I was starting to doubt my own, grudge-laced belief that Trent was responsible for the murders, and that was disturbing. He was capable of murder—I’d seen that firsthand—but the mutilated, bloodless body tied to that chair and tortured was far and away from the clean, fast death he had inflicted upon his head geneticist last spring. Thinking, I reached for a cookie. Biting the head off, I got up to hunt through the fridge to decide what I was going to fix for dinner and let my subconscious work on it. Maybe I’d make something special. It had been a while since I had done more than open boxes and stir things on the stove.

I glanced at Ivy, feeling guilty and relieved all at the same time. No wonder she thought I wanted more than to be her roommate. Some of this was my fault. Most maybe.

“So what did Trent do when you found the body?” Ivy asked, mouse clicking as she checked out her chat rooms. “Any guilt?”

“Ah, no,” I said, pushing my uncomfortable feelings aside even as I took a half pound of lean hamburger out of the freezer and set it clunking into the sink. “And the surprise he let slip wasn’t that I found a body but that it was Dan’s body. That’s why I don’t like the idea that he put it there to cover himself. He knows more than he’s saying, though.” I gazed out the window at the sunlit garden and the glimmers of pixy wings as Jenks’s kids fought off a migrating hummingbird from the last of the lobelias. It had to be migrating. Jenks would have killed it before letting competition get a foothold in his garden.

As the children shouted and called, working together to drive the hapless bird away, my thoughts returned to the worry Trent had let show when I found that ley line running through his office. He had been more upset about me finding that line than finding Dan’s body.

The ley line. That’s where the real question lurked. My fingers tingled as I turned, wiping the frost from the hamburger off on a towel instead of my suit dress. I glanced at the window, wondering if I would draw more attention by shutting it or if I should press my luck and hope Jenks’s kids were too busy to eavesdrop. Ivy pulled back from her computer screen as she saw my sudden secrecy. Jenks had a big mouth, and I didn’t want him knowing of my suspicions of Trent’s possible ancestry. He would blab it around, and Trent would hire a plane to “accidentally” drop Agent Orange on the entire block to stop the rumors.