I explained about the unidentified woman and how I hoped I could match the handwriting on the card to some letter I might have received from a prospective client.

"Since you didn't recognize her when you saw her," Aunt Caroline said, "this could be a waste of time."

"You don't have to help if—"

"Are you being facetious? I can't think of a better way to waste time than solving a mystery like this. Wait until I tell the girls at the club."

I had to smile. The "girls" ranged in age from seventy to ninety. "Let's get started, then."

I hadn't spent more than two hours alone with my aunt in years—mostly because being with her is like wearing shoes that hurt—but we had a focus other than my life or Kate's, so I hoped I could tolerate her.

I'd printed a thousand business cards when I started up my agency, and gave the first hundred to Angel Molina, my mentor, who had a PI business of his own. He sent me my first few cases and still called me when he had a potential client for me. I'd handed out dozens of cards when I was meeting clients or investigating someone's past. And I'd also sent them attached to every letter I answered along with my tip sheets. Only about two hundred cards remained. That meant I could have as many as six hundred letters in the file boxes in my office.

Matching a snippet of handwriting on a business card to the writing in one of those letters seemed about as likely to happen as a pig laying eggs, especially since half were probably printed on a computer and bore only signatures. But I'd promised Cooper Boyd I'd do what I could to help identify his mystery woman.

I went to my office and scanned and enhanced the xeroxed card, and printed out one copy for Aunt Caroline and one for me. Then I took two file boxes with my saved correspondence into the kitchen.