“Benedetto and Carpington. They came up when I was over at the Valley Forest office. Greenway, you know, the guy we bought from? He got in a bit of a discussion with this Spender guy, and those names came up.”

“Well, Carpington, I think, is the councilman for our area,” Sarah said. “In the city, I always used to know the name of my alderman and the school board members, but since we moved I don’t keep track as well. But I think that’s the guy.”

“And Benedetto?”

“That sounds familiar. Hang on—” big sigh “—let me do a library search.” I heard her hitting several more keystrokes, muttering “Come on, come on” under her breath. “Okay, it’s Tony Bennett’s real name, but that’s probably not the guy you’re looking for. There’s two other hits for this year, four for last, then, like thirty, the year before. Just a sec.” More waiting. “Yeah, here’s why I remembered the name. He’s some developer-wheeler-dealer guy, government department that was unloading tracts of land had a guy who allegedly, hang on, I’m trying to get another screenload here, okay, allegedly took kickbacks from this Benedetto guy so that his bid for the lands would be accepted. Of course, the bids were ridiculously low, then Benedetto resold the land in parcels and made ten times the money back.”

“So what happened?”

“I’m just looking ahead here. Looks like not much. There was some sort of government investigation launched, but you know how those things can go. People forget about it, it never gets wrapped up, who knows. That’s it.”

“Thanks,” I said, paused. “What time you think you’ll be home tonight?”

“Gosh,” Sarah said, “it could be late. I misplaced my keys, so the car’s probably stolen, so I could be late.” And she hung up.

Chapter 5

5

the next morning, the morning of the day that I found my first dead guy, Trixie asked me, “So what, exactly, was The Backpack Incident?” She was sitting in our kitchen, taking a sip of her coffee.

Trixie lived two doors down and, like me, didn’t head into an office every day. I try hard to be interested in what other people do for a living, but when Trixie first told me about running a home-based accounting firm, I kind of glazed over. Any occupation in which the majority of your time is spent filling in lots of forms and adding up columns of numbers is one I want to stay as far away from as possible.

We had regular curbside chats, like the ones I had with Earl, and we were dragging our garbage to the end of the drive two days after I’d decided to teach Sarah a lesson about leaving her keys in the door.

“Hey,” I said.