Jacinda Durham slouched low in the driver’s seat of her Nissan Pathfinder and rested the edge of her zoom lens on the base of the open window. She’d parked in a dark spot between streetlights, before an empty parking lot, gated for the night, and she’d hooded the lens to guard against flashes of reflection from passing vehicles.

She aimed her camera at the white Jaguar parked in the lot across the street and waited.

It was one of those thick, sticky summer nights when the air lay on the skin like a veneer. To make herself less noticeable, she wore a long-sleeved black t-shirt over her jeans, and her clothes had turned into a sauna. At least her hair was off her neck, pulled into a doubled ponytail.

Shit, she hated stakeouts. But they were the bread and butter of her work. It was always the things people did in the dark that got them in trouble.

Her cellphone rang. Lifting her eye from the viewfinder without moving the camera, she checked the number and answered, turning her attention back to the Jag.

“Hi, Dad.”

“You didn’t check in, Jaci.”

Her parents had given her the fairly exotic name of Jacinda, but when she was little, they’d called her by the mundane nickname Cindy. In junior high, she’d announced that she wanted to be called Jaci, and by about eleventh grade, her parents had finally gotten that through their heads. As an adult, she’d reclaimed the exotic flair of her full name, but her parents had had apparently one name change in them, and she’d be Jaci to them forever.

She was thirty, but always felt fifteen when she spoke to her parents—which was often, seeing as they worked together. Her mother was an attorney with a private practice, and her father ran Durham & Associates Detection Services, a private investigation firm of which Jacinda was the sole ‘associate.’

She was thirty years old, but Daddy still expected her to check in when she was staking out a target after dark. Sometimes, she thought that was sweet, but not tonight. Tonight, she was hot and uncomfortable and short on patience for a father who kept forgetting that she was more than capable of handling herself. More capable than he was, frankly.

“Sorry. I’m sitting across from The Cotton Gin, bored out of my head, waiting for Mr. Kennedy and his wandering penis to go back to his Jag with his side piece and give me the goods. Nothing to worry about, Papa Bear. It’s all good.”

“You know I can’t sleep until I know you’re safe.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’ll call when I get the money shot, or when know I won’t get it tonight. And then I’ll head home.”

“Don’t press your luck, Jaci. You don’t have to get the shot tonight.”

“Yeah, I do. This is the third night out on this guy.” She knew he was cheating on their client, she’d seen plenty of evidence, but until they had good pictures, the work wasn’t done. Pictures always told the story, no matter the rest of the evidence.

But Randall Kennedy was cagey. He took his lover to out-of-the-way places like The Cotton Gin, a good steak joint, but a bit too far on the north side of town to be considered elegant, and far out of the way of his usual CEO crowd. He never engaged in much PDA out in the open—all Jacinda had been able to get so far was a few shots of his hand on Lynette Jenks’ pert ass. Suspicious, but not nearly enough.

The best shot she’d gotten so far was a shitty image of the two engaged in an illicit soul kiss in the front seat of that Jag. Glare on the windshield made it worthless for proof.

Tonight, she had to get the money shot.

The front door of The Cotton Gin opened, and Jacinda peered through the viewfinder. Kennedy and his blonde beauty strolled down the sidewalk while the door closed behind them. “Gotta go, Dad. Love you.”

“Love you. Be caref—”

She tossed the phone aside and got to work.

With his hand in full possession of her snugly clad ass, Kennedy led Lynette to the Jag. Jacinda snapped pictures of the walk, of Kennedy’s chivalrous opening of the passenger door, of him lingering, leaning on the door, to say something and then laugh, and of him going around and getting in behind the wheel. She took photos of them through the windshield, but they didn’t get into anything interesting.

When Kennedy backed up the Jag, Jacinda set the camera on the passenger seat, next to its double, which was set up with another roll of film, and started her Pathfinder. She knew where they were going.

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~oOo~

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She followed Kennedy and his date to the Symphony Towers Hotel, where they skipped the valet and parked in the garage. When they took the elevator up to the lobby level, Jacinda took the stairs to the street. She’d followed them as far as she needed to, and if she got any closer, Kennedy would take notice. She didn’t have to watch him to know he’d head to the front desk, so she could take a minute or so and go around to the main entrance.

