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the truth. Tell me right now.”
    “I’ll tell you.” Abby took a breath. “You’re right. I’m a reporter. For a newspaper.”
    “I knew it. I always know. Which paper is it, this time?”
    “The
L.A. Times
.”
    “You work for them?”
    “I’m what they call a stringer. A freelancer.”
    “How did you find me?”
    Abby formulated a vague but—she hoped—plausible lie. “I was working another story, and your name came up.”
    “My name? Why would my name enter into it?”
    “I can’t reveal my sources.” It sounded like something a journalist would say.
    Andrea gave her a sharp look. “Your sources. Oh, for God’s sake. You act so ethical, and yet you gained admittance to my home under false pretenses. To spy on me. To write one of your damn stories!”
    “I was going to tell you—”
    “When?”
    “When we’d established a rapport.”
    The woman snorted, a sudden sharp noise like a gunshot. Abby managed not to jump at the sound.
    “Rapport. When you’d gained my trust, you mean. Fooled me into trusting you.”
    “I guess so.”
    “You people—you disgust me.”
    “Could you put down the gun now, please?”
    “I ought to shoot you dead, you little bitch.”
    “I’m just doing my job.”
    “Your job. Your job is to ruin lives. People like you have been after me for twenty years. For twenty years—do you know what that’s like, never to be left alone, never to have any peace?”
    “I’m sorry,” Abby said.
    “Ought to shoot you in your lying heart,” Andrea hissed, but there was no more passion in her voice, and the gun was lowering. “Your car is fine, of course.”
    “Yes.”
    “And when you used my phone to call Triple A—”
    “I didn’t really make the call. I faked it.”
    “You’re quite the actress, aren’t you?”
    Abby didn’t answer.
    “Get out. Get out of my house.”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “You think I’m a sideshow for your readers’ amusement? You think I’m a freak?”
    “No, I don’t.”
    “You do. You all do. Well, go and write about me. Go tell them I’m as crazy as they thought. Tell them I’m a psychopath. That’s what you think, isn’t it?”
    “I didn’t say that.”
    “Get
out
,” Andrea said again.
    Abby got out. She didn’t look back until she was pulling away from the curb. She expected to see Andrea Lowry in the doorway or window, watching her go, but the door was closed, and the curtains remained shut.
    Abby released a slow breath. “That went well,” she mumbled.
    She’d managed to alienate the woman she was trying to befriend. Not that alienating Andrea Lowry was hard to do. She was afraid of people—reporters in particular. Had they really been after her at some point in her life, or was that just part of some megalomanic drama she was acting out?
    Near the freeway entrance Abby pulled into a convenience store parking lot and dictated notes into the microcassette recorder she always carried in her purse.
    “Hostile ... paranoid ... fixated on reporters. Claims they’ve been harassing her for twenty years. Has a gun—Colt thirty-eight. Keeps it in a kitchen drawer near the sink. She looked like she knew how to use it. And she was wearing a wig at the town hall meeting, so whoever she is, she’s afraid of being recognized. Afraid of a lot of things. And not likely to talk to me again.”
    That was the bottom line. Her job was to get close to this woman, gain her trust. She’d failed.
    Abby didn’t like failure. And she knew Jack Reynolds didn’t, either.
    Still, she had more facts than she’d had before. She knew the woman’s name and address. Soon she would know much more.
    ***
    Or maybe she wouldn’t. Information on Andrea Lowry turned out to be perplexingly difficult to find.
    Nestled in the workstation in her bedroom, Abby had spent two hours on her computer, hopping from one Internet database to another. A reverse directory listed Andrea as the sole resident at the Keystone Drive address. More exotic research