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“What are you, in your mid-forties?”

“That’s what I am,” Carver said, staring at Hattie Evans, wondering if “Hattie” was a nickname. She was wearing quite a hat, a prim and proper red mushroomlike thing with a truncated little stem on top. It was ninety degrees outside and she was wearing a hat. He had to admit, despite her sixty-plus years it made her look jaunty.

“Well, you listen, Mr. Carver, I don’t play games and I won’t be brushed aside. ”

“Didn’t intend either of those things,” Carver said. He tried a smile. He was a fierce-looking man but he knew his smile was unexpectedly beautiful and disarming. Used it often. Hattie seemed unimpressed.

As she’d entered Carver’s office on Magellan and sat down before his desk, he’d seen her faded but quick blue eyes flit to where his cane leaned, but she didn’t ask about it. She sat poised with military rigidity in the chair and pressed her knees tightly together beneath the skirt of her navy-blue dress. It was an expensive dress but old and a little threadbare, as was her once-stylish-possibly-hat. She was a whipcord-lean woman, not tall, and she had the look about her of someone who’d endured a lot but was ready for more. Though she’d never been pretty, crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes, pain and experience etched like wounds at the corners of her lips, gave her narrow, alert face a kind of character that held the eye.

“I’m sixty-seven years old,” she said, “in case you’re wondering. In case you’ve got ideas. ”

“Ideas?”

“You know what I’m talking about.

Carver sighed. “I don’t have those kinds of ideas, Hattie. Anyway, I can see you’re not the sort to try them on. ” He shot her his smile again. “Not that some men wouldn’t like to. ” Such charm. Was it working?

She glared at him.

“You mentioned Lieutenant Desoto sent you,” Carver prompted, noticing for the first time that Hattie Evans smelled not unpleasantly like roses. Desoto was Carver’s longtime friend on the Orlando Police Department. The friend who’d urged him not to surrender, to go into private investigation after a holdup man-a kid, really-had shattered Carver’s kneecap with a bullet and left his leg bent at a thirty-degree angle for life.

“The lieutenant said the police couldn’t really delve into my case because I didn’t have enough evidence. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

“All the time,” Carver said. He leaned back in his chair and extended his stiff left leg out beneath the desk, digging his moccasin heel into the carpet.

“He told me he had a hunch, though, that I wasn’t just talking through my hat, so he recommended I come to you. Was he right to do that?”

“Talk and we’ll decide,” Carver told her.