I swallowed my irritation. The thing to do was stall her. If Dad, Dr. Blake, and Michael were not here, they’d show up sooner or later. And surely Chief Burke would be mad enough to come looking for me before long. If I could just stall her.

I handed Timmy the limp shell of Kiki. He clutched the tattered bit of fur eagerly and began talking to Kiki in a low tone.

“Good thinking,” she said. “Keep the brat quiet.”

I turned to face her.

“You shot Jasper, didn’t you?” I said. “Was it because of the finch-laundering?”

“The what?” she asked. She sounded puzzled.

“No, I didn’t think so,” I said. “Then it was because of—” I stopped myself. Probably not a good idea to admit that I knew Jasper’s inside person in the embezzlement scheme wasn’t Karen or Nadine but Sandie. And that she’d probably killed Jasper when he got greedy and hit her up for a bigger share of the cash. And set up Karen to find the body so she’d look guilty.

I saw, very fleetingly, a smug smile cross her face. Then she frowned, and steadied the gun.

“Knock it off,” she said. “You think I’m going to stand around bragging about how clever I am until some of your family shows up? I want the thumb drive. I know Karen hid it in the brat’s stuffed toy—that’s where she always used to hide stuff from Jasper. And now it’s gone, so I know you took it. Where is it?”

“With the cops,” I said.

“Yeah, right,” she said. “You spent the last couple of days running around playing Nancy Drew, and when you find a hot piece of evidence, you turn it over to the cops.”

“I didn’t just turn it over to the cops,” I said. “I made a copy and then turned it over to the cops.”

Her face fell a little.

“Honest,” I said.

“Where’d you copy it?”

Great. Now she’d try to trash my laptop.

“And then I e-mailed it to a friend who’s a cyber expert,” I said. “To see if he could decipher it. So there’s no sense trying to find the thumb drive and collect all the copies, because they’re not even all in the state by now.”

Actually, they probably all were, unless Chief Burke had sent a copy to someone in Washington, but no sense getting her fired up to hunt down my cyber expert.

“How could you do something like that to me?” Sandie asked. Clearly she was a few ants short of a picnic.

“I wasn’t trying to do it to you,” I said. “I thought I was doing it to Nadine. In fact, with Jasper dead, there’s no one else who knows you were in on it. Blame Nadine.”

She shook her head. Ah, well; it was worth a try.

“I haven’t got much time here,” she said. “I want you to—”

We heard a knock on the door.

“Don’t answer it,” Sandie said.