Where before I’d seen only shadows, I now faced photos and paintings of a woman in nearly every stage of life—from baby snapshots to grade school, high school yearbook photos, college graduation. Aged and clearly mishandled Polaroids took up space in new teak-wood frames. A casual photo of her and a woman who was quite obviously her mother looked to have been taken at a backyard barbecue as both women stood over a gas grill, paper plates in hand, neither looking at the camera. It was an inconsequential moment in time, fuzzy around the edges, taken without consideration of the sun being off to the women’s left and thereby casting a dark shadow against the photographer’s lens. The kind of photo you’d be forgiven if you chose not to incorporate it into an album. But in Trevor Stone’s study, framed in sterling silver and perched on a slim ivory pedestal, it seemed deified.

Desiree Stone was a beautiful woman. Her mother, I saw from several photos, had probably been Latin, and her daughter had inherited her thick, honey-colored hair, the graceful lines of her jaw and neck, a sharp bone structure and thin nose, skin that seemed perpetually under the glow of sunset. From her father, Desiree had been bequeathed eyes the color of jade and full, fiercely determined lips. You noticed the symmetry of genetic influence most in a single photograph on Trevor Stone’s desk. Desiree stood between mother and father, wearing the purple cap and gown of her graduation, the main campus of Wellesley College framed behind her, her arms around her parents’ necks, pulling their faces close to hers. All three were smiling, robust with riches and health it seemed, and the delicate beauty of the mother and prodigious aura of power in the father seemed to meet and meld in the face of the daughter.

“Two months before the accident,” Trevor Stone said and picked up the photo for a moment. He looked at it, and the lower half of his ruined face spasmed into what I assumed was a smile. He placed it back on the desk, looked at us as we took the seats in front of him. “Do either of you know a private detective by the name of Jay Becker?”

“We know Jay,” I said.

“Works for Hamlyn and Kohl Investigations,” Angie said.

“Correct. Your opinion of him?”

“Professionally?”

Trevor Stone shrugged.

“He’s very good at his job,” Angie said. “Hamlyn and Kohl only hire the best.”

He nodded. “I understand they offered to buy the two of you out a few years ago if you’d come to work for them.”

“Where do you get this stuff?” I said.

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“And it was a rather handsome offer from what I understand. Why did you refuse?”

“Mr. Stone,” Angie said, “in case you haven’t noticed, we’re not the power suits and boardroom type.”