She laughed. “You aren’t that girl, Miss Eden. You might carry that gun and call yourself a private investigator, but those blue jeans cost a week’s salary. You’re a trust-fund baby, and my baby is going to fleece you for every penny you have. I hope you realize he’s running a long con here. Give the debutante her bad-girl dream, empty her trust fund, and then dump her pretty little ass.”

I could have told her Gabriel doesn’t need my money. That he owned this building. Owned a million-dollar condo. Kept a hundred grand in cash under his bed for “emergencies.” But that would mean giving her some idea exactly how much her mark was worth. So I shot her.

The woman fell back, yowling, though the bullet had barely scraped her leg.

I turned to Lydia. “Please call the police and tell them I have been forced to shoot an intruder. It’s only a scratch, but they still may want to send an ambulance.”

Lydia picked up the phone. The woman lunged to grab it.

I motioned for Lydia to hang up and said calmly, “Are you going to sit down now?”

“You—you shot—”

“I grazed you.” I grabbed a tissue box from Lydia’s desk and tossed it at the woman. “Wipe up the blood. If you play nice, I’ll get you bandages. I might even toss in five bucks to buy a patch for your jeans. Now sit. Lydia? Any chance you could grab me a mocha?”

Gabriel had a rule about not involving Lydia in trouble, and the legality of that bullet graze was already highly questionable. When I mouthed, “Please?” she nodded with reluctance.

“I’ll be right around the corner,” she said.

I waited until she was gone. The woman still wasn’t sitting. She wasn’t making any move to leave, either, so I decided not to press the point.

“Seanna Walsh is dead,” I said.

“No, Seanna Walsh was playing dead.” She tossed bloodied tissues aside. “I knew this guy—a police sergeant—who used to make problems disappear for a price. We had an arrangement. One night he brought dope to a party, where he got loaded and told me he nabbed a half kilo of coke from the evidence locker. I saw an opportunity.”

“To do what? Steal it?”

She snorted. “That would be stupid. I’m not stupid.”

I bit my tongue.

“I was dealing with other shit at the time,” she said. “I’d conned a guy who blew it all out of proportion. Put a bounty on my head. A bounty.” She sounded genuinely insulted. “I cut a deal with this sergeant. I’d keep my mouth shut about the dope if he’d help me disappear—stage my death so no one would come after me.”

“No one even realized Seanna Walsh was dead until this spring. Fifteen years after she disappeared.”