Crazy Jake jumped out of the way just in time to avoid serious injury, but Delmar’s kung fu-fighter impression wasn’t wasted. He caught Reggie in the jaw with one beat-up Reebok, and Reggie’s head snapped back. He wasn’t down for the count, though.

His eyes narrowed and fiery, his breaths straining, Reggie lunged, and when he did, he looked a whole lot like that pit bull on his forehead. Growling, he grabbed

And I knew if I didn’t do something quick, somebody was really going to get hurt—and the whole crazy mess just might get caught on camera.

“Stop! Right now!” I sounded like a desperate kindergarten teacher and, honestly, that’s exactly how I felt. I raced over, and because she wasn’t about to give an inch, I had to nudge Sammi aside to get close. Since I’m about twice her size and she wasn’t expecting it, my push knocked her off her feet. The last I saw of her, she was butt down in a patch of weeds.

Sammi was less than happy, even after I mumbled a hurried, “Sorry.” Her curses were just as loud and colorful as Reggie’s.

And I so didn’t care.

It wasn’t until I was right on top of where they were still tussling in the dirt that I saw Delmar had something pressed to his chest.

The something in question was a dirt-coated box. It was about half the size of a piece of computer paper and made of wood. I have a degree in art history, but believe me, that doesn’t make me an expert in things old and moldy. Even so, I could tell the box had been buried a long time.

I could also see where it came from—there was a hole right next to Jefferson Lamar’s headstone.

Automatically, my interest level ratcheted up a notch. Reggie and Delmar’s beef was small potatoes compared with the too-obvious fact that the box buried near Lamar’s grave might have something to do with him—and with his claim that he’d been framed for a murder he didn’t commit. I may have been taking my life in my own hands, but hey, I had a job to do.

And I wasn’t talking about my job at the cemetery.

With Reggie and Delmar still busy going at it, I made my move. I darted forward, dodged the next punch Reggie threw, and ripped the box out of Delmar’s hands.

“Hey!” Delmar was small and wiry. He was on his feet in an instant, his fists on his hips, his chin stuck out. He was so intent on glaring at me, I wondered if he even realized Reggie had hopped up, too. He was standing at Delmar’s side with the same defiant look in his eyes.

“What the hell you think you’re doing?” Delmar demanded.

“Keeping you from being sent to jail. And you, too.” I turned what I hoped was a fierce look on Reggie. “Somebody finds out you’ve been fighting—”

“Ain’t nobody gonna find out,” Reggie spat. “Not unless you tell ’em.”

“I wasn’t planning on doing that.” It was the truth, so it wasn’t like I was giving in to Reggie’s threat or anything. When he spun away and stalked over to the fence and left a good bit of distance between himself and Delmar, I breathed a sigh of relief. It was the first I realized that Sammi was still down on the ground. I offered her a hand along with an apologetic smile.

She got to her feet without my help, but not before she tossed me a snappy, “Piss off.”

“Fine.” I backed off and went to stand where I could keep an eye on the entire team. Not that I’m paranoid or anything. “Someone want to tell me what’s going on around here?”

“That idiot took what don’t belong to him,” Reggie sneered.

“Got as much right to that thing as he does,” Delmar added, pointing to the box.

I could see I was getting nowhere. I looked to Absalom for help.

He shrugged. “Don’t like stickin’ my nose in other people’s business,” he said. “It ain’t polite.”

“But it is your business. It’s all of our business. That TV crew is going to come over here and—”

“Who cares what that man-woman thinks of us?” Sammi brushed off the seat of her red shorts. Checking me out, her expression soured. “Who cares what you think? You’re a spoiled little rich girl. You got no idea what real life is like.”

“You think?” Yeah, I was tempted to lay it all on the line: the stuff about my dad and the once-upon-a-time Martin money. The bit about the fiancé who dumped me rather than be associated with my shame. I was even willing to go for broke and mention the ghosts.