The doorman opened one of the brass-framed front doors of this hotel on the lower tier of high-end. “Good evening, miss.”

“Thank you,” she said and gave him a warm smile. Didn’t do to be rude to the people who stood in the background everywhere and thus saw everything, and she wasn’t working undercover, so she didn’t need him not to remember her. The only people who needed not to notice her were walking toward the front desk.

Inside the brass-and-marble lobby, Jacinda lurked behind a large plant in a seating area and watched her target check in. She stayed where she was until they headed toward the gleaming brass doors of the elevators and stepped into the one that opened.

When the doors closed, she stretched out her long legs and strode quickly to the desk.

There were two attendants at the desk, but Jacinda worked it so she got in front of the one she wanted. The tall redhead who reminded her a little of a young version of her mother, with a Jayne Mansfield body and a Rita Hayworth face, had helped her out a few times—including telling her that Randall Kennedy had booked a room for this night using his ridiculous alias of Adam West.

Batman. He booked hotel rooms and dinner reservations to bang his chippie under the name of the guy who’d played Batman on TV. What a douchebag.

Jacinda leaned on the counter. “Hey, Shannon.”

“Hi.” Shannon cast a blue-eyed glance at her colleague, who was totally occupied checking in a couple and their baby and about three hundred pieces of luggage. “He just checked in.”

“I saw. You got a room number?”

“You can’t go in there. I could lose my job.” She was young and fairly new to the biz. Jacinda had softened her up over drinks and heartfelt conversation, had learned a little bit about her past and used it to her advantage, so she knew that Shannon had a recent college degree and aspirations for a career in the hospitality industry. She was only the shift manager at the desk of this pretty nice place now, but she wanted to move on to one of the few really swanky places in Tulsa, and eventually to run her own hotel someday.

Jacinda also knew that Shannon didn’t like men who treated the women they said they loved like crap. Like, really didn’t like them. Enough to put her job on the line when Jacinda had asked for help in just the right way.

What Jacinda was asking her to do in this case was far more than simply confirming a reservation, the kind of help she’d sought in the past. She knew she was pushing the edge here, asking her to conspire in directly incriminating a guest of the hotel. She would definitely lose her job if she was found out. Probably her whole career, at least in Tulsa. Jacinda felt a pang of guilt at that. But she needed her.

So she’d make sure Shannon didn’t get found out. It was good business, anyway. A cooperative contact in a hotel like this was gold in the PI business. Fuck, it was platinum.

More than that, though, she didn’t storm through life not caring what her actions meant for others. She didn’t want Shannon to lose her job because she didn’t want to hurt Shannon, who didn’t deserve it.

“I don’t want you to lose your job. I don’t want to go into their room. All I need is to get into the room next door. Is it free?” Earlier in the day, when Shannon had alerted her to Kennedy’s reservation, Jacinda asked her to put him in a room with a balcony, which meant floor to ceiling glass, and to hold a room next door for her.

As guarded and anxious as she was, Shannon couldn’t keep a proud lift from the corner of her mouth. “Better. I put him in one of rooms overlooking the courtyard. It’s on an inside corner, and the room on the other side of the corner is free.”

That meant that the balconies would be at a ninety-degree angle to each other. Perfect for surveillance. Jacinda pushed a credit card and a fold of twenties across the desk. “You’re a star, Shannon. You are going places.”

“I hope so.” She ran the transaction, discreetly slid the twenties into her blazer pocket and held out a key card. “Room 1021. Enjoy your stay at the Symphony Towers Hotel.”

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~oOo~

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“Okay, Cheaterman, you better have your curtains open.” Leaving the lights out, Jacinda crossed to the closed draperies of the Room 1021 balcony and peeked around the far edge.

“Bingo.” The sliding glass door and window of the balcony next door were like a movie screen, showing the room inside in full. The couple was already naked and gettin’ jiggy. They had only a nightstand lamp on, but the top half of the two-backed beast was inside the halo of light, and it was enough for Jacinda to see that it was Randall Kennedy boring a hole through the pretty blonde half his age. Helpful of him to have that Navy tattoo on his shoulder. Thanks, pal.

