“Okay. She’s a drug sniffer, I guess. I shouldn’t touch her, right? Kinda cute, isn’t she? Should I bring her some water? Sparkling or flat?”

I had my first grin of the week, then had another when I saw Claire waiting for me at a table at the back of the long, narrow garden enclosed by ivy-covered walls.

I hugged her. She hugged me. I just couldn’t get enough of that hug. When we finally broke apart, Claire bent and kissed Martha on the nose, making my little pal all waggle-tailed and squirmy. Martha really hearts Claire.

We sat at the nice long table in the corner of the patio, and Claire moved her newspapers out of the way — but not quick enough.

“Hey, let me see those.”

I read the headlines.

The Post: “Another revenge killing at Zeus,” by Jason Blayney. The Chronicle: “Suspect held in House of Heads mystery,” by Cindy Thomas.

“It’s true: you can run but you can’t hide.” I handed the papers back to Claire, who said, “So what’s the latest with you and Joe?”

“You go first, butterfly. I can’t talk until after I’ve had hot chocolate and gingerbread pancakes.”

“I haven’t been to bed,” Claire said. “Can you tell?” Now that she mentioned it, I realized that she was wearing scrubs.

I said, “Tell me what’s going on.”

“Where should I start? Yesterday, seven p.m. We’ve got a full house, of course. Among my other patients, I’ve got a seventeen-year-old boy on the table. Contact muzzle stamp on his temple and soot in the entrance wound. It’s a clear suicide, but his parents aren’t accepting it. Everything I say, they come back with ‘No, Davey would never do that.’”

“The doors show any signs of a break-in?”

“I asked the same thing. They said, ‘No, but maybe someone came in through the window.’ He’s got GSR on his hands, Lindsay. I took a sample for testing, just to be safe, but the windows are locked from the inside. It’s obvious and it’s heartbreaking — and then, here comes Mr. Dickenson.

“He’s got a history of high blood pressure; he starts to feel lethargic and blacks out. His wife gets him to the hospital, and he’s two minutes from a CT scan, which would confirm he’s having a stroke, but no, he codes in the hallway.

“So now Mr. Dickenson is coming in through the back door of the morgue and I have to do an autopsy he wouldn’t have needed if he’d coded two minutes later. Meanwhile, Davey’s family won’t leave, still insisting that their son was murdered.”

We took a time-out to order breakfast from our waitress, then Claire picked up where she’d left off.