I would have done it, too, if I thought it would get me anywhere. But hey, I know a losing cause when I see one. And this one took the cake. Rather than mention that my real life was no doubt more complicated than Sammi could ever imagine—and sound like I was looking for sympathy—I glanced from the box in my hands to the hole near Lamar’s grave.

Automatically, I looked around for Lamar, too, but he was MIA, and didn’t it figure. That’s the thing with ghosts, see. When I want them to leave me alone, they’re all about help me, help me. And when I need some ectoplasmic assistance? Well, that’s when they tend to go wherever it is they go when they’re not bugging me.

With no help coming from the disembodied, I concentrated on the living.

“How’d you find the box?” I asked Delmar.

“He didn’t find it.” Reggie marched over. I swear, there was steam coming out of his ears. “I found it.”

“I saw it first.” Delmar plunked down on a handy headstone. “We was digging around a little bit. And I saw the corner of that box there.”

“I saw it,” Reggie insisted. “I saw it first.”

“Whatever!” I gave his comment all the attention it deserved before I turned back to Delmar.

“I saw it first, and I got it out of that hole,” the kid told me. “What’s that saying about possession being nine-tenths of the law?”

Reggie had no response. Then again, I don’t think Reggie understood the law. Or fractions for that matter. He grunted. “If there’s something valuable in that box—”

“If there is, it’s mine,” Delmar said. His jaw was rigid.

“Not a chance!” Reggie closed in on him. “If you think you can—”

“Hold on!” I stepped between them. “The box doesn’t belong to either one of you. It doesn’t belong to me, either. If it was buried at this grave, then it belongs to this man.” I looked down, as if I had to check the headstone to know who was buried there. “Jefferson Lamar. It belongs to Jefferson Lamar. Or to his family.”

Delmar wasn’t convinced. “Ain’t no dead man needs anything valuable.”

“Maybe there’s nothing valuable in it,” I told them. “Maybe it’s just a nasty old box. Did you ever think of that?”

Delmar hadn’t. Neither had Reggie. I could tell because, suddenly, they were all about keeping their mouths shut.

I saw my opportunity and took it. I hadn’t thought to bring gloves. Too bad. The wooden box was mushy. One corner of it was splintered, too, probably less from time and weather than from where Delmar and Reggie had knocked into it with their shovels. It had a small metal lock on the front of it, but since one side of the box was completely rotted away, opening it wouldn’t be a

I held my breath, gritted my teeth, and got to work.

Delmar and Reggie stepped closer. So did Absalom and Sammi. Crazy Jake took pictures.

I hoped when he developed them, I wouldn’t look as disgusted as I felt sticking my fingers inside that box.

I picked a piece of fabric out. It was torn and faded, but it looked like it had once been orange. It unrolled, and a fat brown spider dropped to the ground, and it’s not like I’m a chicken or anything, but I was so startled, I jumped back. I was so busy watching that spider scuttle under a nearby rock, I wasn’t paying attention. It wasn’t until I saw something silvery and shiny on the ground that I realized that along with the spider, a coin had fallen out of the box. By that time, it was too late.

Absalom bent to retrieve it. “Look at that!”

“What is it?” Delmar asked. “You think it’s real?”

“Heck with real. You think it’s worth something? If it is,” Reggie reminded us, “I found it.”

Crazy Jake took a picture.

Surprise, surprise . . . Absalom handed me the coin. I held on tight and, fortunately, it wasn’t nearly as dirty as the box it came out of. I buffed it against my jeans and took a good look. “I think it’s silver,” I said. “There’s an eagle on one side of it, and it says here that the coin is worth one dollar.” I flipped it over. “There’s a head of a lady on the other side. It’s dated 1902.”

“That’s old,” Crazy Jake informed us.

“That means it’s worth something. I’m thinkin’ it just might make me rich.” Reggie made a move to snatch the coin out of my hand, but I turned so he couldn’t reach it.

“I don’t know what it might be worth,” I said, “but I

“Who cares about the friggin’ competition,” Sammi bellyached.

