“My brain cells aren’t working,” Tillotson said.

Diana stepped back and held her front door open. She let him handle the screen.

“I know what they need,” she said.

She led the way past the living room to the kitchen of her rented Cape Cod. By now she didn’t have to tell him to take a seat, or to put his briefcase on the table. She went straight to the range and started heating water for coffee.

At the first sip his face relaxed like a sheet of ice slumping off the roof of a car. She took it as a signal to start her report.

“I asked around,” she said. “Nobody’s even heard of him. If he’s paying for it, it’s not with anybody I know.”

“Or with you.”

“Or with me.”

She didn’t take offense. He needed to know whether his suspect was leading a secret life with the local hookers. She was one of them, even if roles got a little fluid here in her kitchen.

“We can’t find any trace of him having an affair,” said Tillerson. “No life insurance on her. He was the big earner in the marriage.”

“No motive? How about his alibi?”

“He says he was working late, but he’s the boss. Any number of ways he could have slipped out, killed her, and come back.”

“So basically what you have is, she’s older, and she’s dead.”

“That and this itch I get when something just doesn’t look right.”

“Does caffeine cure it?”

“Never has yet.”

“So what’s the itch about?”

“They met twenty-some years ago. He was thirty-two. She was fifty. Okay, I get it. A beautiful, sophisticated older woman. But now she’s seventy-three. Maybe the magic went away.”

“It usually does at some point.”

Diana made a face. Who was she to talk about marriage? She knew only what clients told her, and they might or might not be a representative sample.

“That’s true,” he said. “But maybe he blamed her for getting old.”

“Could be. I read that he broke up her first marriage.”

“Yeah. I interviewed some friends of hers. At the time they thought she was crazy, throwing away a solid guy for a boy toy. They were surprised when it lasted this long.”

“Do you have any pictures? You know, besides what was in the newspaper?”

He opened his briefcase and removed an old-fashioned photo album, which he pushed across the table. Diana started turning pages.

“Damn,” she said. “If that’s seventy, sign me up. I mean, not yet, but she’s doing it right.”

“How does he strike you?”

“Client material.”

“Ouch.”

“Now I’m getting the  itch.”

She flipped a few more pages.

“You know what it makes me think of? ‘Granny porn.’ Ever heard of it?”

“I can guess.”

“It’s a niche, but it’s popular. Or so clients tell me. The basic scenario is a young guy and a hot horny woman with a Medicare card. Maybe he’s a delivery guy, maybe a friend of her grandson. Spoiler alert—they get it on.”

“No shit.”

“I could actually refer a fair amount of business to a woman like that. It comes up.”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Yeah. There was an affair, but she was the one. And the guy was younger than her husband.”

“That’s gotta hurt.”

Tillotson thought.

“I’ve still got nothing. That means I need a confession.”

“Get him in a room and needle him until he snaps.”

“I’ve done this before.”

But he was grinning as he got up to go.

As Diana got home from an afternoon client, she opened the door and heard the phone ringing.

“It worked,” said Tillotson.

She sometimes wondered what kind of risk he was running by reporting to a civilian, and not just any civilian.

But that was up to him.

“What, the caffeine?” she asked.

“Yeah. The itch is gone.”

This was the part she didn’t like.

Diana could usually convince herself that she had come to terms with her job. A hooker went where she had to go, and a certain number of bystanders would guess what she was doing.

But this situation left no room for doubt. Diana walked across the shop floor, past the three lifts, each of which held a car aloft. The three mechanics looked everywhere but at her.

They were still taking in every detail. Her T-shirt, jeans and athletic shoes weren’t fooling them.

The walk of shame took her to the boss’s office in the far corner. Under the circumstances, she appreciated the grimy blinds that covered the equally dirty windows. She knocked and pushed the door open. The client was sitting behind the desk.

“Hi, Vern. I’m Diana.”

She thought he had the perfect name for a fifty-ish man who looked like the dictionary definition of a mechanic.

Diana closed the door behind her and locked it. Her eyes went to the only corner of the desk that was clear of paperwork and boxed auto parts. There it was—the white envelope that justified this ordeal.

Next to it sat a grease gun. She made a mental note of it.

“Should I get ready?”

“Sure.”

She went to the elderly padded chair in the corner and put her bag down. She stripped off her outer garments and dropped them next to the bag. Underneath she wore Victoria’s Secret, which put the usual smile on his face. She performed the practiced balancing act that let her exchange her sneakers for four-inch heels from her bag without touching the dirty floor with her feet.

He kept watching and smiling, as she made a production of slipping the bra and panties off.

She knew what he wanted next. Most women would have overlooked the grease gun, but Diana had seen similar things before. This kind of man often had her come to his shop because he thought it was hot to watch a naked woman playing with his tools

All of them.

“Nice,” she said, as she took the tool from the desk and sniffed the nozzle. “State of the art synthetic grease.”

She enjoyed his look of surprise.

“I’ve met a few mechanics.”

