Wolf anticipated her. He shook his finger at her. “No carrying tales, either,” he instructed. “You don’t arm the enemy.”

“But she’s nice,” she protested.

“Nice. Sure she is. Does she keep her pointed hat in the closet or does she wear it around the house?” he asked pleasantly.

“She doesn’t own a single one, honest.”

“Make her mad,” he invited. “Then stand back and watch the broom and the pointy hat suddenly appear.”

“You’d like her if you got to know her,” Michelle replied.

“No, thank you. No room in my life for a woman who shares her barn with flying monkeys.”

Michelle and Minette laughed all the way back to the office.

“Oh, what Sara’s missing,” Minette said, wiping tears of mirth from her eyes. “He’s one of a kind.”

“He really is.”

“I wish I could tell her what he said. I wouldn’t dare. She’s already scored a limousine driver. I expect she could strip the skin off Wofford Patterson at ten paces.”

“A limousine?”

Michelle nodded. “The driver was texting someone at the wheel and almost wrecked the car. She reported him to the agency that sent him.”

“Good for her,” Minette said grimly. “There was a wreck a few months ago. A girl was texting a girlfriend and lost control of the car she was driving. She killed a ten-year-old boy and his grandmother who were walking on the side of the road.”

“I remember that,” Michelle said. “It was so tragic.”

“It’s still tragic. The girl is in jail, pending trial. It’s going to be very hard on her parents, as well as those of the little boy.”

“You have sympathy for the girl’s parents?” Michelle ventured.

“When you work in this business for a while, you’ll learn that there really are two sides to every story. Normal people can do something impulsive and wrong and end up serving a life term. Many people in jail are just like you and me,” she continued. “Except they have less control of themselves. One story I covered, a young man had an argument with his friend while he was skinning a deer they’d just killed in the woods. Impulsively, he stabbed his friend with the knife. He cried at his trial. He didn’t mean to do it. He had one second of insanity and it destroyed his life. But he was a good boy. Never hurt an animal, never skipped school, never did anything bad in his life. Then he killed his best friend on an impulse that he regretted immediately.”

“I never thought of it like that,” Michelle said, dazed.