“We’ll talk to Lucy,” Sean said. “She may have a witness to the Albright murders. Not an eyewitness, but Lucy and her people are tracking him down now.”

Max didn’t like Ryan’s analysis, though it made sense. “Harrison Monroe doesn’t get his hands dirty,” she said. “He’s a short, quiet, mild-mannered, impeccably dressed financial planner who looks the part. I don’t see him standing in front of a woman and stabbing her. I don’t see him pulling the trigger from a moving car and killing a potential witness. He’s ordering the murders, but he’s not committing them.”

“If someone comes clean we can get him on first-degree murder even if he didn’t pull the trigger. This is really a RICO case, Max, and I’ve been part of them, but it’s usually a large team of agents working multiple angles to take down as many people in a criminal organization as possible through a lot of tedious paperwork, analysis, investigation, and collecting evidence. Being a cop is not all glamour and recovering priceless artwork, sweetheart.”

“Which is why I’m not a cop,” she countered.

“You do your fair share of the unglamorous grunt work. Want to talk to Eve? She’s clamoring to say hi.”

“Am not,” Eve said from the background.

“Of course I want to talk to her.”

Sean said, “Thanks, Ryan, I’m going to call Lucy and see what’s keeping her.”

Sean stepped into the next room as Eve popped up in the Skype window next to Ryan. “When are you coming back?” she asked.

“I wish I was on a plane now,” Max said, and meant it. “This might be one of the few cases I can’t solve.”

“Stay then,” Eve said. “I don’t want you to regret not finishing it just because of me.”

“That is certainly not the reason,” Max said. “Ryan can explain all the nitty-gritty to you, but it sounds like my skills aren’t sufficient.”

“They are more than sufficient,” Ryan said. “It’s the time involved. A case like this you can’t cut corners.”

That was true, Max thought. If Ryan and Eve weren’t in her life, she’d rent a condo here in San Antonio and stay as long as necessary to finish the case. She’d done it in the past.

But now she didn’t care. Well, she cared, but not enough to uproot her life and miss out on so much time with the people she loved.

“It’ll be a couple more days,” Max said, “maybe a week. If I know Lucy is taking the case, I can walk away.”

“You must trust her.”

“I don’t trust many people to do as good a job as me, but Lucy is one of them,” Max said.

Eve said, “Maybe Ryan and I can come out there this weekend if you can’t leave.”