Again, she seemed to pick up something in his tone. She sat straighter. “Only a few days,” she said. “I know I shouldn’t be so—” Again she let the sentence trail off. She looked across the desk at Keegan with her brow furrowed.

Keegan thought of the small woman who had brought them coffee that morning. “No staff?”

She shook her head. “Not after six.”

Keegan nodded. He jotted Catling on the pad of paper and then crossed it out. Honestly, how long had he looked at those photographs he’d been handed in the limo? How well had he studied the face in them? How astronomical were the odds that Eve was actually the woman Catling wanted to find? The possibility seemed too unlikely to entertain under these harsh fluorescent office lights; it was a late-night hilltop fantasy, a chimera of sleeplessness and flickering lights spread out to the horizon. It didn’t warrant ink on paper. She couldn’t be the woman Catling wanted.

“There’s more,” Eve said. “It’s actually why I came to see you.” She stopped speaking and worried her lower lip with her teeth again, like she was stitching a sentence together in her mind. “Since you left this morning, the phone has kept ringing. When I pick up, the person on the other end hangs up.” Then, as a kind of afterthought: “Uncle Nigel was at the studio today—he usually answers the phone.” Her hands, still in her lap, tugged at each other nervously. “It just kept happening,” she said, “and it frightened me. It shouldn’t have, but it did. I know what you do for a living, so I looked you up in the phone book and came down.” She glanced at Keegan pleadingly and then looked away. “You must think me a fool.”

Keegan rubbed the back of his neck. If he had to guess, the hang-up calls were from the latest of Uncle Nigel’s ‘nieces’. Whoever she was, she was probably miffed to hear another young female voice on the line and kept calling back to confront the old man about it. If that were the case, Uncle Nigel was in more immediate danger than the young woman who sat across the desk from him.

Still.

Eve tilted her head up, as if she was steeling herself against Keegan’s skepticism. “I think I’m right, you know,” she said. “Paranoid as it sounds, I think someone is watching the house.”

Keegan leaned back in his chair and lined his fingers up along the desk’s edge. “Ever hear of a man named Simon Catling?”

Eve looked genuinely confused. “No,” she said. “Maybe.” She shook her head. “Oh, I don’t know. Should I? The name sounds familiar.”

“Where might you have heard it before?” Keegan said. He was careful to keep his voice even.

“Catling?”

Keegan nodded. “Simon Catling.”