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Evangeline had been right. Her husband had been planning to kill her … and I’d be damned if I’d let him get away with it.
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    A fter I left the Barrows’s house, I drove home. Agatha must have still been mad at the way I'd cut her off because she gave me her version of a cold shoulder. The silent treatment didn't bother me, but the way she kept blasting the air conditioning in my face was annoying.
    It looked like Hale wasn’t going to do his job, so I’d have to do it for him. And I knew what I had to do next—look for the motive.
    In my experience, motive usually came down to three things—money, love or revenge. Evangeline had suspected her husband was having an affair, plus she’d said he was up to something at work … something to do with money. So, that’s where I’d look.
    Thankfully, computers made that kind of investigating easy, and I had the best of the best right at home.
    When I got home, Artemis was lying halfway under the Meal-A-Tron, his legs sticking out into the kitchen.
    “Artemis?” I ventured, not sure what exactly was going on.
    “Huh?” His muffled voice drifted out from under the machine. He slid out, grease on his cheek and a wrench in his hand.
    “What are you doing?”
    “Oh, just tinkering with this thing. You said the consistency of the food is not to your liking.”
    I was touched. I hadn’t actually realized that he’d noticed. “Oh, thanks. Did you fix it?”
    His brow creased and he turned back to look at the machine. “Not sure. Guess we’ll find out next time we make a meal.”
    His lack of confidence worried me, but I didn’t have time to dwell on that now. I needed to dig up some evidence on Evangeline’s husband so I could push Hale in the right direction.
    I slid the envelope out of my tote bag and slapped it onto the counter. “Anyway, I have big news and more important things for us to do.”
    The crease in Artemis’s brow deepened at the sight of the envelope. “You didn’t return that yet? I thought that was where you went.”
    “It was, but I couldn’t return it. Looks like Evangeline wasn’t exaggerating when she thought her husband was trying to kill her.” I told him about the events of the morning and my new desire to seek justice for Evangeline.
    “Just because you couldn’t return the money doesn’t mean that you have to take the case,” Artemis pointed out.
    “I’m not taking the case … not really. I just want to find some evidence to give to Hale so he’ll investigate it as a murder instead of an accident. I feel like I owe her that much.”
    “Okay. What angle were you thinking?”
    “Evangeline said her husband had just boosted up her life insurance, and the boat was an antique. Do you have any way of looking at either of those?”
    “Of course.” Artemis’s face went blank, his brows shifting up and down in an expression that I knew meant he was accessing data.
    A few seconds later, he said, “Yep, her life insurance was upped just four days ago. From five hundred thousand to three million. And the boat was insured for two hundred thousand. I checked the blue book value and that was in keeping with the value of the boat so it wasn’t over-insured.”
    “So he did change the life insurance. Hopefully, that will spurn Hale into action,” I said.
    Artemis nodded. “I took the liberty of doing a wider search and there’s another thing that Hale might find suspicious as well.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Nathan Barrows bought two one-way tickets to Star Island early this morning.”

Chapter Six
    S tar Island was in a chain of exotic man-made islands, built out of a series of synthetic reefs and lots of sand that sat in the middle of the Persian Gulf. The islands were a separate country owned by some billionaire and were out of United States jurisdiction—a nice place to vacation, but a perfect place to run off to after you’ve murdered your wife.
    The tickets were for a flight the following week and purchased at six