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you getting there?”
    “The manager’s meeting me at eight-thirty, before they open. We’ll meet at seven, go over your notes on the Ellis girl, and then go meet Walker Moss at Hush.”
    “You know that’s a fake name, right?”
    “Of course I know,” she said impatiently. “I already checked, but he’s clean so it doesn’t matter. Meet me at Espresso Express, okay?”
    Anna was a caffeine fiend. I didn’t hold it against her, given my bad habits. I did wish she’d pick cheaper coffee houses to meet in. A cup of black coffee at the Express would probably cost more than the stack of nasty porn did. “Gotcha. See you later.”
    We said our goodbyes and I hung up, slinging the phone across the sofa to disappear under a cushion. I slumped back on the sofa, patting it so Mutt jumped up beside me and settled his head on my lap. “So,” I said to him. “Walker Moss. Wonder what he can tell us about the late Rhian Ellis?”
    I’d spoken to Moss over the phone when I first started the Ellis case, to get his okay to question some of the girls at Hush. We hadn’t met in person, even though I’d tried to fix a meeting. Obviously, Anna’s detective badge impressed him more than my PI license.
    I reached down the side of the sofa for my case notes. I don’t have an office; I prefer a more free-range filing system. The brown manila folder held everything I’d gathered about Rhian since Baxter first asked me to track her down, photos, school reports, and a couple of parking tickets, the usual stuff. I also had a print-out of emails she’d sent the month prior to her disappearance. Apparently Baxter was devoted enough to his fiancée to read her private emails. That was true love, right?
    I hadn’t found anything of interest in the emails, but Anna would want to see them anyway. I combed through them again now, idly scanning the pages for anything I might have missed. Nothing jumped out at me, so I shoved them back in the folder and pulled out the stash of photos Baxter had given me.
    They mostly showed the couple together, smiling at weddings, barbeques, on the beach, and in Paris... Rhian looked like a different person in the photos. Well, she was alive, for one thing, but she also looked...purer. She wore the barest trace of make-up, coupled with conservative, sensible clothes. Was it a cliché to think the soul of a sex-crazed nymph lurked beneath the librarian façade? Probably, but the evidence points that way .
    Initially, I suspected drugs when I found out Rhian had gotten into stripping and hooking. Baxter was pretty adamant that his precious butterfly didn’t even know what mainlining meant, but she could have lied to him. The girl I’d seen in the bathtub full of ice clearly fell a long way.
    I plucked out one photo of Rhian posing with a bunch of other girls. Baxter told me it had been taken at a friend’s birthday party just a month before she went missing. She hugged another girl, tall and dark-haired, with the sort of smoldering come-hither stare I liked to imagine Anna gave me behind my back. The brunette was all curves and cleavage, and made pretty, elegant Rhian look almost plain in comparison.
    I stared at the photo for a while, trying to figure out why it had caught my attention. I flipped it over. Someone had scrawled everyone’s initials on the back, from left to right. I found the brunette’s. TS. Not too much of a stretch to mark her as Tamsin Searle, owner of the apartment where Rhian died.
    Irritated at myself for not noticing the photo before, I retrieved my phone and called Baxter. “You know someone called Tamsin Searle?” I asked.
    “I...vaguely. She’s a friend of a friend of a friend.” He sounded tired and confused. “Is this something to do with Rhian?”
    “Yeah. You got a contact number for Tamsin?”
    “I can get one, I guess. I’ll call you back.”
    I tossed the phone away again and shoved the photos back in the folder. Scratching Mutt’s ears, I put together