Santa Barbara police detective Henry Spencer stared down at the red mark on the paper. It was good, he had to admit. He’d been working on a big forgery case for the past few weeks, and nothing he’d come across there had looked as authentic as this.

Henry drew his thumb across the paper, pressing down hard as he tried to smudge the red ink. It didn’t smear. It had been on the page long enough to set.

That didn’t mean the mark was genuine. Henry’s prey was crafty and thorough. He would have taken the time to prepare his forgery well in advance. But no matter how good he was, the felon must have made a mistake somewhere.

Henry pulled a magnifying glass out of his desk drawer and peered at the red mark through it. He knew where he’d find the telltale signs of tampering-there would be an extra line added to the mark’s right side, or its bottom curve would have been erased and a new slash drawn through the middle.

But no matter how long Henry stared at the symbol, he could find no evidence that this was anything but the original mark. Which meant the impossible had happened.

Shawn had gotten an A on his book report.

Of course, that was only impossible if Shawn had actually written the report himself. The handwriting was his, but that had been true when he’d copied an essay out of the back of the teacher’s edition, too. Henry quickly skimmed the first page. It read like the work of a twelve-year-old, not of a doctoral candidate hacking out sample compositions to help make his student-loan payments.

That still left the question of which twelve-year-old had done the work. And before Henry broke out the ice cream to celebrate his son’s unprecedented academic triumph, he needed an answer.

He took the steps two at a time and threw open the door to Shawn’s bedroom as if he expected to catch him in the middle of an act of plagiarism.