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up a little to me. Okay, maybe she hadn’t decided so much as gave in to my constant barrage of questions. Anyway, I gleaned that she had come here to Kingsley’s firm straight from college. Initially, she had loved working for her boss, but lately not so much.
    “ Why?” I asked, hoping for more than just a shrug. I had the Chinese restaurant’s number in my pocket should I need an emergency order of fried wontons.
    Turns out I didn’t need the number. Rather heatedly, Sara told me in detail the story of the rapist who had been freed because Kingsley had discovered evidence of tampering at the crime scene. She finished up with: “Yes, Mr. Fulcrum’s a good man. But he’s a better defense attorney. And that’s the problem.”
    I was sensing much hostility here. We were standing at the copier, working efficiently together, passing folders back and forth to each other as we copied them. Sara was very pretty and very young. Any man’s dream, no doubt. She was taller than me and her breasts appeared fake, but in Southern California that’s the norm and not the exception. She, herself, did not seem fake. She seemed genuine and troubled, and I suddenly knew why.
    “ You dated Kingsley,” I said.
    She looked up, startled. “Why? Did he say something to you?”
    “No. Just a hunch.”
    She passed me another folder. I removed the brackets and flipped through it, looking for papers of unusual sizes, or POUS’s, that would jam the copier. As she spoke, she crossed her arms under her large chest and leaned a hip against the copy machine. “Yeah, we dated for a while. So?”
    “So what happened?” I asked.
    “ Ask him . He broke it off.”
    “ Why?”
    “ You ask a lot of questions,” she said.
    “ It’s a compulsion,” I said. “I should probably see a shrink about it.”
    Her eyes brightened a little and she nearly smiled, but then she got a handle on herself and remembered she didn’t like me. “He said things were moving too fast for him. That he had lost his wife not too long ago and he wasn’t ready for something serious.”
    “ When did his wife die?” I asked.
    “ A few years ago. I don’t know.” She shrugged. She didn’t know, and she clearly didn’t care.
    “ Are you still angry with him?” I asked.
    She shrugged and looked away and clammed up the rest of the night. Yeah, I think she was still angry.
    We finished copying all twelve files, many of which were nearly a foot thick. Maybe within one I would find a suspect or a clue or something . At any rate, the files would give me something to do during the wee hours of the night, especially since I had recently finished Danielle Steel’s latest novel, Love Bites , a bout two vampires in love. Cute, and uncannily dead on.
    So Sara and I loaded up the files into a box and as I carried the entire thing out to the elevator, the young assistant watched me with open-mouthed admiration. I get that a lot.
    “Jesus, you’re strong,” she said as we stepped into the elevator.
    “ It’s the Pilates,” I said. “You should try them.”
    “ I will,” she said. “Oh, and I’m supposed to remind you that these files are confidential.”
    “ I’ll guard them with my life.”
    Outside, in the crisp night air, Sara said, “I sure hope you find out who shot Knighty.” She caught the indiscretion and turned beat red, her face glowing brightly under the dull parking lot lamps. “I mean, Mr. Fulcrum.”
    I smiled at her slip. “I do, too.”
    She thanked me for the Chinese food, seemed to want to tell me something else, thought better of it, then dashed off to her car. I watched her get in and back out and drive away. Just as I shoved the box into the minivan, the fine hairs at the back of my neck sprang to life. I paused and slowly turned my head. My vision is better at night. Not great, but better. I was alone in the parking lot. Check that; there was an old Mercedes parked in a parking lot across the street. A man was sitting there, and he