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“I’m just telling the truth, and you know it!” Once more he shoved his finger in Leah’s face; then he turned around and strode across the patio to a gate in the whitewashed, six-foot-high fence that surrounded the pool area.
    “I think you should stick around, Kevin,” Savannah called after him. “Detective Coulter will probably need to speak to you and...”
    But Kevin Connor already had the gate open and was on his way out. “I’m just going to walk on the beach for a few minutes,” he said, “and when I get back I want her off my property.”
    He slammed the gate behind him and the sound echoed across the patio. The pup whined again and plastered herself against her mistress’s leg.
    Neither woman spoke for a few long, tense moments. Then Savannah quietly said, “He’s distraught.”
    “He isn’t the only one,” Leah replied. Now that Kevin had disappeared, her façade began to crumble and tears filled her eyes. “Cait was more than my client; she was my friend. For years. I can’t believe she’s dead.”
    “I’m sorry for your loss,” Savannah told her, thinking of all the times she had uttered those words and how it never got any easier. Being with people in some of the worst moments of their lives had taken a toll on her. Sometimes she felt like forty-something going on ninety.
    Sometimes—like when a beautiful, vivacious young woman lay dead upstairs on her bathroom floor—it was hard to remember that the world was a good place to spend your allotted years of life.
    A sound from inside the house caught Savannah’s attention, and she looked beyond Leah Freed to see the technicians carrying a gurney up the steps. In a little while, they would be coming back down with Caitlin Connor’s body. And that was a sight that the victim’s agent and longtime friend should be spared.
    Besides, Savannah was pretty certain from the look in Kevin Connor’s eyes when he left that he meant it when he said that Leah had better be gone when he returned.
    Dirk wouldn’t be too happy about her hanging around a potential crime scene either.
    “You really shouldn’t be here, Leah,” she told her. “Did you see the yellow barricade tape outside when you came in?”
    Lean glanced uneasily over her shoulder and shook her head. “Ah, not really. I... ah...”
    “Or that big handsome police officer who shouldn’t have let you in?”
    “Um... well... he was busy with those guys in the white uniforms and a lady who I think might have been the coroner. I told him I was a friend of the family, and he said it was okay for me to come inside.”
    She was lying. After what seemed like a million years of being lied to at least fifty times a day by seasoned professional liars, Savannah didn’t need any sort of lie-detector equipment to figure out when she was getting the shuck put on her.
    Leah Freed had sneaked in. Pure and simple. And now she was lying through her teeth about it.
    Savannah’s cop radar registered a blip on her mental screen. “Why, exactly, did you drop by?” she asked the agent.
    “What?”
    Stalling for time, Savannah thought. When you can't think of anything to say, ask a question. It was an old trick most often used by wayward husbands. But occasionally women used it, too.
    “I said... why are you here? Why did you come by the house?”
    “Oh.” She toyed with the pup’s leash several more seconds before answering. “I was just out for a walk with Susie here. I live a few blocks over, and sometimes I take evening walks in this direction. I saw the police cars and...”
    “And?”
    She shrugged. “And I was wondering if everything was okay, you know, with Cait.”
    “Hmm. I see.” Savannah did see. She saw the seven hundred dollar, high-heeled Italian sandals on Leah Freed’s meticulously pedicured feet and knew damned well that she hadn’t been out for an evening stroll up and down santly beach streets in those fancy clodhoppers. Not on your life.
    “I should probably be