Jason said it was upstairs. The first challenge is to find the stairs. The den opens into a gallery almost as wide as my living room. It’s paneled in dark mahogany, lined with portraits. The combination of dark paneling and a collection of intricately framed gloomy portraits of stuffy-looking gentlemen in early eighteenth-century garb sucks the air right out of the room.

I hurry through and try the door at the other end. Success. This door leads to the entry hall. There are rooms on each side and in the middle, a double curved staircase right out of Gone With the Wind. I ignore the flanking rooms and run up the stairs.

I should have asked Jason to draw me a map or at least tell me which of the twenty closed doors I’m looking at is his stepmother’s office. Since I didn’t, and I’ve never met her, I can’t rely on my sense of smell to ferret her out. At the head of the stairs, though, I pick up a flowery citrus scent. Feminine and subtle. Expensive. I follow it to the third room on the left.

This is definitely a woman’s room. Rose-colored wallpaper, blond French Provincial furniture. Bedroom furniture. Mr. and Mrs. O’Sullivan must have had separate bedrooms. My hunch is confirmed when I open the connecting door to my left. This is a man’s bedroom, heavy, dark furniture, hunting scenes on the walls, the scent of musk.

I close the door. There’s a deadbolt on Mrs. O’Sullivan’s side.

Interesting.

On the opposite side of the room is another door. This leads through a massive walk-in closet. Must be a thousand pairs of shoes. At the far end, is one more door. I try the handle.

It’s locked.

Shit. I wasn’t expecting that. I could easily break down the door, but that wouldn’t be very subtle, now would it?

I kneel down to examine the lock. It’s a simple key and tumbler. No deadbolt. In my day job, David and I have jimmied this type of lock a million times. The only problem is I left my purse in the Jag back in town and in it, my set of picklocks. Maybe I can do it the way they do in movies—use a knife from the kitchen or a nail file from Mrs. O’Sullivan’s bathroom.

I go in search. First, the bathroom since I’m here. Either she never does her own nails, or she carries her only nail file with her because a cursory search of her bathroom vanity finds nothing. I’m not about to turn her drawers inside out. I run back down the steps to the kitchen.

It takes me a while to find it. I’ve never understood why anyone would want to live in a house so big that it takes a map to navigate the maze of rooms. It’s getting close to three o’clock, and I want to get out of here as soon as I can. After several false starts through living rooms and dining rooms and media rooms and rooms whose purpose I can’t fathom, I finally find the kitchen.

A kitchen about fifty yards long with a hundred places to hide the knives.

Shit again. I start pulling open drawers. The tissue is about in shreds and the idea of kicking down the door is looking better and better when I find a silverware drawer with something that looks like it could work. It’s a thin-bladed butter knife. I grab it and run.

Picking the lock is not as easy with a knife as it looks on television. It takes several attempts at wedging the blade between the doorjamb and the lock before I get the feel of what I need to do. Even then, the knife blade slips, leaving thin scratches on the woodwork. Finally, I feel the lock give and the handle turns at my touch. Unfortunately, the blade of the knife breaks at the same time and I’m left with pieces that I stuff in my jacket to discard later. Hope Mrs. O’Sullivan doesn’t count the silverware.

It’s three fifteen.

Mrs. O’Sullivan’s office is not what I expect. Compared to the carefully appointed and immaculately clean rooms in the rest of the house, this room is furnished in early American yard sale and cluttered with dusty piles of old magazines, newspapers, scrapbooks, photo albums—the detritus of her thirty some years of life before she became Mrs. Rory O’Sullivan. There are framed pictures of beauty pageants, glittery rhinestone tiaras, ribbons marking her progression from Miss El Cajon to Miss San Diego to Miss California, and culminating in the title of runner-up to Miss America. They stop there. Photos show her with Mr. O’Sullivan, one of the celebrity judges for that pageant. Her life as a beauty queen ended with a runner-up sash and the biggest prize of all.

I maneuver my way through the stuff to a desk thrust against the wall. It’s as piled with junk as the rest of the room. There’s nothing of obvious interest on top and everything is so dust laden, I wonder if she ever comes in here.

I try the drawers. The middle holds nothing but pencils, pens, paper clips, broken rubber bands.

The right-hand drawer is a file drawer. From the dates on file tabs, nothing has been added to categories such as “Bills Paid,” “Recipes” and “Misc” since 2003, the year she met O’Sullivan. No tab marked “PI Investigating My Cheating Husband.” Too bad. It would have made my life so much easier.

The left side of the desk holds two drawers. The first is empty.

The second is empty, too.

Except for one item.

A gun.

CHAPTER 44

I STARE INTO THE DRAWER. I’M LOOKING AT A SMALL-CALIBER handgun. O’Sullivan was killed with a small-caliber handgun. If this is the weapon, am I the best investigator in the world or the luckiest?

I take a pencil from the middle drawer and pick up the gun by lacing the pencil through the trigger guard. It’s a .22-caliber minirevolver. A lady’s gun.

What to do now? Call the cops?

How do I explain being here?

Leave it and risk Mrs. O’Sullivan getting rid of it at the first opportunity?

Leaving it isn’t the best choice, but self-preservation is a strong motivator. I don’t want to go to jail. On the other hand, if it’s the murder weapon, I’m holding the only tangible link to the killer.

I look around the small, cramped room. There’s no obvious place to hide the gun. Except—

There’s a stack of manila envelopes on the floor. I take one and slide the gun inside. Then I shove the envelope under the pile of bulging scrapbooks and photo albums against the far wall. Not bad. I doubt even Mrs. O’Sullivan would notice the new addition to that mess.

Now what?

My watch says it’s 3:40 p.m. Time to go. I back out through the door. I can’t relock it. The fact that someone has come into this room will be evident the first time Mrs. O’Sullivan tries the door.

It’s so quiet in the house, my nerves start to tingle. Now that I’ve done what I set out to do, with remarkable results, getting out should be the focus of my attention. The nagging thought that this was too easy, that I’m missing something even more important makes me pause at the top of the stairs to consider what I should do next.

Two possibilities present themselves. Check out O’Sullivan’s office downstairs.

Or check out Jason’s bedroom.

I turn back to the hallway. I close my eyes and let my senses “taste” the air. This morning, Jason smelled of Safeguard soap, Redken shampoo and CK One deodorant. I follow the same scent trail to the third door on the left at the end of the hall.

The door is not locked. When I step inside, I step into every teen’s dream room. An LCD wide-screen TV hangs on the wall opposite the bed. A Bang & Olufsen system connects computer and TV and every conceivable music source imaginable. There’s a desk and a small love seat. The desktop is clear except for the computer monitor. No bookcase. Nothing personal on the walls, only what looks like LeRoy Neiman sports prints. I recognize the collection because David has them, too. It’s the Football Suite and when I look closer, I realize these are probably the original lithographs.

I move to the desk, open drawers, carefully shuffle contents although I have no idea what I’m looking for or why I think I should be looking here at all.