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wasn’t hormones.
    “Can I help you?” The woman who stood behind the front desk was broad and dark-skinned, with earlobes that looked as if she might have, at one point, hung paint cans from them. They reached nearly to the point of her jaw and were currently sporting three-inch peacock feathers adorned with multicolored beads. The name plaque on her desk said SADIE .
    “I’d like to file a missing persons report,” I said.
    “Aw right,” she agreed, and slid a yellow legal pad across the counter so that it lay directly in front of her. She had boobs big enough to make a mountaineer swoon and her expression was absolutely deadpan. There was no, “Oh my God, who’s missing?” or even an “I’m so sorry for your [quite literal] loss.” She looked bored and a little peeved. She might as well have asked if I wanted fries with my report. Apparently, Solberg wasn’t the first person to disappear from sight in L.A. In fact, maybe that’s why this town called to the huddled masses. Maybe that’s why it had called to me. “What’s his or her name?”
    “J. D. Solberg.”
    “J.D.?” She lifted her murky gaze toward mine with accusatory slowness.
    “Jeen, I guess.”
    She shifted her weight. It took a while. “You guess?”
    “It’s Jeen,” I said, challenging her to challenge me. It was Saturday morning, for God’s sake, and I was doing my civic duty.
    She scribbled on her notepad. “When did she disappear?”
    “He’s a man.” Sort of. I shuffled my feet a little. “And he hasn’t disappeared . . . exactly. He just hasn’t reappeared .”
    She scowled up from under her brows. The woman had attitude to spare. At that precise moment, I would have traded a minor body part for a teaspoon of that juice. My stomach felt queasy.
    “What?” She almost made it sound like two syllables. Intimidation was her stock-in-trade. They should have given her a badge and put her out on the street with nothing more than a scowl and a head bobble. She would have been fine.
    I cleared my throat, straightened my back, and resisted glancing behind me. I had every right to be there, and the chances of Rivera appearing to remind me I’d acted like an overzealous porn star in the past were astronomical. I had nothing to be nervous about. “He went to a convention and hasn’t returned,” I explained.
    “How long ago he leave?”
    “Eighteen days.”
    Her expression hadn’t brightened any. “How you related to him?”
    “I beg your pardon?” I said, firing up my licensed therapist tone.
    Her mouth quirked and her eyes narrowed. Her brows had been plucked to near extinction, but her hair made up for the loss. It was stacked like a braided beehive atop her head. “You his sister? His mother? What?”
    His mother ! Yeah, she had attitude and she probably swatted down gangsters like houseflies, but I’m Irish, and I was pretty sure I could take her if I had to. “I am an acquaintance,” I said.
    “An acquaintance!”
    “That is correct.” I stiffened my spine. “I am a friend, and he—”
    “I can’t file no report from no friend,” she said, and waggled her head for emphasis.
    “What are you talking about?”
    “You gotta be a relative or somethin’. Where’d he go anyways?”
    “What?”
    Judging by her expression and the cock of her hip, I had to guess that her patience was running low, and I’m a trained professional. “Where was this convention he never come back from?”
    “Oh. The convention. I believe it took place in Las Vegas.”
    She raised a brow and propped an open fist on one meaty side. “Las Vegas?”
    “Yes.”
    “Girl, you know anything ’bout Las Vegas?”
    “Listen—” I might have been losing a little of my professional edge.
    “They got things shakin’ there that ain’t even legal in most the country.”
    “I’m well aware—”
    “Your J.D., he like the ladies?”
    My mouth opened.
    “ ’Cuz they got ’em in feathered flocks over there. More dancing girls than I