Free Mortal Crimes: 7 Novels of Suspense by Brett Battles, Robert Gregory Browne, Melissa F. Miller, J. Carson Black, Michael Wallace, M A Comley, Carol Davis Luce

blue sky hard as glazed crockery. Since there were a couple of cars in the driveway, Laura parked on the road. The heat swarmed around her face like bees, stealing her breath from the moment she left her car; even a thirty-yard walk in this heat was daunting. Her pace quickened under the full sun and slowed when she reached the shade thrown by the royal palms. She thought about the illegal immigrants sixty miles from here on the border, walking for miles. Many of them dying in the desert. It wouldn't take very long for her to die—not long at all.
    She rang the bell and found herself waiting a long time. The front door was under an arched alcove and additionally cooled by the shade of an alligator juniper tree. A mockingbird sang from the tree's branch, and Laura thought about her own mockingbirds back on the Bosque Escondido.
    They were wild birds, but Laura had named them after they had stayed through their first winter with her three years ago: Buster and Blanca. She'd put out water for them, which they viewed as their own private watering hole, and watched them raise generations of fledglings.
    In the last few days, Laura had gradually come to the realization that Buster and Blanca were gone. She had no idea where they'd disappeared to or when exactly they'd made their departure. She'd been fooled for a while because a mockingbird still sang from the wire going into the telephone pole above the house. When it finally dawned on her that Buster and Blanca weren't coming for their water and the mocker was perched in a different spot, Laura had taken a good look at the bird. It wasn't Buster. This mockingbird looked more like the Maltese Falcon—broad-shouldered and sharp-beaked.
    All this time, she'd been talking to the imposter as she watered plants or pulled up weeds. The fact that she was fooled made her feel vaguely ashamed. What kind of detective was she if she couldn't see something so patently obvious? But the two birds had sounded exactly alike, just like their cousin here in the juniper tree.
    She rang the bell again. This time the door opened almost immediately. The maid she'd seen last time answered, wearing the same outfit, the knit shirt over a white skirt and Keds.
    The maid let Laura into the house and motioned her to stay in the foyer. The house was cold. A female voice, singing, floated down from a room on the second floor—deeper and darker than the voice student Laura had heard before. Laura knew it was Nina Lantz-Brashear.
    A few minutes later, Micaela Brashear came down the curved staircase. She wore a halter top, cropped jeans, and bejeweled flip-flops that showed off her lacquered toenails. “Hi,” she said. “You wanted to talk to me?”
    “Just a couple of questions.”
    The maid hovered nearby, an uncertain smile on her face.
    “ Es tambien ,” Micaela told her. She led Laura through the house to a narrow room, one wall all screened windows and a pair of French doors looking to the back yard. A print of woman holding calla lilies hung from the wall opposite the windows. The floor was dark red concrete. Outside, there was a lawn, several royal palms, a swimming pool, and a cabana.
    Micaela sat in a wing chair, her back to the yard, pulling her feet up and locking her arms around her knees. Laura thought again that although Micaela Brashear wasn't classically beautiful, her features were assembled in such a way that she could stop traffic with one look.
    “Do you remember the carnival you went to with your friend…” Laura looked at her notes. “Lindsay Copeland? It was about a week before you were kidnapped.”
    She touched one of the small golden hoops at her ear. “It was just a shopping center somewhere. We were coming back from swimming when Lindsay saw it and asked her mom if we could go in.”
    “You remember the part of town?”
    “Somewhere on the west side. We went to that water-slide place; it was on the way back.”
    “Can you remember any cross streets?”
    “It was by