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elite. His father was a close friend of her father's, which meant she'd known Joel forever. They were the same age, he'd been part of the wild crowd of rich kids she'd run with in high school, and back then they'd dated for just long enough so that he'd been the one to take her to her senior prom. When he'd asked her out not long after she'd gotten back to town, she'd seen no reason not to say yes. Since then, she'd been seeing more and more of him. He'd made it pretty clear lately that he wanted to take things to the next level--i.e., he wanted them to have sex--but she wasn't quite ready for that. In her experience, sex plus guys added up to big, messy drama sooner or later, and she had too much on her plate right at the moment to indulge in what--unless she meant to stay in Lexington permanently, which she didn't--couldn't ever be more than a fling.
    "How was your flight?" she asked.
    "Fine. Did you get your car fixed?"
    "I'm driving it home right now."
    "That's good. Anything interesting happen at work?"
    Lisa thought about telling him that she'd nearly been fired, but that would mean bringing Scott into it and, given that the two had never liked each other, that would involve a more intense conversation than she wanted to have. Instead, she told him about the Garcia file and how much she resembled Angela Garcia.
    "Before you start reading all kinds of things into it, you probably ought to take a closer look at that picture." Joel's voice was dry. "A blurry Polaroid doesn't sound too reliable."
    "I brought the file home with me. I could drop the picture off at Walgreens on the way into work tomorrow and have it copied and enlarged." The idea had just occurred, but it was a good one.
    "Sounds like a plan," Joel said. Then Lisa heard someone say something in the background, and he added, "Dad says hi."
    "Tell him I say hi back," Lisa responded. Sanford Peyton had never been one of her favorite people--besides being a friend and business associate of her father's, he tended to treat Joel as if he were ten years old and incompetent, and had always seemed to disapprove of her--but she could be polite.
    "Listen, I've got to go. I'll be back late tomorrow. Don't forget we're going to the country club on Saturday if I don't see you before then. I'll pick you up at seven."
    "I'll be ready." Lisa said good-bye and disconnected. The coming Saturday was the Fourth of July, and the club sponsored an annual buffet, dance, and fireworks display in honor of the holiday. It was a popular event, always crowded and always fun. Most of her friends who were still in town would be there. She only hoped nothing came up at work to keep her from going. Weekends, particularly Saturdays, seemed like something of a theoretical concept to nearly everybody in the prosecutor's office.
    The Fourth of July was a national holiday, however, which should mean something. If not, she would just plan to lie through her teeth about the reason she couldn't work if she was asked to.
    Turning over possible foolproof excuses, she was absentmindedly watching the antics of a field full of frisky yearlings when the Jaguar hit a pothole and died. Just like that. Bump and out.
    "Oh, no," she moaned, listening to the complete cessation of engine noise with dismay.
    She barely had time to steer the car to the side of the road before it stopped dead.
    "Piece of junk," she muttered.
    Shifting into park just because she thought she should, she looked despairingly at the fuel gauge in hopes that the fix could be as simple as that. No such luck: The thing read full, so unless the gauge was as faulty as nearly everything else on the car, the cause lay elsewhere. Probably, Lisa thought, in the transmission the dealership had supposedly just fixed. The car wasn't even hers. It was her mother's. Martha Grant had always driven a Jaguar, time without end, and this was the last one she had bought before she had started to exhibit the symptoms that eventually led to her being diagnosed