Jacinda unpacked her cameras and settled into a damask armchair. Time for the money shot.

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~oOo~

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“Jaci, you in there?” her mother called, knocking as she asked.

“Yeah, Mom. Notice the red light?” Using the tongs, she picked a print out of the wash, squeegeed it, and set it on a drying screen.

“You get it?”

“Mom! I’m just about done. I’ll be out in a few.”

“Did you get the shot?” Her mother was Mrs. Kennedy’s attorney. They kept it all in the family here at the office duplex that was Barbara Durham, Attorney at Law, and Durham & Associates Detection Services.

“Yes! I got the shot. Go away.”

“You used to be nicer!”

“You used to pay my rent!”

“I still do, missy.”

Jacinda laughed. “No, I earn it now. And I write the checks.”

Her mother answered with a sassy rap on the door. “There’s lunch out here, too. From Pho Ha’s. Get it while it’s hot.” A breath of a pause, then: “But you got the shot?”

“All the money, Mom. I got it.”

“You’re a star, Jaci.”

“Yes, I am,” she muttered to herself, staring down at the last print in the holding bath. There was something about this one particular shot that had her caught. All the others were the typical kind of scummy shots this kind of scummy work produced: normal people with normal bodies being normally intimate. Very few stakeout bedroom shots came off like porn. They weren’t pretty or arousing. It wasn’t about that. It was about identification and proof of illicit behavior.

But this shot, post-coitus, of Randall Kennedy lying on top of a young woman who was very much not Mrs. Randall Kennedy, staring into her eyes as she stared back, was the one that would fuck him over in court. This was the one that would send Mrs. Randall Kennedy—who’d quit college to marry him and worked to put him through the rest of his BSBA and then his MBA, who’d given up her own career dreams to raise their son and two daughters almost singlehandedly while he climbed the corporate ladder—after every fucking penny he had and his stocks, too.

This shot showed that he loved Miss Lynette Jenks. It made Jacinda feel a little bit sorry for the guy.

Not too sorry—he was cheating on a wife of twenty-five years, after all—but still. It was obviously not just a cheap fling. Which was why he would be completely fucked in court.

When that last photo had gone through the final wash, she set it to dry and left the darkroom.

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~oOo~

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Five minutes later, Jacinda was back in the darkroom, holding a Styrofoam carton of pho tai in her hands while her mother stared at the drying photos.

“These are good, Jaci. These are excellent.”

“I told you. Money.”

Her mother leaned in and studied that post-coital photo, tucking her still naturally dark hair behind her ears. “This case...this could change things for us. If I don’t screw it up.”

Slurping up a spoonful of lunch, Jacinda rocked her hip into her mother’s. “You won’t. You’re good. That’s why Mrs. Kennedy hired you.”

“She hired me because I’m not powerful enough to be connected to her husband or his bigwig friends. She hired me because I’m a nobody with a decent win record. She hired me because she thinks I need her case, so she can control me. She hired me because I’m an older woman. She didn’t hire me because of my vaunted reputation as a legal eagle.”

“Shut up. I hate when you do that.” Her mother was preternaturally self-composed, but she had her insecurities like everyone else. “Your ‘decent’ win record is almost ninety percent. You’re good, you’re gonna clean out Mr. Randall Kennedy and his wandering penis, and then you’ll have a vaunted reputation as a champion of Tulsa’s wronged women.”

Obviously pleased, her mother smiled and turned from the drying photos. “I hope you’re right.” As they stepped out of the darkroom, she asked, “You’re on the desk this afternoon, right?”

“Yep. I’m on the phone, and I’ll do the accounts while I’m fielding calls.” She’d noodle around online a bit, too, doing some investigation for a couple other open cases.

“Can I push my calls to you, too? Hailey needs the afternoon off to take Charlie to the doctor.”

Though the law firm and the detective agency shared the duplex and had adjoining private doors at front and back, and though the agency got a good portion of its business from the law firm’s clients, the businesses themselves ran independently. But Hailey, Jacinda’s mother’s legal secretary and receptionist, took PI calls when Jacinda and her father were out, and Jacinda or her father took legal calls vice versa.

“No problem. I hope Charlie’s okay.”

