me my uncle was dead and that I'd inherited everything. We'd never had a personal conversation, but I secretly liked her.
The hotel was smaller than I'd expected and grander too. A fountain burbled in a low foyer. Dixieland jazz jumped and spun through the air like a company of musical acrobats, each instrument doing something apparently different but all perfectly coordinated. Crystal chandeliers hung from high ceilings. But the bones of the place showed that it had been built before the age of steel infrastructure.
The desk clerk-a black man with perfect skin and a Jamaican accent that could melt butter- handed me my key card. He even got my name right, zha-nay. I usually get Jane or Janie. I felt myself blushing a little bit, and wondered how long it had been since I'd been seriously flirted with. The four of us agreed to meet back in the lobby once we were unpacked and settled. I headed to my room.
It wasn't a large room, but it was beautiful. Silk wallpaper, crisp sheets, and wireless Internet. There can be no better. I tipped the guy who'd hauled my bags for me, then popped open my laptop and checked mail for the first time since we'd gotten on the plane in Greece.
The background check of Karen Black was in my inbox, cc'd to all the guys. I settled in to find out what I'd gotten us all into.
Karen Alicia Black was born a little over fifteen years before I was. Her father was a cop, her mother was a mother. No living family now, though. When I was getting out of Mrs. Detwyler's second-grade class at Blackburn Elementary, she was graduating from Oberlin with a double major in criminology and mathematics. She moved to Los Angeles and worked as a cop for two years, then joined the FBI. A note in brackets pointed out that this was an unusually short period of time-the FBI preferred three years of professional experience. I had the impression that whoever was writing the report had developed a little crush on her.
Her record at the FBI was impressive-kidnapping, arson, serial murder-until 1998. The year I'd spent watching Titanic fourteen times with Nellie Thompson, a man named Joseph Mfume moved to Eugene, Oregon, from Haiti. In the newspaper clippings that were inserted in the text file, he looked about twenty-five, handsome in a goofy way. During the six months after his arrival, he raped and killed seven women in particularly grotesque ways. Karen Black had been part of the team that brought him down.
After that, her career started going off the rails. Two years later, she quit the FBI under a cloud. There were suggestions that she'd been asked to resign, but nothing that proved it.
Since then, she'd worked on and off for a private investigator and started her own security consultancy based in Boston. Her addresses were listed with pictures of the offices, and the same contact number that was in my cell phone. Her credit rating was decent, the frequent flyer programs loved her, she'd had a couple of bouts of the flu over the years and treatment for chlamydia eight months ago. She owned a condo in Boston, she had no family, no husband, no kids. She'd been in New Orleans on and off almost since the hurricane.
The last two pages of the report were pictures.
The cool gaze that looked out from my computer screen could have belonged to an actress or a supermodel. Pale blue eyes, straight blond hair, a sly smile at the corner of her mouth that seemed to be part of the permanent architecture of her face. In the first image, she wore a black turtleneck and a leather overcoat that reached her ankles, a gray eastern-seaboard streetscape behind her. The next one was a more candid shot of the same woman outside a nightclub. She was in a low-cut emerald silk blouse and tight leather pants, and she had the figure to make the outfit work. Even without the cut of her clothes, I saw what the report's author was responding to.
She radiated confidence and certainty. It was in her eyes and the way she held her shoulders. She had tracked criminals and stopped killers, and her success had left its mark on her.
And she had called me for help. I had the uncomfortable feeling I was about to disappoint her.
I closed the laptop and the French doors that opened onto the balcony. The lace curtains shifted in an air-conditioned