Quill, a little huffy that she'd been 'ma'amed' and Meg had been 'missed,' said with more force than she'd intended, 'Home invasion? You mean armed thugs breaking into people's homes and taking their valuables? That's ridiculous!'
'Oh?' Officer Ange, despite his youth, had an un- expected depth of shrewdness. 'You two know any different, you'd better let the sergeant know.'
'Know what?' The female detective's companion, the one who had gone out the door to, presumably, examine the body of the security guard, approached with a frown. 'Your names?' he snapped. He was of medium height, with very broad shoulders and a big chest. His hair was fair-mixed heavily with gray and thinning on top. His nose dominated a thin, tanned face. Quill liked his looks.
'Sarah Quilliam. This is my sister, Meg.'
The set of his shoulders shifted a little. 'Sarah Quilliam? You involved in that business with Hedrick Conway up in Hemlock Falls?'
'Why, yes. I was.'
'Hm. It's all right, Corporal. I'll take it from here.'
Ange straightened and put his hands behind his back. 'Sir?'
'I said it's all right. I know them. Or of them, at least.' Quill, who had the sudden, undeniably thrilling thought that news of her exploits as a solver of crime had gotten as far as Miami, smiled brilliantly. 'Nosy,' the detective added, 'but harmless.'
'If you say so, sir.'
'Those two bimbos of the Taylor boys will need an escort home. Why don't you take them and report back here in half an hour. No more than that.'
'Yes, sir.' Ange marched off. Quill noticed that the tips of his ears were red.
The detective shoved both hands in the pockets of his sport coat, balanced on the balls of his feet, and said unexpectedly, 'How's Myles?'
'Myles?' Quill blinked at him. 'Oh, my goodness! You must be Jerry. Myles's friend from his days in New York.'
'Hear he's fallen into a pretty lucrative line of work.'
'Yes. He's an investigator for a company that handles corporate crime. He spends a lot of time overseas.'
His eyes went to the ring on her left hand.
'And yes, we're getting around to that. At some point.'
'Good to hear it. Thought things were kind of rocky there for a while.'
'Oh?' Quill's voice was cool.
'We thought we might get him on the force in Miami a while back. Just before he took that investigator's job. Didn't say much, Myles. Never does. But I gathered that if you two were really going to get married, he wasn't interested in moving down here. So.' His tone shifted. 'You two know anything about this?'
'We might,' said Quill. 'Actually, um... Jerry... I'd been expecting that something was going to happen to Verger Taylor.'
'You had, huh?'
Quill ignored Meg's warning glare. 'In the past few days, I've heard no less than two significant threats against Verger Taylor's life.'
'No kidding?'
Quill, a little uncertain at the sarcasm in his voice, nodded.
'You realize that keeping track of people who want to murder Verger Taylor is a full-time job? The list's pretty long. In the past month we've had' - he paused, drew a small notebook from the breast pocket of his jacket, and flipped through the pages - 'three significant death threats against him.'
'Three?' said Quill.
'Significant?' Meg asked. 'What do you mean by significant?'
'Threatening letters, phone calls, that sort of thing. Taylor's attorney, Frank Carmichael, turns them over to us pretty routinely.'
'Corporal whosis, that is, Ange.'
'Wisc. Just like it's spelled.'
'Yes. Him. That is, he. Said that all the evidence pointed to a home invasion.'
'That's right. It's a typical M.O. for this part of Palm Beach County. The perpetrators scope out the victim's home beforehand, posing as television repairmen or electricians, then pick a night when there's not a lot of activity. They don't care in particular if anyone's home or not. They disable any alarm systems, shoot whomever's in their way, and take off with what they can steal. In this case, it was a bag with twenty thousand dollars cash, a lot of small silver and jade. The contents of the safe in Taylor's office.'
'Twenty thousand in cash?' Quill was stunned. 'The boys say keeping that amount of money on hand was typical of him. It's not all that unusual around here.'
'Couldn't have it been premeditated murder? Planned to look like a home invasion?'
'Anything's possible,' Jerry said agreeably. 'But I'll tell you one thing about police work, if Myles hasn't told
