Page 9 of Puzzle for Two

“Thanks!” Brooke tucked the bills into her magician’s bag of a purse. Despite the fact that her purse didn’t look like it had room for more than a credit card and her phone, she was constantly shoving things inside or whipping things out with Felix The Cat alacrity. She glanced at him, glanced at him again. “Are you okay?”

“Hm?” Zach threw her a distracted glance.

“You look a little…rattled.”

“Rattled?” Zach shook his head. “Nope. Not me.” He picked up the dossier from her desk, flipping through it. “What do you think?”

“That you ran into Flint.” Her tone was sympathetic.

“Huh?No. I mean, yes. But it has nothing to do with Flint.”

“What does? Doesn’t?”

Zach gazed at her, baffled. “What are we talking about?”

Brooke shrugged. “Beats me.”

“Did anything jump out at you when you looked through the file?”

“Literally? No.”

Zach gave her a long, steady look, and Brooke grinned. “I do wonder what kind of person puts together a dossier on his friends and family.”

“The kind of person friends and family want to kill?”

“Maybe. He has a reputation for being eccentric.”

“Nothing that’s happened so far makes me think that rep isn’t justified.”

Brooke cooed, “And yet you still fell in love with him!” At Zach’s glare, she admitted, “Okay, yes. I did hear more than I let on. You know how thin these walls are. You’ll be lucky if Mr. Yen next door didn’t hear the whole scheme over the dumpling steamers.”

“That wasveryunprofessional,” Zach said crushingly.

Brooke was uncrushed. “I don’t see how. We’re in the snooper business. You have to assume everyone in this office is practicing their tradecraft at all times.”

“Everyone meaningyou?”

“Until we’re in position to hire another operative.” She kept talking as he opened his mouth to object. “Anyway, it’s not like you could keep that part secret from me.”

Probably not, but he’d sure planned on trying. Especially after Flint’s scathing reaction. He still felt hot with embarrassment at the memory.

Brooke’s thoughts were running in a different direction. “My money’s on the wife.Cherchez la femme.”

“Yeah, well, that’s not much of a leap, given her threats to destroy him personally and professionallyand/orkill herself and frame him for her murder.”

“It’s a little extra,” Brooke agreed. “But you know who she is, right?”

Zach admitted, “At this point, you probably know more about our suspects than I do.”

“ZoraKaschak-Beacher. ZoraKaschak.”

“Is that someone fromPeoplemagazine?” Brooke was an inveteratePeoplemagazine reader. She also claimed to be Army, whatever the hell that was, and seemed to communicate with her comrades almost solely through hashtags and gifs. Which was just one reason why Zach was secretly dubious about Pop’s plans for her to become a human-resources manager. He wasn’t convinced she was entirely human. Surely somewhere in outer space an alien civilization was scouring the volcanic plains for one of their Army?

“The Kaschak family owns the Haunted Hollow Theme Park chain. Zora’s the sole heir to a multimillion-dollar empire.”

“With inflation, that doesn’t mean what it used to.” But Zach flipped back to the file pages on Zora. The photo at the top of the page (Alton was nothing if not thorough) showed a pale, washed-out-looking woman with fair hair and light-brown eyes. Her face was round and colorless. Nondescript. Someone who could easily blend into a crowd. Except, according to the file, she was an independently wealthy fifty-seven-year-old agoraphobe, so blending into crowds was probably not her thing. Supposedly, she had not left the family estate in over a decade.

Could staring at the same four walls for ten years drive you to suicide?

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