“We should care.” OK, I sounded a little too much like a cheerleader, but let’s face it, if any team needed encouragement, it was mine. “Like Delmar said earlier, the producer, Greer, is probably going to suck up to Team One. I’m sure that’s why she decided to start with them today. So we’ve got to make it so she can’t ignore us. This is going to help.”

“If that coin is worth something,” Sammi grumbled, “we should all get a cut.”

“You ain’t listening.” Absalom took a step toward her. Sammi wasn’t about to back down, and either Absalom didn’t notice the fire in her eyes, or he didn’t care. “This is going to make us look good,” he added. “We got ourselves a genuine mystery here, and that TV chick is gonna love that. Bet those rich ladies, they don’t got a treasure like this in their section.”

As if his words were the magic abracadabra that made them appear, we heard rustling through the weeds and the sound of Greer’s squawking as she instructed her cameraman to start filming.

“Let’s not tell them. Not yet, anyway.” Making sure that fat spider was long gone, I retrieved the faded orange fabric, wrapped the coin in it, and tucked it all back in the box. I dropped the whole thing in an especially dense patch of spiny weeds behind Absalom’s voodoo

“I’d rather do a little research before we let anybody know what we’ve found,” I said, when what I meant was that I wanted to talk to Jefferson Lamar before I showed the coin to anyone else. “That way when we reveal we have the coin, we can show how good we are at research, too.”

I don’t think any of them agreed with me, but I never had a chance to find out because just then Greer and her cameraman showed up.

“Keep doing what you were doing.” She gestured in a way that told us to get busy and act natural all at the same time. “We just came to see what Team Two is up to.”

She wasn’t kidding when she said we. Team One trailed behind Greer and the cameraman, and even before they stepped into the little clearing near Lamar’s grave, they were mumbling to each other.

“Not nearly as aesthetically pleasing as the section we’re working on,” Lucinda Wright commented as she adjusted her picnic basket over one arm. She shook her head sadly.

“Not nearly as promising,” Katherine Lamb said to Gretchen Hamlin.

Bianca didn’t speak a word. She just gave me a look, head to toe, that said she was assessing my fashion sense.

It was the first I realized there were bits of rotted wood and a streak of dirt across the front of my emerald green scoop-necked tee.

“Well . . . ?” Her top lip curled, Greer gave my team a collective look that clearly said we were a disappointment. “You’re supposed to be doing something. Anything. Anything?” This time, her gaze fell on me.

“We were just—”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter.” She waved away whatever explanation I was about to give as inconsequential. “We need a scene where we introduce both teams. I thought we could do that now. You know, like you’re working in this section over here . . .” She waved my team to one side. “And Team Number One . . .” When she turned to the other team, she smiled in a way she didn’t when she looked at the rest of us. “You’ll come through over there, between that mausoleum and that headstone there with the angel on top and—”

“I thought this was reality TV.”

Greer laughed. Not in a that-was-funny way. More like in a you’re-incredibly-stupid way. She rolled her porpoise eyes. “Get real, Ms. Martin. The appeal of reality TV is that it’s real without being too real. You know what I mean?”

Before I could tell her I didn’t and I never wanted to, she dismissed whatever answer I might give.

“So let’s get you over here, Team One. Mae, you’ll be telling your team all about the cemetery. That way, we’ll be able to provide our viewers with some historical background without hitting them over the head with it. So you’ll want to mention that Monroe Street was officially founded in 1841, but that burials have taken place here since 1818. And remember to say something about how it was an ideal spot for courting. Couples walked the grounds arm in arm!” She sighed. “It was all very beautiful, and very romantic.”

“And yuck!” Really, I was supposed to keep quiet when this sort of nonsense was about to be filmed? “That’s sick and twisted.”

“It’s history.” If Greer’s eyes were lasers, they would have cut right through me. Not so the look she turned on Mae Tannager. “So you’ll be doing all that, and Team

Good thing that camera wasn’t on Sammi right then and there; she gave Greer the finger.

