If this was ever over, if Marshall’s plan worked and we got Robert back, if I ever had my whole family safe at home, I’d tell Peyton that she was too young for her own set and that she could have them back next year. Meanwhile I’d replace them, right down to her Poké Ball key chain. I’d find a used one on eBay or beat a new one up a little bit myself. She must never, never know. Her soft heart would break; she’d blame herself. I would not allow it.

I checked my watch, then gave the cruise control another bump.

Marshall looked up from his laptop. “Done? I need to make some calls.”

I nodded, and he put his cell on speaker so I could hear.

First up he asked a friend on the force to see if Lexie Pine had an arrest record. She did, starting from when she was barely twenty, the charges escalating over the years: petty larceny, possession, solicitation, assault, possession with intent to distribute. She’d been in and out of jail for most of her adult life.

I found her criminal history oddly comforting, more proof that this woman who’d staked out Geoff Wilkerson and possibly my children, too, who had lurked in the shadows of the Botanical Garden to watch Spencer Shaw die, was no angel.

Marshall also showed me her most recent mug shot when it landed. It was six years old; her last arrest had sent her to state prison for almost four years. She had a small, elfin face that might have once been pretty but was now creased and puffy, the skin picked raw in places. Dingy blond hair. Gray-pearl teeth in her slack mouth. Her eyes were wide and angry. I was so caught by that flat, furious gaze that I drifted onto the shoulder and the rumble strip growled at me. I jerked the Taurus straight and centered us, then took another glance. Her slightness surprised me. She had the narrow shoulders of a young girl, frail bird bones at her collar exposed by her peasant shirt.

“Meth?” I asked.

She looked like a person on a poster about meth, which made me understand fully why Lexie and her mother hadn’t made it past reception when they went to the firm to see Spencer. No way Lexie Pine could have passed as either a guest or a caterer at the party. She must have entered the gardens early and then hidden while they closed and set up for the event. She’d stayed in the darkness, an avid goblin, watching Spencer convulse from a shadowed bridge or a winding dark path, or perhaps even secreted in the heart of one of the lush beds of taller plants, like a worm in an apple.