I didn’t care about Greg Hewitt or his credentials, if he had any. I didn’t care where he had come from or why. I decided he was probably more greedy than good. That was all right with me. Greed is honest. Greed is understandable. Greed I was willing to pay for.

I had no faith in his ability to find Leslie. If all the king’s horses and all the king’s men hadn’t been able to do it with all the investigative and forensic tools at their disposal, how was a down-on-his-luck PI supposed to do it?

He hadn’t, of course. He had come and gone in and out of my life for several months while he interviewed witnesses who had already been interviewed a dozen times, while he tracked down Roland Ballencoa and watched his habits. He had broken into Ballencoa’s house in San Luis Obispo, but found nothing. He had followed Ballencoa for several days, but learned nothing—until he learned that Ballencoa was moving to Oak Knoll.

I never told anyone about Greg Hewitt. I never met him at my home. I never let him meet Leah. I never spoke of him to friends. While he was good-looking and roughly charming, there was something about him that was just slightly off-putting for me. There was something about him that was a little sleazy, a little edgy. Or maybe what I pinned on him was really just a reaction to my own distaste for the depths to which I was willing to go.

I asked him to get me Ballencoa’s new address in Oak Knoll. That would be the last thing I would want from him. He didn’t like the direction my mind was going. I suspected he didn’t like my intention to sever what business relationship we had. He wanted to hang on. It was no secret that Lance and I had money. It was also no secret to me that Greg Hewitt wanted money. I was willing to give it to him. But he had wanted more than money.

In his mind he had some notion that there might be something between us—if not romantically, certainly sexually. He was the kind of man who equated sexual conquest with control. As if his prowess would be such that I would fall under his spell, and we would become like the two-dimensional characters of a 1950s pulp fiction detective novel.

I believed no such thing. I wanted no such thing. Nor did I want him. I hadn’t been with any man other than my husband since my early college days. I hadn’t wanted to be. What I wanted was Roland Ballencoa’s address, and no one else was going to get it for me.

Desperate people do desperate things.