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“And how is Grandma doing?”
    She finally blinked. “What do you mean?”
    “I’m sure this has been a difficult day.”
    Averting her gaze, Phyllis’s pale lips thinned, her puffy eyes starting to pool with a fresh round of tears.
    I passed her the mini-packet of tissues I kept in my tote for tearful interview subjects. “I’m sorry. I know you lost someone you were close to.”
    She eyed the packet as if I’d asked her to hold the snake we’d be sacrificing after the interview.
    “I’m fine,” she stated, handing it back to me.
    Sure you are. “Then may I ask you a few questions?”
    She pushed back a curl that had escaped her helmet of dyed black hair and nodded.
    “Did you happen to see Marty yesterday afternoon?”
    “We had a little birthday celebration around one. You know, we all gathered around to wish him a happy birthday and have some cake.”
    “How’d he seem?”
    “Fine.” A sad smile pulled at the network of fine lines around her dark eyes. “Happy.”
    “No indication of any health issues?”
    She shook her head. “Absolutely none.”
    “Nothing that seemed out of the ordinary?”
    “No.”
    I wrote seemed fine in my notebook. “How would you characterize your relationship with Marty?”
    “My relationship?” She blinked, sending a tear down her cheek. “We’re friends.”
    “I understand that you and Marty used to be more than friends.”
    Sniffing, she looked like she wanted to sic that snake on me. “That was a long time ago.”
    Not that long ago. “And Marty broke it off shortly after he met Victoria.”
    “It was a mutual decision,” she said, taking a swipe at another tear.
    I didn’t believe her for a minute, but nothing she’d told me had waved any red flags. At least not yet.
    I passed her the tissues. “And that probably led to another decision to avoid spending much time with Marty after work.”
    With no resistance Phyllis reached into the mini-pack and dabbed her eyes. “I may be getting old, but I’m no fool.”
    “Tell me, considering that your relationship with Marty had cooled, I’m curious why you bought him a birthday present.”
    That same sad smile blanketed her face. “It seemed petty not to. Just because we’re not…. It doesn’t mean we can’t do something nice for one another.”
    “What did you get him?”
    “Salsa from a little shop we discovered on a trip to Arizona a few years back. We both loved the stuff, so I set it up to get a delivery every year—one for him for his birthday and one for me.”
    “So this gift wasn’t a surprise.”
    Phyllis narrowed her eyes at me as if she had just realized that I wasn’t so scary. I was just frighteningly slow on the uptake. “Hardly, not after three years.”
    “Did you have the salsa shipped to your house?” I asked.
    “No, I’ve had a problem with things disappearing from my front porch, so I had it shipped here. Arrived late last week.”
    Where someone could have had easy access to it—someone who knew that a bottle of Marty’s favorite salsa would be arriving in time for his birthday, just like it had last year and the year before that.

Chapter Five
    Twenty minutes later, I was sitting on a bench at the marina munching on Duke’s takeout, when Detective Steve Sixkiller pulled up in his unmarked Port Merritt Police cruiser.
    “What is this—a late lunch?” he asked, shading his eyes from the sun as he closed the distance between us. “You said in your text that it was an emergency.”
    “It is.” Since I could eat my way through any emergency this guy obviously didn’t know me as well as I’d thought he did.
    When the object of my first schoolgirl crush sat down next to me, I passed him the grease-stained takeout bag. “Want some fries?”
    Crossing his long legs, he reached into the bag and pulled out a couple of lukewarm french fries. “I have a meeting in a few minutes so what I want is for you to give me the short version of this emergency .”
    “Fine. If