The murder of Alan Becker had brought a lot of risk, but she’d made sure there wouldn’t be recordings from the surveillance cameras in the building. She had covered all the protective domes over the cameras without letting her face be seen by any of them. She had been dressed like a man, and the vest and hooded sweatshirt had covered all the parts of her that might suggest she wasn’t one. She’d worn gloves, met nobody coming in or out, and had disguised the number on the license plate on the rear of the van she’d used. Leaving the body in the stairway meant there wouldn’t be much contact with it. When the authorities realized that Michael Miller was Alan Becker, they would still not imagine she was the one who had killed him. It was a man who had looked like a workman.

Her biggest form of protection would be her past life. Nobody would see her as a possible suspect unless she got caught in the act. She had been a popular and successful officer in the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, and still had people there who had been sorry to see her go. A couple of them were now high-ranking commanders.

A background investigation would reveal that her salary, expenditures, and savings were all in balance. She’d always made more than she spent, but the surplus would not raise any eyebrows. She had an excellent record of arrests and convictions in Weldonville, having solved and brought to conviction all four homicides that had happened during her time, and done a good job on cases of all kinds. She had always found that a homicide investigator could learn plenty about people by examining credit reports and public records of births, marriages, divorces, inheritances, and name changes. A background report on Leah would have yielded nothing.

When she investigated a suspect, she searched for gossips and detractors. It wouldn’t work on her because she didn’t attract that kind of attention. When she was young, there had been a certain amount of interest in her. She had been a minor local celebrity since she had gotten tall enough to dunk a basketball in high school games. For a while people had assumed she’d meet some male player at the University of Colorado, marry him, and raise a few very tall children. When that didn’t happen, some people just assumed that she was a lesbian who wasn’t interested in making any announcements about it. When she became a state cop, hours away from Weldonville in Denver, people forgot about her personal life.