THE NEXT DAY Abby found her thoughts occupied more with her chance to talk to Luke than with the contents of the material from Gunther. She’d picked up two file folders of the reporter’s notes after lunch the day before. Gunther stubbornly believed that there had to be a hard copy of everything, and she and Luke had agreed to sift through it all together.

When his knock came, she was trying to think of a way to bring up Faye’s involvement in the Triple Seven investigation. She really just wanted to know how much Faye would be doing.

“Hi, Luke, glad you could make it.”

“Sure. I promised you a while ago that we’d work on this. Sorry it’s taken so long to get around to it.” He smiled and Abby felt the familiar flutter of butterfly wings in her gut. He always did that to her. He hesitated at the door, so she gestured him inside.

“We’ve both been busy. I divided up the stuff.” She pointed to the coffee table. “Two piles of information; take your pick. I’ll sort through what’s left.”

“Great.” He stepped inside and started to say something, then stopped.

“Something wrong?”

He sighed. “No, not at all, but sometimes I admit to feeling defeated on this case, like we’ll never fully resolve everything, and I’m not usually that much of a pessimist.”

She closed the door and moved toward the couch. “Me too. But at least we have a possible lead here. I pray that every lead will eventually give us something solid.”

He nodded and went to the table and opened the top folder of the pile on the right. “I’ll tackle this,” he said as he sat on the left side of the couch.

Abby sat next to him and picked up the remaining file. “I’ve got this. Now let’s find something juicy.”

“For a short visit, Gunther sure took a lot of notes,” Luke observed after reading a portion of the reporter’s files. It would take time to go through everything.

He was leaning over the notes on the table while Abby had grabbed her stack and settled back on the couch, tucking her feet up under her. She was wearing a fresh, light scent. He didn’t know if it was perfume or the smell of shampoo in her hair, but Luke would catch a whiff of a pleasant smell when she moved. He found himself wishing that she’d sit closer. Sometimes it was hard to concentrate on the dry reporter’s notes.

“She started out wealthy and privileged,” he commented after skimming through the next few pages.

“I saw that. Privilege ended when her father died,” Abby said, looking his way and sorting through a different folder of notes.

“Yikes. He killed himself. Her dad was a commodities trader; he gambled on some bad deals and lost everything, not only his money but also the accounts of about twenty clients. He hung himself in his home office, and that left Alyssa and her mother bankrupt. They had to move from San Francisco to Templeton to live in an aunt’s guest room. At thirteen Alyssa lost privileged private schools and money and was sent to a hick town and public school.”

“Stuff like that happens to a lot of people and they don’t grow up to become homicidal maniacs. And I believe that is what Alyssa is. Does anything in there hint at a deep, dark secret?”

Luke shrugged. “Gunther talked to a lot of school classmates. Most said that while Alyssa had been in their class, they barely knew her. He has a bunch of notes here about trying to find Alyssa’s high school boyfriend, Mike Jez. Supposedly Jez was the only one who knew Alyssa well. Gunther never did find him from what I can tell.” He looked at Abby’s pile of paperwork. “What’s in your stack?”

“Vital statistics. Miscellaneous stuff. She didn’t get a high school diploma until later, after she was in Long Beach. A lot of this stuff I found in my own search.”

“What? I thought that she met Lowell in college.”

“She did. She was there taking general ed courses, but she didn’t go far. Not a lot has been written about her past. But what amazes me more is how none of this about her dad and her sad life was ever common knowledge. Usually politicians play up that stuff, rags to riches and all that. The articles I’ve read about Alyssa, or Alyssa and Lowell, are more concerned with him, never with her.”

“Well, she was never the candidate.” He sat back and stretched, then relaxed on the sofa facing Abby. He shared such a strong connection with her because of the Triple Seven. Something about her touched him at a deeper level than Faye ever had.

“Take a break?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“Abby, I wondered if it bothered you that I asked Faye to help us, to look into the deal with Quinn out in the high desert.”

“Bothered me?” Abby shook her head and then looked a little sheepish. “Well, maybe at first. But it makes sense, doesn’t it? She lives out that way.”

“She does, but this case is ours. I guess that’s what I thought you would think, why you’d maybe be a little upset. Faye only wants to help.”

Abby took a deep breath. “Thank her for me. Help is appreciated. I was surprised to hear that about Quinn, about him being with a woman when he was in Tehachapi. What could they have possibly been doing out there but watching us? The high desert is no hotbed of political activity. And your girlfriend knows the area and the cops up there better than we do.”

Girlfriend? The way Abby said it made it immensely important to Luke for Abby to know that was no longer the case.

“She’s not my girlfriend,” he said with more heat than he intended.

“Oh? You’re not dating anymore?”

“No, we’ve, uh . . .” Words escaped him. “We’ve become good friends, but our relationship is not serious. After all, she has her life in the Antelope Valley and I have mine in Long Beach. Neither of us is at a place where we’d move just to be with the other.” That explanation felt lame to him, but Luke was stuck with it.

“Oh.” Abby frowned.

“We’re friends; that’s all.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he was curious if more would be possible with Abby, since they were now both free.