As ordered, we trudged over to the mausoleum to wait. Well, some of us trudged over to the mausoleum. I noticed that Absalom kept his distance, just like I saw that in spite of her one-finger salute, once she was away from the group, Sammi didn’t look as angry as she did upset.

Remember how I said that I knew better than to go chasing after ghosts? Well, I knew that having a heart-to-heart with Sammi was not in my best interests, either. Still, I couldn’t help myself. There was something about seeing tough Sammi with her eyes bright with unshed tears that made me feel like it was my duty, as team captain, to say something to cheer her up. I walked over to where she was leaning against the mausoleum, her leg (the one with the electronic monitoring device on it) bent and one foot against the wall, her arms crossed over her chest.

I smiled, but since she refused to look at me, it didn’t much matter. “Don’t pay any attention to Greer. She obviously wouldn’t know fashion if it came up and bit her in the butt.”

She snorted. “And you would?”

I tried not to take the comment personally. I mean, coming from a woman in red shorts and a purple shirt

“For an old-folks’ country club, maybe.”

“How can you—” I bit off the rest of my comment. Sammi’s opinion was just that, an opinion, and dead wrong, besides. She only said what she did because she was itching for a fight. I refused to be the one to give it to her. I didn’t care enough, in the first place. Plus fighting teammates would make Greer salivate, and who knows what Bianca would think of me if she saw me duking it out with Sammi.

I held my arms at my sides, the better to control my temper. “Greer doesn’t shop where I shop, or where you shop.”

Sammi’s top lip curled. She plucked at her purple top. “You think this kind of quality comes off the rack? I make my own clothes. I design them, too.”

OK, so we didn’t share one iota of the same fashion sense, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t impressed. Suddenly, the whole saint-on-the-shirt thing made sense, too. “You’re name is Sammi Santiago. And Santiago, that means—”

“St. James. Yeah.” She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “That’s how you can tell it’s one of my own designs. I put St. James on all my stuff somewhere. You speak Spanish?”

“Nah. But I know that much. I know creativity when I see it, too. You making your own clothes, that’s really cool.”

She controlled a smile. “You think so?”

“I think that’s more than I could ever do. It’s way more creative than Greer in that gray suit of hers.”

“Yeah.” Sammi looked toward where we heard the sounds of genteel laughter coming from the section

“That’s too scary to think about!”

We shared a laugh.

It wasn’t much, but it was a small inroad. Feeling more comfortable with Sammi than I had since she stepped out of that van and into my life, I did my best to make small talk. “You ever think of selling your clothes?” Believe me, I was in team-captain mode here, I wasn’t interested in buying. “There are some boutiques over in the Tremont neighborhood that—”

I guess that was the wrong thing to say. Sammi grumbled a curse and walked away.

As it turned out, maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing after all. It meant I didn’t have to deal with Sammi or with introducing anybody to anybody else when Quinn showed up.

“I thought you’d be working.”

I gave him a look that told him I was. “Didn’t think I’d see you today.”

“Hey, I’m a man of my word.” He was carrying a slim file folder, and he held it up for me to see.

“Is that—”

“The file you wanted. The Lamar case, yeah.”

I should have been grateful. I was. Honest. But—

“It’s awfully skinny.” I scrunched up my nose and gave the folder another look. “How can all the information about an entire murder investigation be in such a skinny folder?”

Quinn’s expression reminded me a whole bunch of the one on Sammi’s face before she walked away. “ ‘Thank you’ might be a more appropriate response,” he said.

“Thank you. Why is the file so skinny?”

His lips puckered. Not in the good way they did when he kissed me. “This is what’s called the basic file,” he explained. “There’s one of these kept in the Homicide Unit for every case that’s ever been investigated. It’s not supposed to leave the Justice Center.”

“Thank you.” This time I meant it.

