The kitchen was infested with cockroaches. Coop had never seen so many. Hundreds of them scattered from the light he’d just turned on. They scampered across the floor, the counters, along the stovetop. A pale-faced Tony was huddled in the hallway, right outside the door. “An exterminator’s on his way. We’re going to have to close down for at least a week.”

Wonder Woman took one look at the insect bedlam and headed for the hallway, too. “I am so out of here.” She spun back. “If any of those get up in my apartment, you’re a dead man.”

***

Coop barged into her apartment a few hours later. She was sitting on her couch, curled over her laptop. The exterminator was already at work downstairs, but Tony had been right. They’d be closed at least a week. Exactly seven days too long.

“You’d better have shaken out your clothes before you came in here,” she said.

He stalked across the room. “You’re one hell of a bodyguard.”

“I’m not your bodyguard, remember? And I’ve been doing what I had to do.”

“Hiding from a few bugs?”

She shuddered. “I’m not proud of myself.”

There it was again. That refusal to defend herself over anything she perceived as a personal weakness.

“I’ve been doing some research,” she said as he started to pace. “You can buy cockroaches by the hundreds on the Internet. Did you know their severed heads can survive if they’re refrigerated? Only for a few hours, but still.”

“I didn’t know that. And I wish I didn’t know it now.”

“I’ll start tracking down dealers tomorrow, but finding out who placed the order is a long shot. They even sell them on Amazon.”

But his mind wasn’t on Amazon, and neither was hers. “With Keith out of the picture,” she said, “we both know who the next most logical suspect is.”

He didn’t ask who she meant. He knew.

She closed the lid on her laptop, stared at it for a moment, then rubbed her eyes. “He’s in Miami.”

16

South Beach was a twenty-four-hour carnival of swaying palms; Latin rock music; Easter-egg-colored art deco buildings; and shapely, long-haired women strolling along Ocean Drive with hoop earrings the size of bracelets and colorful thongs showing through tight white shorts. She and Coop arrived early the next afternoon at the Setai hotel, a Collins Avenue sepulcher serving the very wealthy, where Coop had booked a suite with a nightly room rate that could have bought her a set of tires and a new laptop.