“Maybe you’d hold things back because you’re afraid she’ll get dragged into this mess. Maybe because you feel guilty.”

He was more perceptive than I’d realized, and I instantly regretted telling him anything. “You’re welcome to think what you want. Why don’t you tap my phone?”

“It would be great if we got to do that, but we can’t. Stupid laws.”

We were all of four blocks from Jesse’s building, but traffic was so snarled up that it was barely moving. “You know what? I can walk from here.” I got out of the car before Bruxton could object. “Thanks for the drive, detective,” I added, slamming the door behind me.

CHAPTER 15

The woman in knee-high boots, skinny jeans, black turtleneck sweater, and pink hair didn’t look like any church lady I’d seen before. “Rachel?” I stared at her and recognized a glimmer of the girl I’d met before. She’d been a friend of Claudia’s then, a punk goddess with prominent piercings and enough attitude to power a rocket ship. She’d also had a rotten boyfriend who’d pounded the hell out of her and forced her to turn tricks to feed his drug habit.

“It’s so good to see you, Lily.” Rachel pulled me into a muscular hug. “You look so beautiful. But then, you always do.”

Just after Claudia had moved in with me, I’d woken up one morning to find a pink-haired pixie drooling on my couch. When I’d shaken her awake, she’d pulled a box cutter on me. And yet she’d turned out to be the only friend of Claudia’s I liked. “You look fantastic.” I smiled at her. “You’ve still got the pink hair. I love it!”

“People can’t believe I work for a church.” Rachel looked around at the wooden pews and the stained-glass windows. “This place is part of me, though. It changed my life.”

That was, after all, why I liked her. Rachel was the only friend of Claudia’s who had kicked her drug habit. Of course, Claudia had cut off the friendship for the same reason. Fortunately, Rachel had a distinctive name—Heidegger—and Google had given up her whereabouts quickly. I was glad to be able to track her down at the Jan Hus Presbyterian Church on East Seventy-Fourth Street. Her voice had been warm on the phone, as if she were genuinely glad to hear from me. “What do you do here?” I asked. “When I Googled you, the website said you worked for the Neighborhood House.”

“I work on outreach to the homeless, but have a lot of programs here at the church—music lessons for kids, meals for the elderly, the Remarkable Theater Brigade, even kendo classes.”

“Wait, swordfighting?”

“We’re a twenty-first-century church. We don’t spend all our time praying, you know.”