Chapter One

      The way Detective Taylor McIntyre liked to work a homicide was to put herself in the victim’s place. Not just into his or her place, but into their actual lives.

      To get a full sense of the person, she needed to walk through their homes, touch their things and imagine what it felt like to be this person who had fallen victim to a homicide.

      In essence, Taylor, a third-generation law enforcement agent, wanted to walk in their shoes and examine what they normally had to deal with on a daily basis. She couldn’t accomplish that from a distance. And she had come to learn that sometimes the smallest of details was what eventually allowed her and her partner to find the killer and solve the crime.

      Just because her partner, Detective Aaron Briscoe, was on a temporary leave of absence, immersing himself in the head-spinning roller-coaster ride of first-time fatherhood, and the precinct was shorthanded, didn’t mean that she had to change her approach. She just had to go through the paces alone rather than have Aaron stare at her as she wandered around, patiently waiting until she needed to use him as her sounding board.

      Taylor had no doubt that her partner of almost three years considered her approach unusual, but he’d made his peace with it and generally went along with her method. That was what had made them such a good team and she missed him now, missed the sound of Aaron’s grunting as he squatted down to examine something close-up.

      She even missed the way Aaron sometimes unconsciously whistled through his teeth, even though it had driven her crazy periodically.

      Taylor half smiled to herself as she pulled up in front of an impressive, sprawling four-story apartment complex where the cheapest lease went for the paltry sum of $4,000 a month.

      You just never know, do you? she mused. Right now, she’d welcome that awful sound Aaron made. It meant that he was thinking. And two heads were always better than one.

      Entering the parking structure, she drove underground and parked in one of the spots designated for guests. Taylor got out and walked toward the elevator located against the back wall.

      The late Eileen Stevens’s apartment was on the fourth floor. That made it The Villas—as this particular complex was whimsically named—penthouse. And, given the fact that the building was situated at the crest of a hill, anything above the second floor actually had a decent view of the ocean in the distance.

      The Villas, a nine-month-old complex with rounded corners and panoramic windows, was situated directly across the street from a newly constructed, exceedingly popular outdoor mall. The mall boasted pricey stores of all sizes, exotic restaurants, a twenty-one-screen movie-theater complex and even had a merry-go-round located smack in the middle. It also promised a skating rink for the winter months. With Christmas less than a month away, there was one now. Hordes of humanity seeking entertainment and diversion swarmed there every Friday and Saturday night. The rest of the week saw a healthy dose of foot traffic, but it was the weekends that put the mall on the map.

      Eileen Stevens would no longer be among the people frequenting that mall, Taylor thought, getting out on the fourth floor. Because Eileen Stevens, thirty-eight-year-old dynamo and newly made partner at her prestigious law firm, was found dead in her opulent, cathedral-ceilinged bedroom this morning. With a key to the apartment for emergencies, her personal assistant had come by to see why Eileen hadn’t shown up at the firm