If it was the latter, we could be looking for a ritualistic killer, someone who liked to kill and was equally excited by patterns.

Someone who might like to do it again.

Claire made a left across a break in the oncoming traffic. A moment later, she executed a careful parallel-park maneuver between two cars on Bryant, right outside Susie’s.

She turned off the engine, turned to face me. “There’s more,” she said.

“Don’t make me beg, Butterfly.”

Claire laughed at me, meaning it took even longer for her to get it together and tell me what I was dying to know.

“The shoes,” she said. “They’re a size eight.”

“Couldn’t be. That little girl?”

“Could be and are. But you’re right that it’s crazy, Linds. Caddy Girl probably wore a size five. Those shoes weren’t hers. And the soles have never touched pavement.”

“Huh,” I said. “If they’re not her shoes, maybe those aren’t her clothes, either.”

“That’s what I’m thinking, Lindsay. I don’t know what it means, but those clothes are brand-new. No sweat stains, no body soil of any kind. Somebody carefully, I want to say artfully, dressed that poor girl after she was dead.”

Chapter 14

IT WAS STILL EARLY in the evening when Claire and I crossed the threshold to Susie’s, the boisterous, sometimes rowdy Caribbean-style eatery where a group of my friends meet for dinner every week or so.

The reggae band hadn’t yet arrived—which was fine, because when Cindy waved to us from “our” booth, I could see from her expression that she had something big on her mind.

And words were her thing.

Cindy is the hot-shit crime reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle these days. We met four years ago while I was working a particularly grisly case involving honeymoon murders, and she talked her way right into my crime scene. Her audacity and tenacity ticked me off enormously, but I came to respect those same qualities when her reporting helped me nail a vicious killer and send him to death row.

By the time Cindy crashed my next crime scene, we’d bonded and become trusting friends. I’d do anything for her now. Well, almost anything—she is a reporter after all.

Claire and I wriggled into the booth opposite Cindy, who looked both boyish and girly with her fluffy blond hair, man-tailored black suit jacket over a mauve sweater, and jeans. Her front two teeth overlap minutely, which only makes her face look even prettier. Her smile, when it comes, lights you up inside.

I flagged down Loretta, ordered a pitcher of margaritas, turned off my cell phone, then said to Cindy, “You look like you’re hatching something.”

“You’re good. And you’re right,” she said with a grin. She licked salt off her upper lip and set down her glass.

“I’ve got a lead on a story that’s going to be a bombshell,” Cindy said. “And I think I’ve got it to myself—at least for a while.”

“Do tell,” said Claire. “You’ve got the talking stick, girlfriend.”