Stella’s house was easy to pick out, because Leah had noticed Stella had installed a rattan shade over the left side of the porch to keep the afternoon sun off her favorite sitting spot. Leah slowed some distance before she reached the house. She couldn’t say there was something wrong. She could only feel that Stella’s email didn’t seem right. She hadn’t said the right things. It didn’t seem like a retired cop to include the complaint that she’d been trying to reach her. By training and experience, an old sergeant would have no use for complaints like that. The worst days of a cop weren’t about not getting a prompt return call.

Leah looked at the street intently, paying close attention to anything that looked like a hiding place or a firing position. The moment brought back the sense of menace she had felt on certain nights looking for homicide suspects. Each doorway, each wall, had to be noticed and evaluated. If she knocked on the next door, would a puzzled and cautious householder open it, or was there somebody on the other side who would hear the knock and fire through the door?

As Leah stared along the row of houses, she noticed the way the roots of the big old trees had lifted the concrete sidewalk squares and tilted them, so what had started as a perfectly straight walkway had become like a path in a forest.

Leah kept her speed constant, not wanting to appear to have reacted to something. She went on for another block and then turned left to get out to the business district one street over. She parked in the big lot behind a bowling alley and then trotted back across the street and past it to the front yard of the house she judged to be the one behind Stella’s. She kept moving along the side of the house to the backyard, went over the back fence, and reached the yard behind Stella’s house. Maybe she had allowed herself to become overly tense and nothing was wrong, but it wouldn’t hurt to perform a welfare check, just as she’d done hundreds of times at her job.

She went up the concrete back steps to Stella’s kitchen door and looked in. She saw nobody. The lights were off, but there was a glow from somewhere toward the front rooms, so she could tell the kitchen, the hallway leading to the stairs, and the parlor were empty. Would Stella sit in the dark to wait for her?