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since Drake is gone.”
    “So he won’t be able to do the investigation alone?”
    She shrugged. “Maybe. Us uniforms are not always on top of how assignments are made.” She looked at the doctor and Lois, who had been joined by one of the paramedics. “That the guy who made the corpse?”
    “He said he felt for a pulse, didn’t find one, backed off.” I nodded toward Lois. “She has that plot. It’s really upset her, obviously.”
    Rhea shook her head. “Not a nice thing to find.” Her gaze drifted back to Rita’s body. Bruno Morales came around the corner of the equipment shed that concealed the library parking lots from the garden, and Rhea’s attention sharpened. “I’m going to check in with the man. Stick around, now.”
    She gave me a friendly smile as she turned to leave.
    “Oh, Rhea—” I caught her arm.
    “Yeah?” She shut her notebook, looking inquiringly at me.
    “There’s a woman over there.” I flicked my gaze toward Carlotta, who was watching my encounter with the police intently. “She was one of the neighbors in that case last fall, and she’s told all the gardeners I was a murder suspect and that there’s something shady about me. I’m sure you’ll hear about that as you take statements.”
    “Bit of a bigmouth, isn’t she?” Rhea regarded Carlotta with disfavor. “I’ll certainly want to take her statement. I’ll make sure she doesn’t leave.”
    She walked over to Carlotta and said something that made the older woman sputter, then went on to Lois’s plot, where Bruno was in consultation with the forensics team. Seeing Carlotta heading for me, I followed Rhea, trying to stay discreetly in the background, but close enough to the police that I could avoid Carlotta.
    Bruno squatted beside the garden plot, studying the scene. I tried not to look at Rita’s livid face, tried not to notice the dead shine of her brassy hair.
    I couldn’t hear what Bruno said, but periodically he picked up bits of stuff and handed them over his shoulder, where one of the forensics team jarred or bagged it and wrote all over the container.
    Inching closer, I heard the man with the jars address Bruno.
    “So whaddaya think, Morales? Accident?”
    I felt like an idiot. It hadn’t even occurred to me that it could be an accident. In my recent experience, unexpected death wasn’t.
    I looked closer at the scene. Rita’s body lay half in, half out of a foot-and-a-half-deep trench dug across the ten-foot width of the bed. In the French Intensive manner, the surface of the bed rose in a low mound above ground level. Obviously Lois had dug her bed within the last couple of seasons, and shouldn’t have had to do it again. This style of gardening is characterized by keeping the earth aerated, never standing directly on the dirt, loosening the soil to a depth of eighteen inches after first removing the top layer to avoid mixing it in with subsoil. Although the ground in Palo Alto is adobe clay, which most gardeners find undesirable, I think it’s great. When dug while moist, it’s rich and dark as far down as you go. Adding soil amendments makes it friable, and it holds moisture much better than the sandy soils closer to the coast.
    One of the uniforms pointed to the rake that lay at an angle on the ground, half in the path, half on the bed. “Maybe she stumbled across that and fell backwards, hitting her neck on the edge of that hole.” He shook his head. “Crazy way to garden, digging big holes.”
    “You fill each trench in when you dig the next trench.” Bruno sounded absentminded. I wasn’t too surprised that he knew the principles of double-digging. He knew a lot about a number of things. “You see how loose the soil is at this end, where the gardener has already filled the trenches?” He pushed his fingers into the soil appreciatively, then carefully patted it back down. “The soft dirt takes good impressions.”
    “But there aren’t any impressions,” the uniform argued.
    “My