I couldn’t believe there were parents in the world who’d be stupid enough to fall for this guy’s spiel. Would anyone actually leave their kids, unaccompanied, with this creep?

“Sure,” Paul said with a sigh, moving toward the desk. “I’ll sign it.”

Well, that answered my question.

While Delgado went over the “brief contract” with Paul, I walked around the studio, pretending to admire his hideous photos. Some of them weren’t portraits of kids, but landscapes or extreme close-ups of the weathered faces of homeless people that Delgado had blown up to five times life-size. I suppose he thought this made him extremely sensitive and artistic.

A lot of the criminals I’d mediated had thought of themselves this way: outsiders who no one in this world could understand. Society simply wasn’t sensitive enough to comprehend their suffering. This is why—in their opinions—they hadn’t really been breaking the law: the law did not apply to them, because they were so special.

I kid you not. I’d heard it a thousand times.

There was another room off the main gallery. This appeared to be Delgado’s office. In keeping with the black-and-white theme, everything in it was white. It contained another desk, this one with a laptop computer on it. No one was sitting at the desk. There was another door from this office. When I tried it, I found that it led to a very spare, very tidy windowless bathroom, also in white.

There were no other doors.

“So your assistant isn’t here right now, Mr. Delgado?” I asked as I came back into the main gallery.

“No,” he said with a rueful smile. “I let him go home early today. It’s Friday, and with the beautiful weather we’ve been having lately, he wanted to go to the beach. How could I say no?”

“How could you?” I looked out the display window, past the gigantic portraits hanging there, at the few people walking by. It was dinnertime, and getting cold. Everyone sane had headed indoors. “We were your last appointment?”

“Yes, but well worth the wait. I’m glad I met with Mr. Maitland’s approval.” He beamed at Paul. “It’s not every day I get to photograph triplets.”

I reached out and grabbed the cord to the blinds in the display window. I snapped it so that the metal blinds closed with a loud crash.

“Oops,” I said. “How clumsy of me.”

“Oh.” Delgado was seated at his desk. His smile disappeared, but he didn’t look alarmed. “That’s all right, Mrs. Maitland. That happens, er, all the time.”

“Does it?” I asked. “How about this?” I stepped to the front door and locked it.

Now he began to look alarmed. He glanced at Paul, as if for reassurance. Paul’s expression seemed to make him feel better, since Paul was staring at me. Paul didn’t look alarmed, however. He looked exasperated.

“Suze,” he said. “Come on. I thought we were here for—”

“For what, Paul?” I reached down and unzipped the sports bag. “To get kinky? Oh, don’t worry. We are. Just not in the way you thought.”

“I thought your name was Victor.” Delgado glanced at Paul in confusion.

“Did you?” Paul glared at him. “Victor Maitland? The villain from the old eighties movie Beverly Hills Cop? Then you’re an even bigger chump than I am, because you could have looked up the name when she first called to make the appointment, you idiot, but you didn’t. I got it right away, but I still didn’t walk out the door, like I should have. Now she’s got both of us.” Paul turned to face me, then sighed when he saw what I’d retrieved from the sports bag. “Oh, great. There’s no bunny outfit in there, is there?”

“Sadly for you, no.” I leveled the .22 Hornet at them. “Jimmy, get your hands away from that phone, or I’ll put a bullet in your chest.”

“You do and they’ll hear the shot next door and call the cops.”

Delgado didn’t sound like a fawning photographer anymore. He sounded more like a man who might once have killed a terrified little girl. Because she didn’t understand his own suffering, of course. I was sure now that must be how he rationalized it to himself.

“I don’t care,” I said, taking careful aim. He had a black T-shirt on—to go with the theme of the place—with a yellow smiley face in the middle. It was easy to center the target. “It will be worth going to jail to kill you.”

“Suze,” Paul said. He, like Delgado, had his hands in the air. “Think about this. They have the death penalty here in California. Do you really want to go to the chair for murdering a guy whose only crime is taking really bad pictures?”

“Hey,” Delgado said, sounding offended. “I’ve won a lot of awards.”

“Seriously, dude?” Paul looked disgusted. “From who, your mom?”

“Paul.” I kicked the bag. “Stop it. There are some cuffs in here. Get them out and put them on him.”

Paul lowered his hands, looking relieved. “Oh, shit. I thought you were mad at me, too.”

“Oh, I’m mad at you, Paul,” I said, keeping the rifle level at them both. “But I need your help right now. So get out those handcuffs.”

“Fine.” Paul bent to dig through the sports bag with ill grace. “But if you think this is how it’s going to be when we’re married, Suze, with me helping you out with your crazy ghost do-gooding missions, you’re high.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Paul,” I said. “I still might shoot you, considering the mood I’m in, and I can’t promise it will be only to maim. So try to stay on my good side, okay?”

He dug more energetically through the sports bag. “I get it. You’re mad about the thing with Jesse. Maybe I went too far. I can call off the demo. It’ll cost me, but I can do it. But guns, Suze? And”—he pulled a taser from the sports bag and blanched—“these things? Really?”

Delgado, meanwhile, had his own worries.

“Who sent you?” he barked at me gruffly. “If it’s about the money, you can tell Ricky I got it.”

“It wasn’t Ricky. I don’t know any Ricky. It was Lucia Martinez.” I kept the rifle trained at the center of his smiley face T-shirt. “Remember her, Jimmy? She went to Sacred Trinity.”