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system for her clients, but, of course, hadn’t developed one yet.
    “Why don’t you ask Christiana?”
    Something outside had captured Francine’s attention. She nodded again, and then pushed past her and went outside.
    Jane followed her out, but hung back by the door.
    Francine crossed the yard and entered the detached garage. The window was dirty, but it lit up a second after Francine went in.
    Jane followed, but didn’t go in, and tried to keep her head away from the window. She listened, but it was quiet.
    The door creaked open. Jane ducked around the corner of the wall and hoped Francine wouldn’t notice her.
    Francine shut the door, a fluffy white cat cradled in her arms. “Christiana would kill me if she knew I had let you out,” she murmured as she rubbed the cat’s head.
    Jane sighed, disappointed. It looked like she’d have to start the job cleaning, like Francine said, and hope that clues would make themselves apparent.
    The house was a great deal messier than she had expected, considering she had figured Christiana Malachi lived there alone.
    Jane hadn’t wondered about the dishes piled in the kitchen sink. Surely the Malachi Ministries task force and other random staff had been in and out of the house for days.
    She washed them up, paying close attention to the knives, but there was a knife for each spot in the block.
    But the bedrooms and hall bath upstairs told a different story. The rug in the bathroom was damp, as was the shower curtain. Jane squeegeed the bath. Not that you needed secret clues to find out who was staying here. Francine ought to have provided her with that information already.
    Once the bathroom was clean, she knocked on the first bedroom door. There was no answer, so she let herself in.
    The room reeked of sweat socks and stale food, which was no surprise since there were plenty of both littering the floor.
    The smell, mess, and piles of laundry implied a male of the teenage variety was occupying the room. Jane dug through the desk drawer to see if she could ID the occupant. She shuffled through the pile of scratch paper and stubby pencils until she found a crumpled-up receipt.
    She smoothed it out and laid it under the desk light. Two weeks old. From Safeway. Muscle Milk, three-meat pizza, and Red Bull. That looked like food an adolescent boy would eat. She scrounged in the drawer again and came up with a scrap of paper that had half a phone number on it—not a local area code. She put her finds back and shut the drawer.
    She whipped open a garbage sack and started in on the garbage, mostly food wrappers. Once she had excavated the floor, she set her little silver Roomba to work and opened his closet. The owner of the room didn’t have much hanging, just one black church suit and two white shirts. But he did have a coat hanger with three ties on it. The bright orange tie Jane was sure she recognized from the online video. So, if she could isolate the guy with the orange tie, she would be able to ID the first roommate at the Malachi house. She made the bed and moved to the next room.
    The second room had a deeper layer of trash, and cleaning the garbage off of the desk would be a perfect excuse to dig around. Something crunched under her foot as she stepped into the room. She cringed. Snooping would have to wait until the potato-chip sacks, hamburger wrappers, paper coffee cups, and all of the greasy napkins went in the garbage.
    She let the Roomba range freely in this room too, so that no matter who happened in, they would find her actively cleaning.
    The mess on the desk was promising. She lifted a composition book that sat on top of paperbacks and notebooks. The pages were dated, but hard to decipher. Sermon notes? Journal? Both? The handwriting was definitely masculine, but the dirty laundry lying all over the room made that clear enough. A page dated February 22 was especially difficult to read, but that made her want to try harder. Some of the words had been etched deeply