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of a struggle. There was no blood. The neighbors heard no unusual noises. The vehicles in the garage were registered in his name. He wasn’t hiding her car in there.”
    “Did you look in his cars?”
    “He opened them for us. They were empty.” Officer Untidy was wrestling with her shirttail—and losing.
    “You made an honest mistake, ma’am,” the boy officer said. “You did your duty as a citizen and called us. You reported what you thought was a murder. We checked it out and found nothing.”
    Helen couldn’t bear the condescension in his voice. This young twerp thought she was a hysterical woman.
    “It wasn’t a mistake.” Helen sounded really hysterical now. “I heard him murder a woman.”
    “I wouldn’t say that too loud if I were you,” the boy officer said. “He could sue you for your last nickel.”
     

Chapter 3
    “Ten. Twenty. Thirty.”
    Helen was counting crumpled ten dollar bills. The money had been stuffed inside her teddy bear, Chocolate.
    “Two hundred. Two ten. Two twenty.”
    She pulled more stuffing out of the bear. The pile of wrinkled tens grew higher. Helen breathed in the dirty perfume of used money. Last night, she’d heard a woman being murdered. Then two cops treated her like a nutcase. It was a trying evening. But this morning, Helen had her hands on something reassuring: money. She knew she’d be fired in a few hours. But if her bear Chocolate was as fat as Helen hoped, she could tell Girdner to go to hell.
    “Two ninety. Three hundred. Three ten.”
    Telemarketing was wretched work, but Helen made more at it than at any other dead-end job she’d ever worked. She had an odd, embarrassing knack for selling septic-tank cleaner. The money was piling up. Helen couldn’t have a bank account or even a safe-deposit box. Those would make her too easy to trace. Instead, she stashed her money in a place she thought un-bear-ably clever.
    “Three seventy. Three eighty. Three ninety.”
    The money pile had grown to a fat mound. Helen had not had so much cash since she worked for that St. Louis corporation. Actually, she hadn’t had much cash then, although she made a hundred thousand plus. She spent her salary on designer suits for a job that bored her, massages to ease the work tension, and Ralph Lauren window treatments (when you spent that much, you did not call them curtains) for a house designed to impress other people.
    “Four ten. Four twenty. Four thirty.”
    She threw away more money on Rob, her rat of a husband.
    He’d looked for work for years, but never found a job. Rob needed a Rolex to get to job interviews on time, a new SUV to get there in style, and a state-of-the-art sound system to soothe his shattered nerves when he was rejected—again. But Rob was no mooch. He was building a new deck, wasn’t he?
    “Six forty. Six fifty. Six sixty.”
    When Helen remembered what happened on the deck, she started counting faster, spilling bills every which way. One hot summer day, Helen decided not to be such a corporate grind. For the first time in seventeen married years, she left work early. She would surprise her husband, handsome and sweaty in the sun. They would make passionate love on the new deck furniture, then swim naked in the pool.
    Her husband had had the exact same thought. Helen found him sweaty and naked with their next-door neighbor, Sandy.
    “Eight seventy. Eight eighty. Eight ninety.”
    Bills leaped like spawning salmon as Helen recounted her humiliation that awful afternoon. She’d picked up a crowbar on the deck and started swinging. When she finished, she’d smashed her old life completely. Now she was on the run in South Florida, a female version of The Fugitive, condemned to nowhere jobs that paid in cash under the table.
    “Nine twenty. Nine thirty. Nine forty.”
    Helen pulled out one last ten-spot wedged inside Chocolate’s paw. Nine hundred fifty dollars. She shoved the money back in the bear and patted his swollen belly.
    Rich Chocolate,