MONDAY Chapter 1 It had been a couple of years and I was neither dead, nor undead, which I ranked as an achievement. It wasn’t as if I lacked opportunity. Even when I wasn’t really looking for it. I was safe at the moment. My perch among the roof beams of the Crate & Freight warehouse in the Northfield section of Denver was only fifty feet above the concrete floor. Those SCAR assault rifles down on the loading bay weren’t aimed at me. No one knew I was here and it was dark in this corner. That was safe, by some definitions of the word safe. I was kind of enjoying myself. Still, I knew what a few SCAR rounds could do to a body. The guys down there weren’t carrying them for show. If they pointed a flashlight up into the gloomy recesses, they would be surprised to see their afternoon visitor from the HR department, now minus her clipboard and big square glasses, in black coveralls and toting a camera with a zoom lens. Given what they were involved in, they wouldn’t stop to ask questions. I needed to call this in and hand it over to...

TUESDAY Chapter 2 Well, unless sitting in the office was my own personal purgatory, I was still alive. I hurt like hell, though. I completed the report and stretched, carefully. The bruises would fade and the sprains and strains would repair themselves. I heal exceptionally quickly, but being hit by a truck is always going to hurt for a while. Scary stuff. Just my kind of evening’s entertainment. Sitting still while typing the reports had stiffened up my back and I attempted some gentle twists. One of the problems with being five-ten; there was more of me to hurt. Still, on the bright side, a normal person would have been in the hospital, if she were lucky. Morales had gotten his report. This one was for Carter. I attached it and a final invoice to an email, signed it off as Amber Farrell, Commercial and Private Investigator, and sent it. That began the sweet process that would end with money in my beleaguered bank account. Not a moment too soon. This case had lasted way longer than I had anticipated; the flat fee I’d agreed to had turned out to be a bad decision. It had been interesting, sure...

Chapter 3 “I’m sorry about the call,” I said as we walked. “It was just wrong to take it while you were waiting and could hear. I’m usually much more discreet with a client’s business, but I didn’t think he’d appreciate waiting.” “Campbell gets overexcited, and I guess this isn’t a good time for him,” she replied. Of course, she would have heard about the company on the news. She would have connected the dots while she listened to my side of the telephone conversation. And of course, she would know him. She waved an elegant hand. “Let’s leave it, for the moment.” Jennifer Anna-Marie Kingslund was the CEO and owner of one of Colorado’s leading businesses, the Kingslund Group. She owned hotels, restaurants, sports facilities and nightclubs. I remembered hearing she had diversified into PR recently. Given her history of marriages that had come apart in public and the intriguing rumors of boardroom struggles, there weren’t many people in Denver who didn’t know something about her. According to the papers, she was a role model for businesswomen, or attractive and extroverted, depending on the angle of the story. She famously championed local causes. I didn’t think I qualified...