This could be it, she thought. Someone who had heard her questions but didn’t want to speak up in front of other people. Someone who knew something about Mandy and needed to talk about it, even at great personal risk.
O’Hara slowed down just a little, then turned quickly to see the person who was going to break her case wide-open.
It was her partner.
“Gee, Muffy, didn’t mean to startle you,” Lassiter said. “I just wanted to know who was taking you to the prom.”
“How did you know I was here, Carlton?” she said.
“You had an appointment,” Lassiter said. “It was on your scheduler.”
“You broke into my computer?” she said, anger rising.
“Let me rephrase that,” Lassiter said. “You had an appointment. It was on your scheduler, right under the reminder about the meeting with the Coalition to Help the Homeless.”
O’Hara felt her anger melting rapidly into embarrassment. She’d completely forgotten about that. “How bad was it?”
“How bad was it?” Lassiter said. “Let’s see-how many times in an hour do you imagine one noble philanthropist could mention that his wife sits on the city council?”
“That clown?” O’Hara said. “About a thousand.”
“Sure, he’s a clown,” Lassiter said. “Only I was the one feeling like I had a red nose and floppy shoes. Because when he wasn’t reminding me that he sleeps next to a woman who controls our budget, he was demanding to know what kind of progress we were making solving the hit-and-run of a homeless man on Santa Barbara’s busiest street. And what could I tell him? That we hadn’t done jack on the case because we were busy trying to prove that an obvious suicide really wasn’t?”