Quinn sloughed it off. “I figured no one else was going to be looking for the file. Not on a murder that old. Especially when someone was tried and convicted. You just going to stand there? Or are you going to take a look?”

I shook away my disappointment and went to stand in the shade of the mausoleum. Quinn came along. “Basic file,” he said, flipping it open. “It tells you—”

“The basics.”

“That’s right. Who was murdered, when the call first came in, who was interviewed, who was convicted.”

“I know who was convicted.” I leaned closer for a better look. Not such a bad thing, considering that Quinn was wearing Flavio aftershave, my favorite. When he left my apartment that morning, he was dressed in the navy suit he’d worn to dinner the night before. But he must have stopped home somewhere along the way. His suit was one I’d never seen before. Grey, with pinstripes that were far more subtle than the ones on the suit that Lamar wore. His French-cuffed shirt was a shade of blue that matched the sky overhead, his dusty blue tie was a box pattern of darker and lighter blues, tans, and gray.

I leaned a little nearer. “You got this file for me fast.”

One corner of his mouth pulled into a smile. “Told you I was a man of my word. You wanted what you wanted, I wanted what I wanted, and once I got it . . .”

I knew better than to go down that road. The last

That was not the kind of publicity the restoration needed, and it would certainly make my favorite Homicide detective less than happy. With that in mind, I took the folder out of his hands and read it over.

“The victim was Vera Blaine. She was twenty-two.” Seeing the information laid out in black and white made me queasy. “He never told me who was killed, or mentioned that she was so young.”

“He?”

I shook myself out of my thoughts and found Quinn with his head cocked, studying me.

“He. The guy who filled out the papers in Lamar’s cemetery file. You know, the ones that mentioned that Lamar might have been wrongly accused. I just assumed it was a he. And look”—changing the subject was a much better tactic that getting fixated on the fact that my information was coming from the dead guy who’d been convicted of the murder—“it says she was killed at the Lake View Motel in Cleveland. Ever hear of the place?”

Quinn shook his head. “I only hang around in places where there’s trouble. Maybe no one’s been killed there lately.”

“Or maybe the place doesn’t exist anymore.” I read over the address. Even I knew it wasn’t the best part of town. “Twenty-five years is a long time. The motel is probably gone.”

I read the next section of the report. “It looks like the

“And it also says that there’s not one shred of doubt that your guy, Jefferson Lamar, committed the murder. See?” Quinn had obviously been through the file before he came to Monroe Street. He knew what he was looking for. “Lamar didn’t have an alibi. Not one he could substantiate, anyway. The victim worked for him at the Central State Correctional Facility. She was his secretary.”

“Which doesn’t mean he killed her.”

“Of course not.” He took the file out of my hand and flipped to the second page. “But all this does. Look: it’s a list of the evidence. They had him dead to right. Lamar’s personal weapon was used in the shooting. His fingerprints were on it. His blood was on her blouse.”

None of which Lamar had ever mentioned.

“Still, there was that note in the cemetery file. The one about Lamar being framed.” There were only those two pieces of paper in the file, but I turned them both over, just in case I’d missed something. “There must be more information somewhere. What about crime scene photos? And the gun itself? If Lamar says he was framed—” I offered an apologetic smile. “If that note in his file says he was framed, there must be a reason somebody thinks he was framed. How can I find out more?”

“This isn’t enough? If all you’re looking for is information about the crime so you can make your team look good—”

“I am. I will. But wouldn’t it be even more interesting if it turned out that note in the file was right? What if Lamar really was innocent? If we could prove that, we’d really look good in the competition.”

“If you could prove that . . .” Quinn snatched the file folder back from me. “That would mean you’d have to

“That I might piss someone off. Big time.” I swallowed the sour taste in my mouth that came with the realization. “That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t at least look into it.”

“That’s exactly what it means.”

“But, Quinn . . .” He was about to walk away, which is why I pulled out all the stops and added a playful little purr to my voice. “You know what you got for getting me the basic file. Imagine if you got the real file for me, the whole thing, you know, with the photos and the interviews and—”

“All of that is in some storage room somewhere.”

