What evidence they did turn up kept suggesting the same thing: that Mandy was a deeply troubled woman, who was battling depression for reasons no one seemed to understand. She’d apparently left a lucrative career in sales to move back in with her mother, who was undergoing treatment for some kind of rare cancer. Since then she had barely left the house except to take her mother to the doctor or to run to the supermarket or the pharmacy, and while she told her mother, who was too weak to make it down the stairs, that she was taking care of the garden, she’d clearly been letting it go for a long time. Mrs. Jansen thought Mandy had had a girlfriend over a few times, because she’d heard voices through the floor, but she had no idea who it might have been, and O’Hara was never able to find a trace of her.

As soon as they’d walked into the crime scene Lassiter had made the judgment that Mandy’s death was suicide, and O’Hara hadn’t found anything to suggest he was wrong.

But she couldn’t accept that. Wouldn’t accept it. When Lassiter showed her a draft of his report, she refused to sign off on it, and insisted they keep the investigation open just for a little while longer.

But that little while had already stretched past its breaking point and unless O’Hara could come up with something fast, she’d have to put her name on the report that would close the case.

If she could just articulate what she felt was wrong about the case Lassiter would have come over to her side. He would have grumbled, because that was what Lassiter did. But he trusted her instincts and he would have followed her lead.

But she had nothing. No suspects, no motives, no evidence. Just a conviction that Mandy Jansen hadn’t killed herself. A conviction for which she couldn’t find a single fact.

She was so busy trying to figure out her next move as she crossed the visitors’ parking lot that at first she didn’t hear the man following her.