner finished, Tricia expected Arnold Miller to leave. She really didn't have anything to talk to him—or anyone—about. His work for her was done. He'd found out what she needed to know. Or part of it, anyway…

“Did you see today's paper?” Patsy asked, glancing at Miller. She was holding Taylor, giving him the bottle of warm milk Tricia hoped would calm him enough to sleep. Her son's only fussy times were when he was off his schedule.

“Caught glimpses of it on my way over,” Miller said.

“You saw the headline, then?”

“About the senator?”

Tricia sank down in her hard-backed wooden chair, suddenly cold. What now? Nervous tension burned through her. How soon could she be alone with a paper?

“What about him?” she asked.

Both sets of eyes turned in her direction. It was the first time either of them had looked at her since they'd begun this discussion. And her tension intensified under the scrutiny of those glances.

She sat up. Found a social smile she'd thought long gone. “You're talking about the guy from San Francisco, right? The senator? The one who supposedly killed his girlfriend?”

“Right,” Patsy said, pulling the plastic nipple from the sleeping toddler's mouth, setting the bottle on the table slowly, almost deliberately. And then she looked back at Tricia.

“What about him?” Tricia asked again, keeping her voice casual. She was a middle-class stiff like all the rest, curious about how the other half lived—and got away with murder.

“The autopsy showed that Leah Montgomery had been pregnant. They're saying she miscarried when she went off the cliff.”

Oh. God. Leah. I'll deal with this soon, my dear friend. As soon as I'm alone and can cry with you. For you. For us. Leah, I miss you so much.

So goddamned much.

Somehow, she kept her smile, but felt her lip twitching. She hoped it didn't show. She'd wait a minute or so, then excuse herself to the bathroom, taking Taylor when she left. She'd put him to bed, maybe lie down with him…

“And,” Patsy added, “they've found an old hermit who lives halfway up Miner's Mountain. Apparently he knows Senator Whitehead. The man's bills, which have been in arrears since the government cut back on his
welfare, have been paid in full every month since six months before the senator's wife disappeared.”

Walter was on Thomas's payroll? He was one of them? Only her instinct for survival kept the food in her stomach.

“Someone must've leaked that little piece of information,” Miller said, his too-clear gaze making her uncomfortable. “It's not the kind of thing the prosecution would normally let loose.”

Say something,
Tricia commanded herself. Act like any other middle-class working stiff having dinner with friends, discussing the soap opera-esque dramas played out by larger-than-life players—celebrities and political figures and movie stars. Everyone talked about that, right?

“Didn't the woman's sister appear on TV not too long ago claiming some kind of cover-up?” Hoping her voice didn't sound as shaky as it felt, she forced herself to continue, trying to convey just the right amounts of curiosity, compassion, horror and disgust. “Maybe they're letting things out to assure the public that they're actually working on the case.”

“Maybe,” Miller said. His hand lay on the table, thumb rapping a constant beat. Still, his gaze on her didn't let up.

What?
Tricia screamed silently. She felt trapped. Caged. Needed to get out. To breathe.

“I read that the evidence established enough of a pattern and therefore probable cause to get an added grand jury indictment against Senator Whitehead in the death
of his wife and unborn son. He's currently being held on a million-dollar bail.” Patsy's words dropped quietly into the room, slamming into her like lead bullets.

What would a normal person say to that? Tricia tore a piece off her napkin. And another.

“Any half-competent prosecutor would've done the same,” Miller replied to Patsy, but when Tricia glanced up, he was still watching her. “The two women were life-long friends. You have a pregnant wife who disappears without a trace and then, less than two years later, the friend—also claiming him as the father of her unborn baby—mysteriously disappears as well. Only this time they have a body. A dead body.”

Was this what people were doing all over the state? Discussing her private hell over the dinner table?

“But why would he do such a thing?” Patsy's questions would logically have been directed at the man who sounded like he knew what he was talking about. Instead she was watching Tricia, too.

Tricia felt far too hot. Needed to take off her T-shirt, her bra.
Breathe.

“If the guy's sterile like he claims,” Arnold Miller was saying, “it wasn't something either of the women would have known, but it would certainly prove to him that both had been unfaithful.”

“You think he did it out of jealousy?”

“It's common enough. He can't live without them, but can't live with their bastard children, either.”

“Kind of odd, both women being unfaithful to him, though, isn't it?” Patsy asked thoughtfully.

Stop! Both of you, just stop!

Miller didn't answer.

“They're going for the death penalty,” Patsy said.

Miller's presence scared Tricia into responding. “I hope they get it.” And then, without looking at the ex-P.I., she murmured, “Well, I guess I should get this little guy into bed.” She stood so abruptly her chair tipped over behind her.

“Tricia.” Patsy's words came at her as she righted the chair.

“Yeah?” She didn't turn around.

“There was a picture of Kate Whitehead in the paper tonight.”

She froze. Then turned, compelled by something deep inside her to play this one out. “I feel sorry for her.” No one knew how true those words were, but she didn't say them because they were true. She said them because they were what she would've said if she'd been talking about someone else.

Miller's scrutiny detained her as surely as if he'd grabbed her wrist, and Tricia finally understood just how good the man had been at his job. And why. She had a feeling that if he wanted something from her he was going to get it. She just hoped to God he didn't want anything—and wished she had an open bottle of booze to hand him.

“It was the same grainy photo they splashed all over the papers when she disappeared,” Patsy went on. “You
know the one, with that beautifully wavy shoulder-length hair, eyebrows that were too perfect to be natural, those long lashes and curvy lips.”

What the hell was going on here? Tricia looked from one to the other, wishing she had the energy to be angry with both of them rather than just frightened like a rat in a trap. She shook her head. “I don't know if I ever saw it.” Thank God her upbringing had taught her how to lie—and how to do it artfully.

If only she could remember the lesson on detachment. It was the first key to survival.

“Yeah, well,” Patsy said, “I don't know how anyone would recognize an actual person from that picture….”