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don’t think she had opened them since she’d first seen the body. I reached into my purse, pulled outmy cell phone, and dialed 911. Then I called Al. He asked no questions, just took down the address and hung up the phone.
    Kat and I sat in silence while we waited for the police to arrive. A gnarled and lush jasmine vine grew up a trellis nailed to the side of the guesthouse, and the air was redolent with the blossoms’ heady fragrance. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, relishing the smell, the steady beat of my heart, and the sun warming my flushed cheeks. It felt, for a moment, as if Kat and I were ensconced on a tiny island of sweet-smelling tranquility, the twittering of birds and the steady hum of our breath the only sound that disturbed the silence.
    In a few minutes, however, I heard the faint shriek of police sirens, and got up to open the front door to the four uniformed officers that were the first of the hordes that soon invaded; their loud voices, heavy footsteps, and barking radios banishing every trace of that odd moment of serenity.
    T HE supervising detective seemed a bit taken aback at the sight of two heavily pregnant women rolling around in the middle of his crime scene. In addition to asking us the same long series of questions about who we were, what we were doing there, and what we had seen, that we had already answered for the uniformed officers who arrived first on the scene, and again for the detectives who had shown up fifteen minutes later, he grilled us about how we knew each other, even going so far as to request a description of the prenatal yoga class in which we’d met. I watched him carefully jot down the name and address of the yoga studio, and did my best not to express frustration at the thoroughness of his inquisition. This was, after all, his job. He had no way of knowing at this stage of the investigation what clues, whatindividuals, would come to be important. Kat and I, as the discoverers of the body, were, of course, his first and so far only possible suspects.
    I was in the middle of recounting, for the third time, what we had been doing in the house, when Al arrived.
    My partner walked into the yard, flanked by police officers. One of them, a grizzled man who seemed too old to be a cop at all, let alone a uniformed officer, called out to the detective, “Hey, this is Al Hockey. He used to be on the job. He knows the redhead.”
    I gave Al a relieved smile, and he winked at me. He extended his hand to the detective, whose brusque manner had already begun to dissipate.
    “My partner giving you some trouble?” Al asked.
    “Your partner?” the detective said.
    “I’ve been doing some private security work since I retired. Juliet works with me.”
    “Al left kicking and screaming,” the older officer said. “Bullet took him out, but he’d still be here if it weren’t for that.”
    The detective nodded. “I’m about done with my questions,” he began. Just then, we were interrupted by a piercing shriek.
    “What’s going on here? What are you all doing here?” A small woman with pitted olive skin meticulously covered by a smooth sheen of expensive make-up, was standing in the French doors, hands on her hips, her face twisted into an anxious scowl. “What happened?” she yelled.
    The detective heaved himself laboriously to his feet and walked over to the woman. At the sound of her voice, Kat had finally roused herself from her stupor. She had not been able to answer the police officers’ questions with much more than whispered monosyllables, and I was worried that she wasin some kind of shock. Now, she glanced over at the woman and groaned, “Oh, God.”
    “What? Who is that?”
    “My mother-in-law.”
    Nahid Lahidji’s eyes were hidden behind a vast pair of Jackie O sunglasses, but she certainly didn’t seem old enough to be Kat’s husband’s mother. She had the clothes for it, though. She looked exactly like what she was, a fabulously successful Beverly