“Which means I’ll be even more impressed if you can get your hands on it.”

He didn’t have a chance to tell me he would—or wouldn’t—try. Greer’s not-so-soothing voice rang through the section, calling Team Number Two over for the big meet-the-other-team scene. Before I could tell Quinn we’d talk about Lamar’s file again, he was gone, and my teammates and I were being ordered around by Greer.

Walk, talk, smile, stop. Approach Team One. Introduce yourselves. No, that’s not good enough. Start all over again.

Reality TV it was not.

According to Greer, this scene would eat up approximately two minutes of air time. It took two hours to shoot, and by the time it was done, even Team One, in their straw hats and flowing garden dresses, looked a little wilted.

“We’re going to break for lunch.” I took the bull by the horns and made the announcement, and though Greer opened her mouth to object, Team One didn’t give her a

I wanted to be alone, see, because I was hoping if I was, Jefferson Lamar would make an appearance.

As soon as everyone was gone, he did. He popped up out of nowhere right next to Absalom’s voodoo altar. “Do you have anything new on the case?”

“I sure do. I saw the file. Looks like you’re as guilty as hell.”

His jaw went rigid.

“Facts are facts,” I told him. “And speaking of facts . . .” Being careful not to reach into the weeds before I looked to make sure there was nothing in there that was going to surprise me or gross me out, I went for the box.

Only it wasn’t there.

“Somebody stole it!” I said, before I realized Lamar had no idea what I was talking about. I filled him in. “Do you know who buried the box? Do you know who took it?”

His lips thinned. “You are working with the criminal element.”

“Oh, come on. That’s my team. They wouldn’t—” Only I remembered how Reggie and Delmar had fought over the box, and how Sammi had commented that if the coin inside it was valuable, she wanted a share in the profits. I thought about how busy we’d all been in the last couple hours, and how in that time, anyone could have taken the box out of the weeds. It was small enough to hide, and with Greer bossing us around and moving

My shoulders sagged. “You didn’t see—”

Lamar shook his head.

“Great.” I dropped onto a low headstone next to Lamar’s. “We had something that made us look good, and now it’s gone. And maybe that box had something to do with your case.” I was hoping this would spark a response from Lamar, but he simply shrugged.

“There was a coin in it.”

“Really?” His eyes lit. “I used to collect coins.”

Now we were getting somewhere. I sat up. “This one was silver, with the head of a lady on it.”

“Sounds like a silver dollar. But as to who would bury it at my grave or why . . .” Another shrug.

“Well, things aren’t looking good,” I told him. “Maybe that silver dollar was a clue of some sort, but it doesn’t matter now that it’s gone. And as far as that file Quinn got for me . . . it’s no wonder you were convicted. They had enough evidence to bury you.”

I hadn’t meant it as a pun; even I winced.

Lamar was as stone-faced as ever. “I told you I was framed. Otherwise, the evidence wouldn’t have been that perfect. Not if it wasn’t planted.”

“Then we’re right back where we started.” I threw my hands in the air. “Who did it?”

“A warden makes a lot of enemies.”

“Yeah. Right.” Too restless to sit still, I got up and walked over to his grave. It was the first time I was able to take a closer look. The headstone was gray granite. LAMAR was prominently carved at the top with JEFFERSON in smaller letters below it and to the left, as well as the dates 1933-1985. To the right, it said HELEN, along with the birth date of 1936. There was no death date listed.

“Helen? She’s your wife?”

Lamar nodded.

“And she’s not—”

“No, she hasn’t passed.”

“And does she think you’re guilty?”

He flinched as if he’d been slapped.

“All right then.” My mind made up, I brushed my hands together and headed out for lunch. “A warden makes a lot of enemies, huh? Then we won’t waste our time going down that road. Not yet. We’ll start with the one person who wasn’t your enemy.”