“Probably just a cold. Daycare is hell for germs. Okay. I’ve got a deposition at one-thirty that’ll likely take the rest of the day. Will you be by for dinner tonight?”

“Nope. I’ve got class tonight, and then I’ll just go home, eat out of the fridge, and crash, I think. I didn’t get much sleep last night, after all.”

Her mom smiled and leaned in to plant a maternal, lipsticked kiss on Jacinda’s cheek. “My super sleuth. I’ll see you tomorrow, then. Push your father out the door at closing time, okay?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

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~oOo~

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She worked alone through much of the afternoon, answering the phone, settling accounts payable and invoicing accounts receivable. When she had the desk cleared of that work, she pulled a couple of files from the active cases holder and did some digging online.

Since the internet had become a Thing, a lot of the early footwork in the job had gotten dramatically easier. Some cases could be solved with fifteen or twenty minutes of smart online searching. Her father was still flummoxed by the very idea of an internet, so he left that work entirely to her.

Jacinda had worked at Durham & Associates since high school, though she’d been allowed only to play secretary until she’d gotten her own private investigator’s license. Even from that limited vantage, she’d seen the work her father did, and she’d helped where she could. Now that she was his associate, she’d been working to bring the business into the modern era.

Speaking of which...she picked up the desk phone and dialed a number she had memorized.

“Thank you for calling Tulsa Digital Solutions. How may I direct your call?”

“Ryan Stoller, please.”

“One moment.”

The Muzak at TDS was probably meant to be ‘cool’—some synthesized alien mating call bullshit that gave Jacinda a headache. She put the call on speaker and got back to her search, looking for an address history or some kind of trail on a guy who’d cut contact with his parents.

The Muzak cut out. “This is Ryan.”

“Hey, Ry. Jacinda.”

Ryan’s voice changed at once, shifted from terse and businesslike to easy and a little bit flirtatious. “Hey, beautiful. You want me to unzip your files?”

She and Ryan had been friends since junior high—always totally platonic and yet filled with stupid flirtatious play. There’d never been anything close to sexual about it; it was more like they’d practiced on each other without ever being interested in that way.

Then, while Ryan was in college, he’d come out. His parents and a lot of his friends had abandoned him over that. He was still only carefully out, ten years later.

She grinned but tried not to let it come across over the phone. “Gross. Tell me you don’t actually use lines like that, and if you do, please GOD tell me they don’t work.”

He laughed. “I do, and they do. It’s all in knowing your audience. What can I do ya for?”

“Weren’t you supposed to be over here this week to do the whole Y2K check?” The whole planet was freaking out over what would happen on New Year’s Day 2000, about six and a half months from now, when all the digital clocks in the computers all over the world tried to change years on a two-numeral system and reset to 1900. Jacinda was skeptical, but figured better safe than sorry. She wanted their system checked and remediated well before the thick of the procrastinators’ panic.

“It’s Wednesday. Week’s not over.”

“You were going to call with a day and time.”

“I did. Talked to your pops. Told him I’ll be there Friday morning, first thing.”

Jacinda sighed. That wasn’t on the paper blotter calendar her elbows rested on, the only one her father would use—not that she would have let him touch her laptop with his luddite fingers. “You know better than to tell my father to schedule anything. Email me if you don’t reach me on the phone.”

“Sorry. But you know, it’s his name on the sign.”

She hated that sign her dad was so proud of, with an actual deerstalker hat hanging on the ‘h’ in ‘Durham.’ “It’s my name, too, and I handle all things digital. You know that. You were dodging me because you knew I’d bitch about waiting until Friday.”

His only answer was a chuckle that filled her ear.

“Jerk,” she teased. “Okay, well, I’ll be here waiting on Friday morning.”

“Good. Wouldn’t mind coffee and doughnuts.”

“Maybe. If I’m in the mood to be nice.”

“You turn my software into hardware, baby.”

This time, she couldn’t help but laugh. “I cannot fathom how you ever get laid.”

“You’d be surprised.”

“I’d be shocked. I’ll see you Friday, you nerd.”

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~oOo~

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Jacinda’s father didn’t come back to the office until ten minutes after she’d locked the front door and pulled the shade down. She’d called him twice and gotten his voice mail, and she’d actually begun to get nervous.

