“Of course not.” Ren glared at his friend. “I used a condom.” He frowned, trying to remember. Not that it was hard to recall with photographic—some might say pornographic—clarity the night in question. “All three times.”

“My, my, aren’t you the stud.”

“Shut up. She’s extraordinary.” Was. Jewel is dead.

Ren picked up his phone and pushed a button. “Mr. Justis, court is over for the day. We’ll reconvene tomorrow morning.”

Bo looked at him, frowning. “This has rocked you.”

Resting his elbows on the desk, Ren put his head in his hands. “I never met anybody like her, Bo. Cool and direct on the outside, steamy and wild on the inside. Damn. She was incredible.”

“You fell hard, didn’t you?”

Ren looked up. “If you mean, was I in love with her?—no. Not even close. Love and sex are not synonymous, my friend. She was gorgeous, wild and hot, and I can definitely say I’ve never had sex like that before or since.” Bo’s hoot made Ren scowl. “That was not meant to demean my fiancée in any way. You don’t marry a woman like Jewel.”

“Dr. Hovant did,” Bo said, rising. “Fat lot of good it did him. If the rumor mill is right, all they did is fight—right up to the moment he drove his boat into a rock.”

Bo crammed his notebook into the back pocket of his rumpled canvas slacks. “Well, looks like your secret’s safe. Bullet dodged. Case closed.”

Ren picked up a pen and made a series of hatch marks on his blotter. Nine of them. “Are you sure?”

“Why not? If Julia knew who you were she obviously didn’t tell anybody, because we haven’t heard anything in two years. She never even mentioned your name to her sister.”

“How do you know that?”

Bo produced a disreputable-looking cotton baseball cap from his other back pocket. “Because I’m a professional. When I visited Miss Carsten at her place of business last week, she never blinked when your name came up.”

Ren’s blood pressure spiked. “You asked her about me?”

Bo made a face. “I told her my friend collected first editions, which is true. I said he was pretty well known for his collection. True again. I said his name was Lawrence Bishop III, and asked if she’d ever heard of him.” Bo smiled, apparently picturing the encounter. “She laughed and said, ‘If any of my customers have numbers associated with their names, it’s more likely the result of a problem with the law than hereditary honor.’”

Ren knew he should have been relieved, but for some reason felt more peeved than pleased. Bo turned to go. “Wait a minute. You’re not done.”

“Yes, I am. You hired me to find your love goddess. I did. It’s not my fault she’s dead.” Bo wedged the cap on his head.

Ren rose and walked around his desk. “Bo, I need clarity on the matter of this child.”

His friend snorted. “What kind of clarity? You used a condom. You were a good bad little boy. End of story.”

“You don’t find it the least bit unnerving that I spend the night in the arms of a stranger in early February and nine months later said stranger gives birth to a child?”

“But you said—”

“Condoms have been known to fail, Bo. And I was asleep when Jewel left, maybe she took the…evidence of our encounter with her. For what purpose, I don’t know. Maybe hubby was sterile and she needed a sperm donor. I don’t have a clue, but I’m uncomfortable with loose ends and this one seems like a big one.”

“Actually, he’s pretty little,” Bo said, leaning down to demonstrate a height somewhere near his knees. “Cute as a bug. Curly brown hair. Big blue eyes.”

Ren pictured a photograph hanging on his upstairs wall: his father leading a toddler—Ren—with curly brown hair and big blue eyes down a dock to the family boat. “You saw him?” he asked.

“Yeah. At the bookstore,” Bo replied. “The aunt takes him to work with her instead of using a baby-sitter. Go see for yourself.”

The idea made Ren’s knees buckle. He parked his butt on the desk and gripped the edge while he forced his brain to recall the paternity cases he’d tried. “What’s his blood type?”

“I don’t know. A, B or O, I suppose,” Bo said flippantly.

“Could you narrow that down?”

“How? Medical records are confidential.”

“Come on, Bo. You hack the telephone company’s records all the time. All I want is his blood type, although I suppose I’ll probably need a DNA match to go to court. Maybe you could ask the aunt.”

Bo’s mouth dropped open. “Have you lost your frigging mind? There ain’t no way that woman would voluntarily give you a drop of that baby’s blood if it meant you might wind up taking him away from her.”

Lowering his voice, he added, “Listen, Ren, get a grip. Chances are, like, one in six zillion this could be your kid. Maybe Julia and the doc had a spat, and she ran up to Tahoe to get back at him—but odds are the kid’s his. If not, she’d have come looking for you as soon as she found out she was pregnant, right?”

Ren had no way of knowing what Julia would do; he didn’t know Julia—only Jewel—and their relationship hadn’t involved much talking. “I never told her my last name.”

“Big deal. If she didn’t recognize you from the salmon thing, she sure as hell couldn’t have missed your dad’s funeral or when you were appointed to the bench.”

“Maybe…”

“Not to mention the fact I see your ugly puss in the papers every few days thanks to that news bimbo you’re engaged to.”

“Eve is co-anchor of the Channel 8 news, Bo—I hardly think she deserves that kind of disparagement. But you do have a point. We are photographed quite often. If Julia had wanted to reach me, she could have found a way.”

“Exactly,” Bo confirmed. “My old man used to tell me ‘Don’t trouble trouble ’til trouble troubles you.’”

Ren snorted. “Very profound.”

“Hey, people pay big bucks to hear Robert B. Lester Sr. talk. The point is, you’ve got a nice life. Don’t rock the boat.”

A part of him wanted to agree, but the problem with Bo’s nautical metaphor was that Ren’s boat was sinking fast from a broadside hit by an eighteen-month-old iceberg.

“SARA J., I’M NOT GONNA tell your sorry ass again, you can’t be giving stuff to every person that comes asking!” Keneesha said with finality.

Sara ignored her friend and continued putting books into the box she was sending to the homeless shelter. Daniel Paginnini was due to arrive at the bookstore any minute to pick them up, and she wanted to be sure she included as wide a range of titles as possible.

“Leave her be, Keneesha,” Claudie St. James said, rocking back and forth in the bentwood chair. “You know how she gets. Sara’s a woman on a mission. And I don’t mean position.”

Claudie laughed at her own joke. Sara smiled, too. For her age, which Sara guessed to be twenty-five, and profession—prostitute—Claudie could, at times, be downright childlike. Perhaps that was what endeared her most to Sara.

Claudie rocked a little faster, her small feet coming off the colorful braided rug that delineated the story corner where Sara regularly read to her customers’ children and to her 18-month-old nephew. At the moment, Brady was sound asleep in his soft-sided playpen behind her desk.

“Don’t talk dirty in front of the child,” Keneesha said, her tone surprisingly maternal. To Sara’s knowledge, neither woman had children, but ever since Brady had arrived in Sara’s life, the two hookers had become veritable founts of wisdom on how to raise children.

Claudie snorted. “The child’s snoring like an old man, or is your hearing going?”

Keneesha drew herself to her very impressive height of six foot, her voluptuous chest swelling indignantly. “I hear just fine. I was referring to Sara J.”

Both women laughed. Sara looked at them, her best—most unlikely—friends, and stuck out her tongue. The two laughed all the harder.

Sara had known Keneesha, a woman in her mid-forties, for almost ten years, which was how long Sara had been back in Sacramento. They’d struck up a conversation on a bus from Reno. Sara had been on the last leg of her journey, returning home after being summarily ejected from the Air Force. Keneesha, “Kee” to her friends, had been returning home after three days of partying with a group of high-rollers.