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with you?
    “That’s correct.” My work for Colonel Janssen was strictly off the books.
    McGlashan eyed me with a natural squint, as if he were looking right through me. I’d been verbose in my reply. I could have gone with “yes.” Neither of us spoke until Susan broke the impasse.
    “Detective, I’d like you to go over the crime scene with Mr. Travis. I know you’ve been over it with me, but I’d like him to hear it from you.” Then she added, no doubt for both alpha males, “It would be most helpful.”
    McGlashan and I, while she spoke, held each other’s eyes in a death duel. Like he was going to play ball with some beach bum. Like I gave a rat’s ass about a Super Bowl ring.
    “My pleasure,” he said, but his eyes never left mine. I caught Susan out of my peripheral vision. Help me out here. Like a siren’s song, her presence turned my head and consumed my full attention. I couldn’t ignore her now like I had when I’d walked into her house and stared at her wood floor and then out toward her dock and the canal.
    She wore a pink Blue Heaven T-shirt and white shorts. No shoes. Her dark chocolate-brown eyes, a perfect match of her hair, lay deep behind the edge of her thick bangs. Her pug nose and high cheekbones made her as attractive as I remembered. Her combination of strength and vulnerability, which I’d found so irresistible, was now tilted away from the former and toward the latter. She sat deep in her chair. Her arms were crossed tightly in front of her. Suddenly Mc-whatever-his-name wasn’t even there anymore. I tried to push away my feelings, but Sisyphus would have had an easier time of it.
    “What do you got?” I said, and switched my attention from Susan to McGlashan. I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees. A real team player.
    “It’s what I already informed Ms. Blake,” he started in.
    We got it, jock-o-boy. You don’t want to be here , I thought, but said, “And what would that be?” I stared at McGlashan, but my mind took off on its own. I wondered if Morgan was at Fish Head yet, and if Melissa, the blue-eyed Aussie bartender who had informed me that she was gay—I must have been totally orbital that year—was still there. I thought of Susan in that tight black dress she’d worn out to dinner and wondered how many men had seen her in that. When I glanced back at her, she crossed her legs and uncrossed her arms. She had the thinnest, most muscular, feminine calves I’d ever had the pleasure of trying not to stare at. If the survival of the species depended on her calves and me—well, I’d find a way.
    McGlashan cut Susan a look as if he wanted credit for cooperating. “Three nights ago,” he started, “Ms. Blake received a phone call at ten thirty-five from Ms. Spencer requesting that she return home immediately.”
    I asked, “What phone did she call from?”
    Susan took it. “Her cell.”
    “Where was she when she called?”
    “Here, like I told you when we talked. She was at the beach and hadn’t taken her phone with her.”
    Susan, to get the ball rolling, recapped for McGlashan what she and I had discussed during our phone conversation while I drove the truck and Morgan bounced his ponytail to whatever tune bounced in his head. She explained that when she had come home, she’d found Jenny recently showered and sitting calmly on the porch. Jenny told her a man they’d seen earlier that day had appeared on the beach and attempted to rape her, and she, in response, had picked up a stick, become a matador de toros, and gored him. Jenny, according to Susan, displayed alarmingly calm behavior.
    I interrupted her. “She was in quiet repose when you found her?”
    “Yes. As she told me the story, I thought she might be in shock, but she never showed any other signs.”
    “And what would those signs be?” My question came with an unintended tone of harshness, but I doubted Susan had ever seen anyone in shock, let alone known the difference between