Eve checked the time on her phone as she went downstairs. It was 7:00 a.m. She’d been asleep for twelve hours and probably would have slept for a few more if not for the wake-up call. She quickly checked her recent calls to see if she’d slept through Duncan trying to reach her and was relieved to see that she hadn’t. On the other hand, it meant the warrant still hadn’t come through.

She opened the door and Jen Ronin bounded in, clutching a brown paper bag. Her mom was dressed in a vibrantly colorful, busy blouse from Chico’s that looked like a Jackson Pollock painting and purple capri pants that could have been stolen from Mary Tyler Moore’s dressing room on the original Dick Van Dyke Show. Jen was beautiful once, but too much bad plastic surgery gave her face the sculpted edges of a mannequin and a pair of hard, upright boobs to match.

“This place is like visiting the IKEA store only with less warmth and personality.” Jen kissed her daughter on the cheek. “Would it kill you to put a picture on the wall?”

“I don’t spend that much time here.”

“I don’t blame you. Prison cells are better decorated. I know. I was in one.”

Eve closed the door. “Being an extra in a women-in-prison movie is nothing like a real prison.”

“What do you know?” Her mom dismissed the criticism with a wave of her hand.

“I spent a year as a deputy at the county jail.”

“Not in the Deep South, honey. It’s a different world there. I was in a chain gang in a swamp. They don’t have swamps in LA.”

“You shot the movie in Burbank.”

“Do you always have to argue with me about everything?”

Eve’s shoulders were tensing up already. She didn’t like the terse, uptight person she became when her mother was around but she couldn’t help it. “What are you doing here, Mom? It’s seven a.m. on a Saturday.”

“I know you get up early on Saturdays to ride your bike and I was in the neighborhood.”

“You live in Ventura.” It was a beach community thirty miles northwest of Calabasas. Her mother rented a tiny apartment close enough to the ocean to smell it but not see it.

“I’m visiting your brother today and taking my granddaughter out for a manicure.”

“She’s four,” Eve said.

“It’s never too early to discover the secrets of beauty and marshal your feminine power.” Jen took Eve’s hand and regarded her short, unpolished nails. “She could teach you some things.”

“Cops don’t polish their nails.”

“It would be a nicer world if they did. I brought you bagels and lox spread.” Jen set her paper bag on the kitchen table and went into the kitchen. “Do they sell plates and knives at IKEA?”