“I know what you mean. Can you describe him for me?”

“A male Caucasian in his midthirties, light-brown hair, average build, average height. He was wearing jeans and a dark blue parka with fur around the neck.”

“Do you think he was homeless?”

Frank shook his head. “I didn’t see anything that pointed in that direction. He was clean, his clothes were clean, and he was dressed for the weather. He just sent up red flags for me, you know? I told him to move along, and he went out to the parking lot. I didn’t see him again, and I left at midnight.”

“Is there any way he could have gotten into Heavenly Bodies?”

“That’s what I’m worried about. I should have told Tad about it when he came in at eleven, but I really didn’t think it was important. The guy was gone. That was that.”

“But now you’re giving it a second thought?”

“Yeah. The thing is, people were coming and going for Miss Ward’s birthday party, and that back door was opening and closing a lot. He could have slipped in with one of the guests.”

After Frank had left, Hannah took out her shorthand notebook and added the man in the blue parka to her suspect list. It wasn’t much to go on, but there had to be some reason he’d been hanging around the mall entrance to Heavenly Bodies. Then she closed her notebook and slipped it into her large shoulder bag, the one her mother hated and her fashionable sisters kept trying to replace.

“Ready?” Andrea asked, opening the door partway.

“Ready,” Hannah answered, hoping her coffee would hold out.

She’d gone through five people with tidbits of information for her that had proved to be less than useful. Then Delores and Carrie had come in to tell her that they’d won the karaoke contest at The Moosehead and now had a fifty-dollar credit at the bar. When the door opened and Herb walked in with Mike, Hannah hoped they’d have something interesting to tell her.

“You can go back to baking cookies now, Hannah,” Mike said with a grin that couldn’t have been any wider.

“What do you mean?” Hannah gazed from Mike to Herb and then back again.

“I reviewed the red-light camera photos from the night that Ronni was killed,” Herb explained. “The camera’s mounted by the traffic light at the mall exit, and it catches anybody running the red light to get on the freeway. It shows Mike entering the intersection on yellow at twelve thirty-five.”

“And Ronni was killed between one and two-thirty in the morning,” Hannah said, recalling the time from Doc Knight’s autopsy report.

“That’s right.” Mike gave a little nod. “The only reason the highway patrol didn’t write me up is that I was driving a patrol car.”