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was dirty white and looked like it might have been a handkerchief. Stevie and Fitzpatrick bent closer but Lucy put a hand between them and the victim. ‘I need to remove it in a protected environment.’
    Fitzpatrick straightened with a scowl. ‘We know, we know, back at the morgue. Look, he probably doesn’t, but at least see if he’s got a wallet in his breast pocket.’
    ‘That I can do.’ Lucy probed the man’s chest with her fingertips, then flinched, her hands stilling abruptly when what she felt wasn’t anywhere close to being right.
    ‘What else?’ Stevie asked in a tone that said she really didn’t want to know.
    Lucy pressed a little harder against the beige trench coat to be sure. Once again there was no resistance where there should have been a ribcage. This is very bad .
    ‘They’re not supposed to do that, are they?’ Fitzpatrick asked blandly. ‘I mean, your fingers sinking into his chest like that.’
    ‘No, they’re not.’ She looked up grimly. ‘I don’t know if this is your cause of death or not, but there’s a big hole here where his heart used to be.’
    Stevie let out a breath. ‘I think this guy just moved to the top of your priority list.’
    Lucy nodded. ‘Indeed.’

Monday, May 3, 8.15 A.M.
    Clay Maynard hung up his phone with a frown. He’d had one hell of a night last night and this morning wasn’t looking much better.
    ‘Well?’ his assistant asked from the doorway of his office.
    ‘Evan missed checking in both last week and this morning, he’s not answering his cell, and he’s not where he’s supposed to be. The foreman at the construction site just said he never showed up for work last week so he fired him. What did you find?’
    ‘The landlord of the place Nicki rented in his new name said he hasn’t shown up yet.’ Alyssa Moore bit her lip. ‘This doesn’t sound good. Could Margo have found him?’
    ‘Not if he did what Nicki told him to do.’ A headache was brewing. ‘He said Margo would kill him if she found him.’
    ‘She’s already tried twice. Maybe three times was her charm.’
    ‘Dammit,’ Clay hissed. ‘We gave him a new life. All he had to do was claim it.’
    Alyssa sat in the chair next to his desk, crossing long legs that made his headache even worse. He’d been engaged to her older sister Lou four years ago when he first met Alyssa. Back then Alyssa had been a scrawny tomboy always getting into scrapes. Now she was a leggy eighteen year old getting into a whole different kind of trouble, which was why Lou asked him to hire her as his assistant. Though Lou and he called off their wedding, they’d stayed close – close enough that she didn’t mind hitting him up for favors, like keeping an eye on her baby sister.
    Luckily Alyssa was a decent assistant, because keeping his promise to keep her out of trouble was turning out to be a lot more trouble than Clay had bargained for.
    ‘Do you mind ?’ he snapped at Alyssa, gesturing to her skirt. ‘I pay you enough to buy clothes with more material than that.’
    Alyssa rolled her eyes and tugged at the skirt. ‘Oh my God. You sound just like Lou. Or my dad. I’m not sure which is worse.’
    ‘I don’t know,’ Clay muttered. ‘They both carry a gun.’
    Alyssa’s older sister and father were cops. Lou was a Maryland sheriff and Mr Moore had retired from a Boston beat. That Clay was a former cop was the reason Mr Moore had allowed his younger daughter to come to work at Clay’s PI agency.
    That and he’d wanted his daughter as far away as possible from the teenaged Romeo who Alyssa had been convinced she couldn’t live without. One month in Baltimore and Alyssa had forgotten all about the boy back home. Unfortunately, she’d discovered a whole new crop right here. But that was the least of Clay’s concerns.
    ‘You didn’t mind my skirt last night,’ she said. ‘That creep never even suspected you were planting a tracker under his car. He was too busy staring at my