By breakfast time we had our list of victims, insurance claims and beneficiaries. None screamed “murder for money.” Carson Morrow’s wife would collect his, but it was only fifty thousand, not nearly enough when you had two kids and he was the family breadwinner. Mary Lee’s family would collect a quarter of a million. A tidy sum…if it wasn’t to be divided among five children and eleven grandchildren. Leon Kozlov’s ten-thousand-dollar policy would cover burial costs, with little left over.

So far, the cases didn’t seem to support an insurance-based theory. Maybe Morrow’s wife had other reasons to kill him, and the insurance money would just be a bonus. Maybe multiple members of Lee’s family had conspired to have her murdered. Maybe Kozlov had a richer policy elsewhere.

Then there was Alicia Sanchez, whose coverage did raise red flags. I wasn’t certain, but I suspected that insurance on an unmarried college student was relatively rare. And a quarter of a million dollars went way beyond burial costs. I couldn’t imagine any parent killing his child for insurance money. But Sanchez did have two brothers, one with a criminal record. One way to get a “loan” from Mom and Dad would be to make sure they had the money to lend. And after grieving for one child, they’d be reluctant to refuse to help another. Not a perfect theory, but something worth further investigation.

Midmorning, we left to visit Evelyn’s Nikolaev family contact. She pulled into the driveway of a town house complex, less than an hour from her place.

“That was quick.”

“At your age, you want to keep lots of distance between you and your colleagues, so no one makes the connection. By our age, no one cares anymore, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to get together for coffee when you don’t live five states apart.”

She turned from one short, narrow road onto another, heading for the rear of the complex.

“Maggie and Frances are a couple girls I know from way back. Not girls anymore, mind you. They’re more retired than I am, but they still dip their hands in when the rocking-chair life gets dull. Not hitwomen, of course—there were never more than a few of us around. Maggie and Frances used to—” A smile played at her lips. “I’ll let them tell you. They’ll like that.”

I scanned the town houses. The sign out front said they were condos, but the units had that run-down “don’t-give-a-shit” look that I always associate with temporary residents. The one Evelyn pulled up in front of, though, shone with pride of ownership. The shoe-box-size front lawn had been replaced with a perennial garden, English-cottage style. There were cobblestones instead of crumbling walk-ways. A well-maintained, ten-year-old Honda sat under the carport, atop a cracked, but recently resealed, driveway.

“So they both live here?”

“They’re partners.”