Innocent Prey (A Brown and de Luca Novel) by MAGGIE SHAYNE

shoes beat heels if you were being chased, say through a snowy pine forest. Jeans beat skirts for just about anything short of book signings and TV appearances. T-shirts were just...easy. And they had the added benefit of being mouthy if you wanted them to be. Which I did.
    Besides, when I put on my aviator sunglasses, I looked badass in this getup. Lara Croft badass. You know, in my opinion.
    Have I mentioned my obsession with mirrors and all things visual? Twenty years, yada yada. You know the deal by now.
    So we walked up this perfect sidewalk to the front door and rang the bell. I heard barking from the other side, followed by a harsh “Nyet!” and dead silence. Then footsteps, and then she opened the door.
    She wasn’t what I expected. I don’t know what I expected, actually. But she was pretty, probably around forty, with dark brown hair in the helmet style of a 1950s TV mom. She was wearing a pencil-slim gray plaid skirt and she almost had the hips to pull it off. Not quite, but almost. A white shell was tucked into the skirt, and she was pulling on a little pink sweater that had the soft, fuzzy look of cashmere.
    “Detective Brown,” she said as she opened the door. “And you must be Rachel de Luca. I can’t tell you what an honor it is.” She shook my hand. Warm and enthusiastic, that greeting.
    My eyes shot to Mason with a “you told her who I was?” look. To which his eyes replied, Nope. Wasn’t me.
    Loren let us in, leading the way through a living room that looked lived in to a small eat-in kitchen. Then she waved us into chairs and poured coffee without asking. “So tell me what I can do to help you find Stephanie.”
    My immediate reaction was How the hell am I supposed to hate this woman?
    I looked at Mason. Usually I left the questioning to him and just hung out to run the answers through my internal lie detector. He’d spoken to the blind coach on his own already—just briefly, he’d said—but she’d been busy and had agreed to see him again.
    “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m hoping we can go over her disappearance again and maybe stumble on something we missed before.”
    She sighed, shaking her head slowly. “I can tell you one thing,” she said, and she looked at me when she said it. “She did not leave on her own. This isn’t a play for attention, as her father thinks it is. Someone took that girl.”
    “Did you see something that makes you believe that, Ms. Markovich?”
    “No.” She lowered her eyes, shaking her head slowly. “No.”
    “Then why are you so sure?” I asked her. Because she really had been adamant.
    “She was afraid, Ms. de Luca. She was afraid to even walk to the corner by herself.” A sigh rushed out of her. “I’ve tried to get her to find her inner strength. Her mother and I have both tried. Even your books haven’t helped, and I was sure they would if anything could.” She smiled a little. “They’ve helped me.”
    “Thank you,” I said. So she was a fan. Huh. Go figure.
    “I just don’t believe she would have had the courage to run off on her own. And besides, it doesn’t make sense to think she would’ve argued so hard against taking that walk by herself if she’d been planning to dodge around the corner and leave. What if I had given in?”
    “I see what you’re saying,” Mason said. “Have you voiced these concerns to the judge?”
    “I’ve tried, but he doesn’t listen. And as for Mrs. Mattheson, she’s falling apart as it is.” Again a heavy sigh. She sipped her coffee, didn’t look at her watch or the clock on the wall behind her while the silence lengthened. She wasn’t in any hurry today.
    I took a sip of mine. It was damn good coffee. Then I set the cup down and said, “She was giving you a pretty hard time that day, wasn’t she?”
    She smiled. “Stephanie gives me a hard time every day. Lucky for her I raised two brothers.”
    “Is one of them blind?” I asked. Just to see how she would react to that.
    She