“I guess so.”

“You know what might be fun? Have me come after hours, and I’ll fix a car for you. Like this.”

She indicated her nakedness with a wave of her hand.

He shook his head regretfully.

“My wife would never believe I was working late.”

Diana heard a key turn in the lock. In an instant she did the arithmetic. Who would have a key? Her money was on Vern’s wife. Had his mention of her summoned her like some horror film character? Or had she intimidated one of the mechanics into keeping her informed?

A blonde forty-something stood in the doorway

“Asshole. Think I can’t read your mind?”

The gun in her hand was doing the talking that mattered. The muzzle shifted from Vern to Diana.

“I suppose you’re a customer.”

Diana knew that silence was the best reply, but Vern didn’t.

“Alison, it’s not what you think.”

The gun swiveled toward him. Diana felt free to wince at the lameness of his words.

“It’s exactly what I think. Did you think I was kidding last time?”

Alison aimed, but she didn’t pull the trigger. She must know that even this distance was too great for a snubnose revolver. She took a step toward her husband, and then another.

Diana pumped the grease gun. The first rule of hooking was get paid, and murder interfered.

She laid down a squirt in the woman’s path. Before Alison could stop herself, she put her stylish boot in the glob of goo. Her feet flew up, and she fell hard on her back.

Dazed, she let her gun hand go slack. Diana plucked her envelope off the desk as she kicked the weapon away. She pointed at the slick spot with her toe.

“That’s going to be hard to get up. But you two can work that out.”

“That’s easy,” said Diana, “he was on top of me.”

“As alibis go, that’s as good as it gets,” said Tillotson.

“Thanks, I guess.”

“No wiggle room?”

“Not the way you mean.”

He gave her a look.

It would have made a great nightmare.

Standing in front of the dark gray-encrusted lava flow, Coutinho thought it looked like the head of a crocodile the size of an Airbus. But instead of just two baleful eyes, this beast had dozens of glowing orange windows into its pitiless soul.

A puddle of water hissed, as it turned to steam and vaulted into the air. Ferns and bushes sizzled as the monster fed on them. Heat and fumes spread like the vile breath of a carnivore.

In a dream Coutinho’s feet would have weighed a ton and kept him rooted in place for the lava to overwhelm him. He knew he was awake, because he could stroll back and forth while he watched the crime scene technicians at work. The flow had slowed overnight. It was moving only a few inches per hour, but that still left his team with a short deadline.

One of the Tyvek-suited figures looked up at him.

“I think we’ve got all we’re going to get. Should we pull?”

“Let’s do it,” Coutinho said, a little too fast. He was dreading the moment.

The topic under discussion was the naked body pillowed in the lush grass that covered much of the Puna region of the Big Island. The dead man lay face down, but the back of his head looked familiar.

Coutinho knew what was coming. When the techs grabbed the dead man and pulled, the top half of him would come loose. The longer they waited, the more of him they would lose to the natural crematorium.

Two technicians, both young men, grasped the corpse by the armpits. They pulled. Nothing happened. They dug their heels into the ground and yanked harder. A sucking sound warned Coutinho to clamp down on his gag reflex.

The upper half of the body came loose, releasing the odor of barbecued meat. The two techs staggered in unison but stayed on their feet. A uniformed officer, another young man, turned and ran for a nearby bush. He vomited as if he would never stop.

Coutinho caught himself thinking that the young cop was lucky. The lava would soon consume the evidence of his professional lapse, along with the bush that gave him some privacy.

The techs flipped the half corpse over.

“I thought so,” said Coutinho. “Zeke Balaguer. His wife is a nurse at Hilo Medical Center.”

“Oh, my God,” came a horrified voice from the designated retching bush. A fresh round of vomiting followed.

“Let’s go see what that’s about,” said Coutinho.

Two hours later he was knocking on the door to a whitewashed box of a house on 130 outside Pahoa. He had told two uniformed officers to wait in their car behind him.

Melanie Balaguer opened the door and stepped out onto the packed dirt in front of the house. Coutinho could forget about an invitation inside.

“Melanie, you know why we’re here.”

“What did Zeke do?”

“Don’t try it. How did you get Zeke to go out there with you?”

“Don’t know what you mean.”

“Or did you kill him here and lug him out there?”

Her silence was as good as a confession. She was big and strong in the way of native Hawaiians, and she was used to hefting patients a lot heavier than a bantamweight like Zeke.

“You remember telling me what you were going to do the next time he stepped out on you?”

She still gave nothing away.

“Getting rid of him out there was a good idea, but the lava slowed down last night. It left half of him for us.”

He turned and signaled. Officer Jenny Freitas, his go-to cop for thinking outside the box, got out of the car and approached. As Coutinho had instructed her, she held a small Styrofoam cooler up for Melanie to see.

“Actually, a little more than half. You threw his junk too far.”

Melanie shrugged.

“It’s not something you can practice,” she said.

“Amen to that.”