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me precede him into the foyer. Ever the gentleman. I stopped just inside the door and eyeballed the room. The chandelier was turned on, blazing down on a large, round oak table with a white marble top. Long-stemmed pink roses were just beginning to wilt in a fan-shaped crystal vase that looked like Lalique. A sickly scent that reminded me of mortuaries filled the air. A white card lay on the table. I bent and read it without picking it up. Welcome to Cedar Bend, sweetheart. Relax, enjoy yourself, and I’ll see you soon was written neatly in small, back-slanted handwriting. It was signed Nick .
    I walked through a curved archway into a long living room, which faced the lake. The day had finally dawned outside, and three large skylights threw oblong patches of sunlight over oak hardwood floors. Everything was spotless, pristine-looking, the carpet snow-white and plush under the couch. Half a dozen French doors brought in a spectacular view of the glistening lake.
    On the back deck, lots of white wrought-iron furniture padded with thick blue-and-white-striped cushions were arranged in conversation nooks. Chaise lounges were lined up facing the water, among giant terra-cotta pots full of geraniums and marigolds. Now that she was out of prison, Martha Stewart would nod her approval and say, “It’s a good thing, this place on the lake.”
    “Okay, enough with the suspense, Bud. Where is she?”
    “Out here.” I followed him across the glossy floor to a French door standing ajar. “No telling when somebody would’ve discovered the body if the neighbor lady hadn’t gone in for a dip.”
    The back deck stretched about twenty feet out over the lake. There were steps leading down to a lower-level boat dock. I braced myself mentally. I’d had enough experience with spattered blood and brain matter in L.A., as well as various other gore, not to get sick at crime scenes, and I was well used to the incomparable stench of decaying corpses and the way it infiltrated my hair and skin until I could barely scrub it out. Unlike some officers and medical examiners, I couldn’t look at dead bodies as hunks of red meat or evidence depositories; I saw them as wives, mothers, daughters, family members.
    Homicide victims suffered terrible pain and unimaginable fear in their last moments on earth. Nobody deserved that, and now Bud and I, and other hard-eyed investigators like us, would prod and probe and invade Sylvie Border’s body, dissect her life to find out who and what and why.
    A water rescue boat sliced through the still waters, with a roaring engine, and headed straight at us. Twenty yards from the deck, the driver killed the motor, and silence dropped like a rock. There was only the gurgle and splash of water breaking on the pilings under the deck. One of the men was a state patrol diver who’d gone in after a bridge suicide last month. I didn’t recognize the others. “I take it they’re here for retrieval?”
    Bud slid off expensive mirrored shades, folded them, and stowed them in his breast pocket as the rescue team donned scuba gear. “Take a peek over that rail and tell me what kind of psycho did her.”
    I leaned over the waist-high railing and peered into the water beside the lower-level boat dock. The lake looked about ten feet deep there, a little turbulent from the rescue boat’s wake, but not enough to obstruct my view.
    Sylvie Border sat upright in a chair sunk into bottom mud. She was completely nude, and her skin gleamed pale white, almost silvery, under the water. I couldn’t see her face, but her long hair billowed up and down in underwater currents. The killer had not only submerged the victim in a chair, he’d also sunk a deck table, dishes, and silverware, entire place settings for three people, as if Sylvie were awaiting dinner guests on the bottom of the lake.
    When a smallmouth bass slipped through long strands of waving hair and nibbled the victim’s right cheek, I straightened and dragged my palms