Annie's Neighborhood. Roz Denny Fox

that had seen better days. In fact, this whole street, like many in the neighborhood—including his, a few blocks away—looked as tired as he felt.

      Koot drove in and parked behind him as Sky picked up his clipboard of report sheets. Shoving his sunglasses off the bridge of his nose into shaggy hair he hadn’t found time to get cut, Sky waited for his friend and coworker to join him.

      The older man came up, blotting sweat from his cocoa-brown face. “Enid called me from dispatch. She said three homes in a row were vandalized while the occupants attended a funeral. Whose work do you reckon it is?”

      “I don’t know. I just got here and haven’t interviewed anyone yet.” Sky started to say more, but broke off as a woman separated herself from a foursome watching workmen install a window. She came toward them, undoing her hair from a band that had confined it. Sky’s attention stalled on thick, black waves unraveling around her shoulders, hair that shone almost blue in the sunlight. She was tall, but not quite as tall as his five feet eleven, even though she wore heels. A no-nonsense navy suit didn’t hide her womanly shape. He couldn’t help staring as she approached. The closer she got, the more Sky was mesmerized by her flawless skin and smoke-gray eyes fringed by jet dark lashes. Obviously natural lashes. In this job he often dealt with women who achieved that look with stuff that came in a tube and tended to smear when they cried. Women he encountered in the course of a workday were always crying, it seemed.

      The woman stopped a few feet short of the men. “I’m Annie Emerson,” she said straightaway. “I called to report the fact that three homes were broken into and vandalized while we all attended my grandmother’s funeral.”

      “I’m sorry for your loss,” Sky muttered, unable to quit staring at her long enough to write her name on the report sheet, until Koot jabbed him none too gently in the ribs. “Ah, yes. We, uh, got the call. I’m Chief Sky Cordova. This is Lieutenant Talmage.”

      Annie lifted an eyebrow. His hasty condolence fell a bit flat. She knew his job probably had him mouthing the words on a regular basis, but his perfunctory tone got under her skin. “I didn’t expect such high-ranking officials to show up. Mrs. Gilroy—” Annie pointed to the older of the two other women at the scene “—felt you’d be too busy to come at all.”

      “Our department is small, and we’re stretched thin,” Koot explained. “We can see your exterior vandalism. Can you tell us what’s missing from inside? And did anyone see the perpetrators or their car, or get any kind of useful description?”

      Annie hesitated. “As I said, I was at my grandmother’s funeral, and the others left before me, arriving home first. The center house belongs to my grandmother, Ida Vance,” Annie said, then with trembling lips corrected and stammered, “N-no, that’s not true. It’s my home now.”

      Sky glanced up from the sheet on which he was scribbling. “Is it Miss or Mrs. Emerson?”

      “Ms.,” she said. Was he trying to learn her marital status? Why? None of his business in any case. “You should speak to Peggy and George Gilroy or Mike and Missy Spurlock. I didn’t go in because I didn’t want to disturb any evidence. I assume my neighbors came home straight from the cemetery.” Annie chewed on her lip. “That would’ve been a little before one o’clock. Instead of calling the police, they contacted repairmen.” Gazing directly at Sky, Annie added, “I gathered they thought contacting you was pointless.”

      Sky bristled, immediately going on the defensive. “At the moment, I and three officers cover all of Briar Run. Our open cases consist of two rapes, an unsolved drive-by shooting and a couple of gang-related drug deals,” he said, waving his pen. “Petty crimes do sometimes get wait-listed.”

      The woman facing him didn’t so much as flinch, which made Sky wonder about her. He thought most females would. “You call a bold, daytime break-in of three homes, with wanton destruction of property, a petty crime?”

      Koot grabbed Sky’s arm and tugged him toward the two couples who stood by the houses. “I’ll dust these places for fingerprints as soon as we collect a list of missing items, Chief.”

      Sky nodded, still gritting his teeth.

      George Gilroy leaned on his cane, and looked uncomfortable when the two cops joined him. After a bit of probing, he admitted, “We lost a TV, a DVD player and a pearl necklace Peggy had left out on her dresser. The thieves grabbed the easy stuff.”

      Peggy piped up. “But other things got broken. Some dishes seemed to be randomly swept off our sideboard.”

      “Ms. Emerson guessed you got home around one,” Sky said. “It’s three now. Were the perpetrators gone when you arrived?”

      “Hi, I’m Mike Spurlock.” The younger man barged into the group. “The thieves must’ve heard us drive in, or else they had a lookout posted. I noticed our broken windows and told Missy to stay in the car. I entered the house through a side door, and saw our back door swinging as if they’d just run out. After I made sure there was no one inside, I had my wife come in to make a note of what all they took.”

      “Our new flat-screen TV is gone, along with some wedding gifts I hadn’t even taken out of their boxes,” Missy said tearfully. “A vase, a duplicate coffeemaker I intended to return. We’re starting out our married life and don’t own much yet.” Missy Spurlock curled into her husband’s embrace.

      Sky, who was scribbling everything down, turned to Annie. “What was taken from your place?”

      “I told you I didn’t go inside. And even if I went from room to room, I might not know what’s missing.”

      “Why not?”

      “I’m visiting, or I have been for two weeks. This is the home where I grew up, but I, ah, have been living in California until I came to see about my grandmother’s health.”

      Sky tapped his pen impatiently on the clipboard again. “You can’t say what’s gone, yet you were most adamant about wanting us to solve this case. The truth is, Ms. Emerson, odds are everything stolen today has already been hocked and the money divvied up.”

      “It sounds as if you know who did this. So, can’t you round them up for questioning?”

      Pretty as she was, her barbs got Sky’s back up. “It’s an all-too-familiar pattern,” he admitted. “If I were a betting man, which I’m not, my money would go on poor, dumb, local kids acting as puppets controlled by drug-dealer puppeteers from Louisville. Oh, I’d like to knock some sense into these kids—tell them they’re lucky to have folks, whether or not the family has trouble making ends meet. They have a roof over their heads and food in their bellies, which is a lot more than kids I’ve seen in war-torn countries where families subsist on nothing. You, Ms. Emerson, would be wise to cut your losses here and hightail it back to your safe haven in California.”

      “Well, thank you for the three-minute lecture, Chief Cordova. I applaud you for serving our country, as you apparently did. May I point out that your current job is to serve the taxpayers of Briar Run? If these are local kids going down the wrong path, it seems to me part of your job should be to show them a better one...by example.”

      Koot Talmage, who’d returned from dusting around Annie’s door and windows, listened to their conversation—along with her neighbors. Talmage nudged his boss. “Why don’t you head out, Chief? I’ll wind up here, go to the office and type these reports. We can keep an ear to the ground. I doubt it’ll yield anything helpful, but the word will go out about who we suspect.”

      Sky shook off Koot’s hand. He continued to glare at the woman whose intelligent gray eyes remained locked on him. Sky had to say he found Annie Emerson irritating, although definitely attractive. He hadn’t taken such a long look at any woman in quite a while. Not since Corrine’s defection led to the outright lies she continued to tell the family court about him. Ms. Emerson’s dig, as well as Koot’s blasé attitude, and yes, also his own hostile one, woke a sleeping noble-mindedness in Sky—something he thought he’d lost. An innate sense of justice that first made him serve his fellow man in