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Sahara.
    Her bathroom was beige, as well, including the fixtures and the thick terry towels. The only color in there came from an assortment of perfume bottles on the beige marble vanity. Strange. The outfit she was wearing today—black slacks and a white top and a black handbag—was colorless, too, unless he counted the blue swoosh on each of her shoes or the red highlights in her long, shiny hair.
    Still, this Simon woman didn’t strike him as colorless or neutral in any way. But what did he know? In his thirty-eight years, he’d really only known one woman well and then it turned out he hadn’t known her nearly as well as he imagined.
    “Well, I’m packed,” she announced from the bedroom doorway. “More or less.”
    Mick suspected it was more rather than less.
    While the lieutenant rearranged the crappola in the trunk of his car to make room for her two big suitcases, Shelby tried once more to contact her parents in Michigan to tell them she would be visiting them for a while. It seemed the logical, the sensible thing to do. Plus she’d been so busy that she hadn’t seen her mother and father for over a year, so she’d managed to convince herself that this exile from work at least had an upside.
    Actually, now that she’d had a little time to think about it, Shelby was almost looking forward to spending some time at the old place on Heart Lake where she’d spent every long, lovely summer of her life until she was nineteen or twenty. The huge old Victorian house had been in her family since it was built in the 1880s by her great-great-grandfather, Orvis Shelby, Sr.
    Judging from his portrait, which still hung over the fireplace in the parlor, old Orvis bore a strong resemblance to Teddy Roosevelt with his ample paunch, rugged mustache, and rimless glasses. He’d been a lumber baron on a minor scale in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, but successful enough to put together a pretty hefty fortune. His heirs, however, weren’t quite so enterprising, and by the time the fortune had passed through the hands of Orvis Jr. and Orvis the Third, all that was left for Shelby’s mother to inherit was the Heart Lake property.
    It would be gorgeous up there now, with October turning all the trees to paint-box colors and the lake to beautiful shades of gunmetal and pewter.
    She shifted around to look out the back window of the car. The lieutenant had just slammed the trunk lid, and was standing there looking typically pissed at the world in general and probably at her and her suitcases in particular, just as a red, white, and blue mail truck pulled up behind him.
    Callahan walked to the driver’s open door and said something to him that Shelby couldn’t hear. Shelby recognized the mailman. It was Joe, a tall, skinny guy in his late twenties or early thirties, who’d told her once that he always read her column and had even written to her a couple of times. It was on her advice, in fact, that Joe had decided to attend his first AA meeting. She wondered how it was going for him, but now probably wasn’t a good time to inquire.
    Right now Joe was stepping out of his vehicle onto the sidewalk, looking none too pleased with whatever Callahan had just said to him. He responded with something as loud as it was incomprehensible, then shrugged, turned to the rear of his truck, and hauled out a large canvas container marked “Canfield Towers.” That was how they delivered the tons of mail, mostly junk, to all three hundred or so residents of her building. The mailman would roll the big container into the mailroom off the lobby, then stand for at least an hour shoving the envelopes and flyers and small packages into the proper boxes.
    Callahan, still looking crabby, slid into the driver’s seat and closed the door.
    “What was that all about?” Shelby asked.
    “I wanted to make sure the post office people had put a hold on your mail,” he growled.
    “Did they?”
    He shook his head. “I have no idea. Fucking idiot said