He kissed her on the lips, deeper than she expected. Harder than she was used to. As he rubbed up against her, she realized that he wanted to make love. She smiled and sighed and kissed him back with her eyes closed, wishing she hadn’t taken that damn pill.

He stroked her chin with his finger. She could smell all over his skin the scent of the soap they used at the office. It was laced with cocoa butter, reminding her of suntan lotion and days spent lazing side by side on the hot sand at the beach. On a chilly night in April, the fragrance seemed so out of place.

He rolled over her leg, finding the center. As he entered her, she wrapped her arms around him and held on as well as she could. Drifting. Sleeping. Keeping her secret locked away in her dreams. She was glad that he’d come home early tonight, glad they were together. This was the way things were supposed to be.

James and Nikki Brant together.

Funny, but she didn’t remember hearing his car pull into the drive, or even the sound of the front door, which always seemed to open with a deafening creak….

LENA Gamble dropped the crossword puzzle on the table and reached for her coffee mug. As she sipped through the steam, the piping hot brew tasted rich and strong and just about perfect. Starbucks House Blend, purchased at the Beachwood Market for three times as much money as any other brand. For Lena the additional expense was worth it—her one big gift to herself—and she brewed it by the cup every morning with a teakettle and filter paper as if a junkie doling out heroin in a red-hot spoon.

She was sitting by the pool, trying to wake up and watching the sun rise over Los Angeles. Her house was perched on top of a hill over Hollywood, east of the Cahuenga Pass and just west of Beachwood Canyon—the view magnificent from here. She could see the clouds plunging in at eye level from the ocean fifteen miles away, the Westside still shrouded in a dreary gray. To the east the marine layer had already burned off, and the Library Tower, the tallest building west of Chicago, glowed a fiery yellow-orange that seemed to vibrate in the clear blue sky.

For fifteen minutes the city had the look and feel of a postcard—the kind a tourist might send back home while on vacation in paradise. For fifteen minutes it all looked so peaceful.

This was an illusion, of course. A trick that played with the senses. Lena knew that Los Angeles was the murder capital of the country. Over the past month there had been thirty-plus murders—more than one homicide for each day of the week. But at dawn on this day, the air was almost clean, the streets appeared almost manageable, and she still had half an hour or so before she had to leave for work.

She glanced back at the house, noticed that she forgot to close the screen door on the slider, but didn’t get up. Instead, she pressed her shoulders into the chair and let her eyes wander down the steps off the porch, along the stone pathway by the garden, and then up the side of the house to her bedroom window on the first floor. It wasn’t a big house. Still, it was her anchor to the city. The only real thing keeping her here other than her job. She’d inherited the property from her brother, David, five years ago.

Built in 1954, the house would probably have been called a modern version of a California Craftsman back then. But every time Lena looked at the weathered cedar siding, the shutters and white trim, she couldn’t help but think that it belonged on a beach at Cape Cod rather than the top of a hill in Hollywood.