That’s when she noticed his shoes. He was wearing loafers. Loafers made of leather the color of butterscotch. And they were stained.

The man pushed past Emily. He got into his truck, slammed the door, and screeched off into the night. She stood there for a few moments as the smell of burnt rubber wafted over to her.

Coffee-stained loafers.

Minus the tinted glasses and the baseball cap, minus the beard and mustache (was it her imagination, or was the skin paler on his upper lip and chin, as if he’d recently shaved?), was this the man who’d run into her at Java Connection? The man whom a witness had reported hitting her car and then driving off, not in a green Ford pickup truck, but in Walter Newell’s car, which the police found abandoned later that night?

She could still hear his snarky voice: Stupid cow.

“Emily?” Frank called to her from the open screen door. “What are you doing out there?”

“Are you all right, dear?” Lila asked, coming up behind Frank. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

That was exactly what she had seen. Emily came back into the house. “Frank, how do you know that man?”

“He’s one of our clients. Why?”

Emily came inside. “I’ve seen him before. At the coffee shop when I went to get your coffee Sunday night. I think he’s Walter Newell.”

Frank’s brow furrowed. “How could it be? Walter Newell is dead.”

“Is he?”

“Didn’t his wife identify his body?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t talked to her.”

“It’s not as if she was looking at skeletal remains. She’d know, wouldn’t she?”

She certainly would. “Would they go on that?” Emily asked. “Just her say-so?”

“What are you getting at?”

“Maybe she wants people to think he’s dead. I don’t know, sometimes wealthy people need to disappear. Maybe it was an act, Quinn telling me how much she hated being married to him.”

“Seriously?” Frank looked at her, slack-jawed. “She came right out and said that?”

Emily squirmed. Her conversations with clients were supposed to be confidential.

Frank waved his hand as if it didn’t matter. “Okay, so suppose the dead man’s not Walter Newell. Then who is he? How come no one’s reported him missing? You can’t just pick up a spare corpse at Whole Foods.”

“What makes you so sure that someone else hasn’t been reported missing?”

“Whoa. Time out.” Frank reared back. “That guy who just left here? He’s one of Ryan’s clients.”

“And Ryan’s the one who recommended us to Quinn Newell.”

Frank stared out through the screen to the street where the green truck had been parked. “You’re sure that’s the man from the coffee shop?”

Emily was about to explain about the shoes when her phone pinged with a text message.