“You could come back and meet my nieces after your date. Stay for dinner.”

“I have to head right back to Delray after coffee. I’m subbing for another cashier, and she can’t leave until I get there.”

“So fill me in.”

“I’ll start with the victim. His name is Vítor Calvo, Dr. Vítor Calvo from Rio de Janeiro. He is...was a plastic surgeon, well-known, apparently. His website touts him as plastic surgeon to the stars. If the online rumors are true, lots of celebrities go to his clinic in Rio to have work done, probably on the sly. What I know for sure is that he regularly scheduled seminars for potential patients at a variety of glitzy resorts with golf courses and five star restaurants. He scheduled half a dozen this year in the US alone. He had one scheduled at the Golden Aspen, and he was there relaxing and preparing.”

I digested this as she went. “Is there a theory about why he was murdered?”

“In a brief statement the sheriff said he believed robbery was the motive, because Calvo’s wallet and a valuable watch were gone, and the room had been ransacked. That’s the kind of thing he wouldn’t say out loud if he could avoid it. So it’s likely they actually think that’s true.”

While I couldn’t imagine my sister killing, even hurting, anybody, I especially couldn’t believe she’d do either for money. Bryce made a substantial income, and when our father died, Wendy would probably take over Gracey Group. As CEO she could pay herself a small fortune. For all I knew, my father had beat her to the punch and she was already filthy rich.

I felt relief, although that surprised me. Even relief felt disloyal. “Any evidence linking someone to the crime?”

“Real information is still sketchy. But we have partners in that area. And one of them knows people in the sheriff’s office.”

“Partners” were Sophie’s idea. In the planning stages of Out in the Cold, Sophie had patiently explained that some people wanted more than talk from a podcast like ours. They wanted to see photos, converse with other listeners, investigate on their own and draw up new theories. They wanted to share their results, discuss motives, means and opportunity. They wanted to help solve our crimes. So we had two choices. We could let them do this on their own, with no oversight, or we could create a club of sorts, Partners in Crime, and keep them more or less in line.

In my opinion “less” was winning, because the partners are a feisty bunch. But I was still glad that Sophie had ignored my skepticism. She’d organized groups by region, set up online bulletin boards and corralled a graduate student into taking on the job of involving our listeners in myriad acceptable ways. In the meantime, I had paid a designer to set up a website.

In addition to creating an almost fanatical interest in our show, our partners had come through for us almost immediately. In our first season, one of them had uncovered documents the state’s attorney had carefully misplaced. The case had concerned a woman convicted of her husband’s murder back in the 1990s. Three years ago DNA had exonerated her and she had been released, but both the police department in her little town and the state’s attorney’s office had refused to follow new leads. The documents were used to prove incompetence and malfeasance. We’d had to rewrite entire segments to include the new information, but our efforts had been invaluable. Interest in the case, kindled by Out in the Cold, had led to a hunt for new suspects, and the end of the state’s attorney’s career.