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slightly cooler down by the water, where the detective and the crime-scene tech found places to sit on a seawall, under the shade of a live oak tree. A few feet away the Intracoastal Waterway pounded like surf on a rocky shoreline, from all of the boat traffic passing north and south. Yachts big enough to land their own helicopters, elegant sailboats, trawlers, fishing boats, and little runabouts all jockeyed for space on the famous stretch of man-made canal.
    The story that Detective Chamblin told Martina Levin was a long one. It didn't seem to have anything to do with the murder they were investigating, but Martina Levin listened carefully anyway, feeling it was only respectful to do so, and besides, it sure beat going back into that bloody, stinking room that made her feel like retching.
    With a sarcastic twist to his mouth, Carl began his story, “Once upon a time, there was a nice girl named Allison Tobias, and she lived with her parents in Lauderdale Pines . . .”
    “What's this got to do with Mrs. Wing?” Martina dared to ask him.

    “Wait, you'll see,” he told her. “Allison was a sweetheart—”
    Everybody said so. If she had a fault, it was that she was a little too sweet, a bit too giving and generous, a shade too inclined to reach out a helping hand to anybody with a sad story, without first checking to make sure it was true.
    In 1990, she was eighteen years old, just graduated from high school in Lauderdale Pines, Florida, and though a majority of her fellow seniors were going on to college, Allison hadn't taken any entrance exams or written any applications.
    “I want to make some money first,” she told her parents, Ben and Lucy, at the end of her junior year of high school. For a semester she'd put them off whenever they wanted to sit down and talk about college, and now they understood why. “I want to work for a while, so I can pay my own expenses and don't have to be a burden on you.”
    The elder Tobiases appreciated the sentiment, and it was true that they were not wealthy people. Financing their daughter's education, even just for the two years of an associate degree, would be a major strain on their single-income budget. Ben was a thirty-year man at a lumber yard; Lucy had devoted herself to taking care of him, their little house and their child. But they suspected that what this announcement of Allie's really meant was that their daughter wanted to be able to afford to rent her own apartment, so she didn't have to live at home with them anymore, which she would have had to do if she had enrolled, as they had expected her to do, in the nearest community college.
    “I was hurt,” her mother admitted.
    But Ben Tobias remembered his own need to assert his independence when he was a teenage boy, and he remindedhis wife that they had married when they were only one year older than Allison was then.
    “She has never even dated,” Lucy objected, thinking of the perils of too much independence too soon for a girl who was shy around boys at the best of times.
    “Neither had you,” her husband retorted.
    His wife tried to smile at the good-humored jibe. “Yes, and that's just what I'm afraid of! She'll fall for the first man she meets out there, just like I did, and look where I ended up!” But then she softened it with a smile, to let Ben know that she wouldn't have had it any other way. For herself. But not for Allie. For her daughter, Lucy had other plans: college, slow maturation, a carefully thought-out career path, with marriage and children down the line at the appropriate juncture. But not now, and not anytime close to now.
    “We can't tie her to the bedpost,” Ben gently reminded her.
    Still, Lucy Tobias wouldn't hear of it, at least not without laying down a few safeguards first. She finally capitulated enough to say that she and Ben would give Allie enough funds to set up modest housekeeping if—and only if—the girl could find an apartment within walking distance of their home.