When she heard his key in the lock, she closed the laptop and crossed her arms on the blotter, waiting.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he said, as if nothing were wrong.

“Who was it giving me grief last night about checking in? Hmmm?”

“Sorry. I got hung up trying to talk to the waitress.”

“I called you twice, Dad.”

He stared at her, his mouth slack with confusion. “You did?” Digging his cellphone out of his pocket, he peered at the screen. “Huh. Four missed calls. I don’t know what happened.”

Knowing exactly what had happened, Jacinda stood and walked around the desk. She held out her hand for his phone, then pushed buttons until she’d raised the volume on his ringer. “How did you manage to turn the volume down but forget how to turn it up?”

He took his phone back. “I didn’t forget. I did turn it up. I don’t know what happened. You know these things hate me. If all these gadgets really take off, I’m going to have to retire. I like real detective work. The kind that puts some miles on your soles.”

“The gadgets have taken off, Dad. You’ll learn to use them. You’re too smart to give up. And I earned us five hundred dollars in half an hour online.”

“You found the son?”

“I want to go out there and confirm before we tell his folks, but yeah. He’s working in a factory near Joplin.” The parents had hired their firm only the day before. Definitely one of the easier cases she’d worked. She felt a little guilty taking their money, but once she drove to Joplin and talked to the guy, she’d have earned it.

“That’s great! You’re a star, sweetheart.” He wrapped her in a one-armed hug.

She hugged him back. “Mom wants you home for dinner, and you’re late.”

“Okay. I’ll jot down some notes about this talk with the waitress. Can you write up the transcript from the tape for me?”

“Can I do it tomorrow morning? I’ve got class tonight. New session, so I want to get there early.”

He beamed at her. “My tough girl. Yeah, it can wait.”

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~oOo~

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A couple hours later, Jacinda was dressed for a hard workout, in black spandex pants and a blue midi top/bra combo and her cross-trainers. Her hands were taped, and her hair was pulled up in a high pony. She walked into the front of the room at the Downtown Hand2Hand Club and faced a group of fifteen women in various states of fitness and a wide assortment of outfits. Grey and red floor mats were arranged in rows at their feet.

One woman’s face was heavily bruised. She lurked at the back of the room like she wanted a quick exit while no one was looking. Jacinda focused her attention on her and smiled. What that woman needed was to stay.

Jacinda had been training here for years and had become friends with the owner, a no-neck boulder of a man named Benny. A couple of years back, she’d convinced him to offer legitimate self-defense classes, free of charge, to abuse and attack victims referred by various organizations around the Tulsa area. She’d convinced him by volunteering to teach them, so all he had to do was clear the room. And many of them stayed for memberships and to pay for more training after their free class was over. Wins all around.

Still focused on her possible runner, Jacinda introduced herself. “Hi. I’m Jacinda Durham, your instructor. If you’ve signed up for this class, you want to learn how to defend yourself, and not just in the way they teach at the Y or the women’s center. You want to learn how to lay some real hurt on somebody trying to lay some hurt on you. Everybody here has been hurt bad by somebody. Maybe a stranger, maybe somebody you know. That’s why I took my first class like this, so I understand. What you’re going to learn in this class, if you take it seriously, is control. How to turn the pain around on an attacker, to neutralize the attack so you can get away, or so you can get help. You’ll learn how to decide how far to take the pain you make. You’ll learn how to be in control when somebody’s trying to take it from you.”

She widened her attention to all the women in the room—and saw that one of the women was a man, slight and shy, and also in the back, near the opposite corner. It was rare for a man to sign up for the class, and she hadn’t noticed an obviously male name on the roster. Not that it mattered.

She met his eyes and smiled. “So, are you ready to learn Krav Maga?”

A few voices answered in a feeble positive.

“Let’s try that again. Are you ready to take back your power?”

A more enthusiastic “Yes!” from her chorus of trainees.

“Are you ready to learn Krav Maga?”

“YES!”

The woman with the bruised face looked ready to bolt, so Jacinda walked the room as she started the lesson, headed toward her runner. She wasn’t going to lose her, not today.