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accident?”
    “Murdered.”
    She could hear him, feel him shaking through the phone. Dirk got excited, but he wasn’t a shaker. His teeth were chattering, and he was having trouble breathing.
    “Calm down, buddy,” she said as she jumped out of bed and reached for the jeans and sweatshirt she had tossed into the hamper upon retiring. “Where are you?”
    “At home… in my trailer.”
    She danced around on one foot, trying to get the jeans on with one hand and the nightgown off over her head. “And where is the bo—I mean, where is she?”
    “In my trailer. Shot with my gun.”
    “Oh, shit.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Don’t do anything. Don’t touch anything. Don’t say anything to anybody. Just sit down on the floor and put your head between your legs until I get there.”
    There was silence on the other end, except for his shaky breathing.
    “Do you hear me?”
    “I hear you. Hurry.”
    “Hang tight, buddy. I’m halfway there.”
----

CHAPTER THREE

    Savannah made the ten-minute trip to Dirk’s place in less than six, but that was plenty of time for her to fantasize more than a dozen scenarios of what had happened in his trailer. And she didn’t like the way any of them played in her head.
    They didn’t call it “
hom
-i-cide” for nothing. Most murders were committed in the home and by killers who were either family or friends of the victim.
    But Dirk wouldn’t kill Polly. He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t. He just would not do it.
    The words gave Savannah comfort, so she kept playing them over and over in her head. But each time she repeated the litany, it had a less convincing ring of truth to it. Savannah had learned several things in law enforcement. And one of them was: Anyone will do anything under the right/wrong circumstances.
    Dirk wouldn’t kill Potty. All right, he might have if
…
    As she whipped along the narrow, dark, eucalyptus-lined road leading to his trailer park, she tried to fill in the blank. What would it take to put a guy like Dirk over the edge? He had been through a lot with his former wife already, and he had never hit or harmed her in any way. At least, not that Savannah had ever heard. And usually, domestic-related killings were a culmination of abuse that had escalated over a period of time.
    If Dirk had shot his ex-wife, Savannah could honestly say she hadn’t seen that one coming.
    Her headlights shone silver on the leaves of the orange trees that stood in long, straight rows parallel to the road. The groves glimmered in the winter moonlight, and Savannah wished her spirit were even half as peaceful as those orchards looked.
    What could have happened in that trailer?
    She considered alternative scenarios—the ones where another party had pulled the trigger.
    Of Dirk’s gun?
    Yes
, she told the nasty, cynical cop voice inside her head.
It could happen. Well
… it
could
. The killer—not Dirk—could be lurking in the darkness of the groves right then, watching her approach the park.
    If somebody else did it, he would have hightailed it out of there right away… unless Dirk got him, too. She hadn’t taken the time to ask before racing to his aid.
    She wondered if he had called the cops yet. Knowing Dirk as she did, she figured he hadn’t. But someone must have. The trailers were pretty close together, and the nosy Biddles wouldn’t have missed an opportunity to report trouble and stir up a hornets’ nest if possible.
    The answer to that question was given the moment she pulled into the spot she had vacated hours before, behind Polly’s Lexus. Harry Biddle came bouncing out of his trailer with an energy she hadn’t seen him demonstrate before. He was minus the undershirt, but the baggy boxer shorts and surgically attached beer can were still in place.
    “I called the cops on your boyfriend, there,” he said.
    “Yeah, you’re a real credit to your community… asshole,” she muttered as she hurried past him.
    “I told them he was shooting off fireworks, and those