“And thanks so much for the coffee.”

“Oh, anytime, sweetness. Would you like some breakfast?”

Not if I planned to make it through the day. “Oh, no, I couldn’t ask you to do that. I need to get in the shower, anyway. Big day ahead.”

She leaned in and grinned conspiratorially. I often wondered if her hair had been that blue in real life, or if it was an effect of her being incorporeal. “You goin’ after some bad guys?”

I chuckled. “You know it. The baddest.”

She sucked in a dreamy breath. “Ah, to be young and reckless. But really, pumpkin,” she said, sobering and leveling a very serious stare on me, “you need to stop getting your ass kicked. You look like hell.”

“Thanks, Aunt Lil,” I said, easing off the stool with a grimace, “I’ll keep that in mind.”

She smiled, revealing an empty cavern where her dentures had been. Apparently, they didn’t make it to the other side. I’d never been sure if Aunt Lillian knew she was dead or not, and I never had the heart to tell her. I really should, though. I finally had a coffeepot that worked, and my departed great-great-aunt decided to make herself useful.

“By the way, how was Nepal?” I asked.

“Ugh,” she said, raising her hands in helplessness, “humid and hotter than a june bug in August.”

Since the departed weren’t affected by the weather, I had to hold back a grin.

Just then, Cookie crashed into the apartment, took one look at me, and rushed forward, her sky blue pajamas skewed and crinkled. “I fell asleep,” she said in a breathless rush.

“Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do at night?”

“No,” she said, looking me over with a mother’s eye, “well, yes, but I meant to check on you hours ago.” She leaned forward and peered into my eyes. Why, I had no idea. “Are you okay?”

“I’m alive,” I said. And I meant every word.

Only half convinced, she smoothed her pajama top and looked around. “Maybe I should make us some coffee.”

“Why?” I asked, my tone accusatory. “So you can slip me another roofie?”

“What?”

“Besides,” I said, indicating Aunt Lillian with a nonchalant nod of my head. “Aunt Lil already made coffee.”

I watched—and tried really hard not to giggle—as Cookie’s hopes for a caffeine high were dashed on the mocking rocks of irony. She hung her head and took the cup I handed her. “Thanks, Aunt Lillian. You’re the best.”

She’s a trouper, that one.

* * *

I set Cookie on the arduous task of going through Mark Weir’s court transcripts—which Uncle Bob had left on my desk—and checking Barber’s flash drives. Hopefully Barber wasn’t into fetishes. And if he was, hopefully he wasn’t into leaving evidence of such a thing on a flash drive where anyone could find it. Those things were much better off in a password-protected file buried deep in the underbelly of one’s hard drive with an inconspicuous file name. Something like Hot Firefighters in Love. For example.

My cell broke out into a chorus of Beethoven’s Fifth, and I did the find-the-needle-in-the-haystack thing while cruising at ninety in a seventy-five, marveling at how a cell phone could make itself so obscure in one tiny handbag.

“Hey, Ubie,” I said after a three-hour search.

“Must you call me that?” he asked in a groggy voice. He seemed almost as caffeine deprived as I was.

“Yep. I got the files you put on my desk. Cookie’s going through everything now.”

“And what are you doing?”

“My job,” I said, pretending to be offended. As badly as I wanted to ask him about Reyes’s conviction, I wanted to be face-to-face, where I could read his every expression. Or read things into his every expression, whichever worked best to my advantage. I still couldn’t believe he was lead detective on Reyes’s case. What were the odds?

“Oh, okay,” he said. “They found a partial on the shell casing from the Ellery site.”

“Really?” I asked, suddenly hopeful. “Did you get a hit?”

“This isn’t CSI, sweetheart. Things don’t happen quite that fast ’round these parts. We should know by this afternoon if it’ll get us anywhere.” He yawned loudly, then asked, “Are you in your Jeep?”

“Sure am. I’m headed to the prison in Santa Fe to check out some intel.”

“What intel?” he asked, suspicion altering his voice.

“It’s … another case I’m working on,” I hedged.

“Oh.”

That was easy.

“Hey, what does bombázó mean?”

“Uncle Bob,” I said reproachfully, “have you been in that Hungarian chat room again?” I tried really hard not to giggle, but the thought of some Hungarian chick calling Ubie “the bomb” was just too much. I cracked up regardless.

“Never mind,” he said, annoyed.

I laughed harder.

“Call me when you get back to town.”

After he slammed down the phone, I closed mine and tried to focus on the road through my tears. My reaction was insensitive and uncalled for. I thought this as I doubled over the steering wheel in laughter, holding my aching ribs.

It took me a few moments to sober, but at least laughing at Ubie’s expense was better than pining over Reyes like I’d been doing all morning. Unfortunately, my hour-long shower—while revealing exactly how black and blue I was becoming—didn’t lend any insight as to why he wouldn’t have shown up last night. But the closer I got to the Penitentiary of New Mexico, the more optimistic I became. Surely this place would have some answers. Then I drove up to the gates of the maximum-security prison, and my optimism morphed into a crackly kind of sweat-induced pessimism.