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seamy neighborhoods, Cassie reflected. Far from it. But Cassie didn’t have to drive through any on her way to and from work every day. Her life had changed dramatically, and she was still shell-shocked.
    If she felt like a sleepwalker going through the motions of her day-to-day existence, Cassie wondered how Pamela Lynch was faring. Any FBI director was held under a magnifying glass, but for the first female director the scrutiny was ratcheted higher still. Pamela Lynch was expected to do her job each day, and though it was tragic that her daughter had killed herself, in the end no one but her family and friends really cared. The press corps wouldn’t give her any passes if she fouled up. She had to perform every day, whether her heart was broken forever or not. In that way, Cassie supposed,she and the powerful woman who was suing her were a lot alike. Of the two of them, though, Cassie knew she had the better deal. She would rather be herself, tangled though her life might be, because Pamela Lynch’s daughter was dead and nothing could bring her back. Cassie’s Hannah was alive, and Cassie still had a chance to make things right between them.
    For the rest of her life, Cassie knew she would regret Maggie Lynch’s death and the part she had played in it. She could try to rationalize it with the belief she had been doing her job and the public had a right to know that the director was using the FBI to find her daughter’s attacker. Yet a young woman whose promising life lay before her couldn’t face a world that knew her secret. A secret that Cassie had broadcast to the entire country.
    Cassie wished, oh how she wished, that she could turn back the clock.
    Though she was extremely worried about the lawsuit, part of Cassie felt she deserved to be sued. If the reverse had happened, and something Pamela Lynch said or did had contributed to Hannah’s death, a lawsuit would be a poor substitute for the more visceral urge to use her bare hands to take revenge on Lynch.
    The voice from the Explorer’s radio pulled Cassie from her reverie. “That tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico is building quickly. They’re calling it Giselle. Winds are being clocked at seventy miles per hour.”
    Cassie had a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.

CHAPTER 7
    Most mornings Etta Chambers came home from her early morning search on Siesta Beach with her plastic bag filled with a nice assortment of shells. Turkey wings and whelks, conches and cockles and lion’s paws. Occasionally she came across an unbroken black sand dollar or a starfish. Since they were still alive, Etta always threw those back into the ocean. But today there was very little in Etta’s shell bag. Her search had been interrupted by the ruckus at the beach.
    “Charles? Charles!” she called out as she came through the front door of the town house she shared with her husband of forty-seven years. “Charles, where are you?”
    “I’m out here, Etta. Where I am every morning when you come home from the beach, honey.”
    Etta followed her husband’s voice to the screened lanai, where Charles sat with his feet up in a lounge chair reading the newspaper. “Charles, you’ll never guess what happened!” she said, continuing on before he had a chance to respond. “A woman’s hand wasfound on the beach. You know that boy we always see with the metal detector? He found a woman’s hand!”
    Charles closed the
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
and put it in his lap to listen to Etta’s story. The boy, the seaweed, the police. Charles was impressed by Etta’s description of the hand and the fact that his usually squeamish wife had gotten so close and taken in the gory details so thoroughly.
    “The hand was all bloated and some of the fingertips were actually missing,” said Etta, her eyes wide. “But I think there was a delicate bone structure beneath the puffiness. And I’m sure it was a woman’s hand because there was bright red polish still painted on some of the