More than an hour passed before she finally heard a key turning in the lock, and the door was flung open to reveal Detective Sergeant Frank Malloy. He looked exactly the way she’d expected, which was not at all happy to see her.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded.

Thank heaven he had no idea how genuinely thrilled she was to see him. To see anybody, in fact, who might rescue her from this hellhole. Resisting the impulse to jump up and throw her arms around him in gratitude and carefully keeping all trace of elation from her voice, she said, “Didn’t they tell you? I have some information about Alicia VanDamm’s murder.”

Malloy ran his fingers through his hair in a gesture of exasperation. Hair, Sarah noticed, that appeared to be uncombed. Just as his cheeks appeared to be unshaven. And his tie was crooked. Indeed, he looked as if he’d just gotten up and had dressed in a very big hurry. It was early in the morning, but not that early.

“This better be something really important,” he warned her, closing the door behind him with a decisive slam.

Frank couldn’t believe it. Sarah Brandt was sitting in an interrogation room. Had actually been locked in an interrogation room, and for quite a while, if what O‘Brien told him was true. O’Brien was an idiot. He’d been looking all over town for Frank when he’d been right here in the building, sleeping in the officer’s dormitory upstairs after having been up half the night investigating a warehouse robbery. A warehouse robbery that promised to add substantially to Frank’s savings, if he played it right, and he most certainly would.

By the time O’Brien had found him, Frank realized Mrs. Brandt had been locked in the basement for quite a while, more than long enough to reduce a normal female to hysterics, which was how he’d expected to find her. Not that he was looking forward to dealing with an hysterical female, but finding her sitting here looking perfectly calm was even more unsettling. The woman was positively unnatural.

“I’m sure you’ll at least find what I have to tell you interesting,” she said, just as prim and proper as you please. As if she was sitting in her own parlor instead of right where countless criminals had endured countless beatings, all in the cause of justice. He should’ve left her here for another hour before coming to rescue her. Maybe by then she would’ve started acting like a normal woman.

“All right,” he said grudgingly, pulling up a chair to the opposite side of the table and sinking down into it. “What is it, and be quick.” He rubbed his gritty eyes, half hoping that when he opened them again she’d be gone. But she wasn’t. “I’ve been awake all night, and I’d like to get a little more sleep before I get called on another case,” he warned.

“Oh, dear, they should’ve told me. I could come back another time,” she offered, annoying him even more. He didn’t want her to be thoughtful. He wanted her to be gone.

“Just spit it out and get it over with,” he snapped, wondering what evil he’d done to deserve having Sarah Brandt enter his life.

“I’ll try to hurry,” she said, folding her hands on the table in that prissy way she had that set his teeth on edge. “I called on the VanDamm family yesterday. To express my condolences,” she added when Frank scowled his disapproval. “Mina and I are old friends.”

Well, he supposed he couldn’t stop her from calling on an old friend.

“At any rate,” she continued, “she told me something that might be useful. It seems that when Alicia ran away, she took some valuable jewelry with her.”

“We didn’t find any jewelry in her room.” Frank absently began to rub the bridge of his nose. His head was starting to ache, and his eyelids felt like they were lined with gravel.

“It may have been stolen, and the thief may have been the person who killed her.”

Frank frowned again, this time because he was annoyed he hadn’t thought of that himself. He would have in another minute, of course. He was just tired. “You know what this jewelry looked like?”

“No, but I’m sure the family can give you a description. They may even have paste copies of the pieces. People sometimes have their jewelry copied so they can wear the fakes and keep the real ones safely locked up. If you find out who pawned her jewelry, you’ll probably find her killer.”

“Unless…” Frank muttered, thinking aloud.

“Unless what?”

Frank didn’t particularly want to share his thoughts with her, but he was too tired to get into an argument about it. “Unless she sold them herself. To get money to live on. Would she have had any money of her own otherwise?”

“I can’t know for sure, of course, but she probably wouldn’t have. Mina didn’t think so, and in fact, she thought Alicia had probably taken the jewelry to sell since she had no other source of money. Girls of that class don’t usually need access to money. Their families provide everything for them.”

“Even when they go shopping?”

“The family would have accounts at all the stores. And if she ever did need to buy something, she’d have a servant along to handle the transaction. It’s considered vulgar for a female to carry cash.”

The more Frank learned about the upper classes, the less he liked them, and he hadn’t liked them very much to begin with. “Which means her sister was right, she probably took the jewelry to sell, so it was probably long gone by the time she was killed.”

“Except that I also can’t imagine Alicia would have known where to sell the jewelry herself or how to go about it even if she did. Girls of her class don’t go to pawnshops, Mr. Malloy. If she did sell the jewelry, someone would have had to help her.”

“I’ll check it out,” he said, “in case she hadn’t sold all the pieces yet. If her killer did steal something, at least that would give us a reason why she was killed.”

“I think I may know who her killer was, too, Detective.”

Frank seriously doubted this, but he could use a good laugh. “And who was it?” he asked with exaggerated patience.

She bristled a little at his tone, but she said, “Hamilton Fisher. He was a lodger at the Higgins’s house, too, and-”

“And he disappeared the night she was killed,” he finished for her. Did she really think he wouldn’t know this most basic piece of information? Now Frank was bristling, too.

“Did you know that he’d been paying her particular attention?” she asked.

“A natural enough thing. She was a pretty girl.”

“And did you know he didn’t have a job? Yet he’d paid his rent a month in advance, and he moved in just a few days before she died. And he started paying Alicia marked attentions from the moment he-”

“So?” Frank’s patience was wearing dangerously thin.

“So, he was probably a cadet,” she said as blandly as if she’d just accused the fellow of being a Methodist.

“A cadet?” Frank didn’t know what was more shocking, that he hadn’t thought of it himself or that Sarah Brandt even knew what a cadet was. “What makes you think so?”

“Didn’t I already explain that?” she shot back.

Actually, she had. A “cadet” was a young man who used his charms to seduce naive or desperate young women into prostitution. The laws of supply and demand required a constant supply of fresh, young females to satisfy the enormous demand of a profession that used them up at an alarming rate. Young men supplemented their meager incomes by working as cadets and helping the pimps fill their need for replacements in the brothels and on the streets.

A girl as lovely and alone as Alicia VanDamm would have seemed a logical target. Maybe Fisher had grown frustrated with his failure to attract her attentions and gone to her room and been a little more forceful than he’d intended in trying to recruit her.

Not wanting to admit he’d missed all the clues, Frank said, “We’re already looking for Mr. Fisher.”