Hot Secret by Sherryl Woods

with the film, after all. Anyone determined enough and familiar with that alley access could have slipped onto the street and away again without ever being seen by one of the guards.
    Molly sighed. Instead of filling in gaps of what she knew, it seemed she was only raising more questions.
    “Thank you for seeing me,” she told them. “Will you stay on here?”
    “The police have told us to stay, yes,” Giovanni said. “We wish to cooperate. I did not like this man Gregory Kinsey, but I have respect for his work. I did not wish to see him die.”
    “Then the police know you are here?”
    “They know, yes.”
    “Will you stay here or move back to Miami Beach?”
    “Here is best. There are no memories for her. Hopefully it won’t be for long.”
    Molly noticed that Francesca was twisting a rosary in her hands. If the strand of beads was wound much tighter, it would snap. Francesca’s eyes were filled with sadness, and suddenly Molly realized that she was perhaps the only one who truly mourned Greg Kinsey.
    She placed her hand over the girl’s. “If you would like to talk, call me,” she said impulsively. “I’ll leave my card on the dresser.”
    Francesca bit her lower lip to stop the trembling. She nodded. Giovanni stepped closer and laid a hand on her shoulder. He murmured something in Italian that drew her gaze up to meet his. She smiled tremulously.
    “That is better, cara mia ,” he said. He glanced at Molly as she went to the door. “Francesca will be fine. I will see to that.”
    Feeling more exhausted than ever, Molly quietly shut the door and walked to her car. As she pulled out of the lot and headed east on Eighth Street, she caught a glimpse of the driver of a car just turninginto the motel. Unless she was very much mistaken, the driver was Otis Jenkins. She doubted the detective was there to rent a room. If Francesca and Giovanni blabbed about her visit, she was going to be in even deeper hot water with the Miami Beach Police Department.
    So what else was new? She didn’t regret tracking down the model and the photographer one bit. It gave her more pieces of the puzzle to use when she tried to explain things to Vince in the morning. Unfortunately, the only piece of information her boss was likely to be interested in was the name of the killer, and she was no closer to knowing that than she had been before.
    At home Brian and Liza were in the dining room with some sort of contraption rigged up on the dining room table. Water was everywhere. Molly eyed the mess warily. “What is it?”
    “A desal … a desal something,” Brian said, regarding it proudly. “Pretty awesome, huh, Mom?”
    “A desalinization device,” Liza corrected. “It’s a winner, if I do say so myself.”
    “It’s awesome,” Molly agreed, trying to sound enthusiastic, rather than thunderstruck. “I don’t suppose either of you considered putting some plastic under it, so the water wouldn’t destroy the finish on the dining room table.”
    Liza and Brian glanced guiltily at the spotted surface. “Think of it this way,” Liza said. “He’ll probably be able to sell this thing to the government and make a fortune. You can buy a new table.”
    “Is it finished?” she inquired cautiously.
    “Yeah. It’s great. Want to see it work?” Brian asked.
    She sat down. “Go to it,” she said more enthusiastically. If sacrificing the dining room table meant her son never had to know how little she understood science, it was a small price to pay. Last year’s project, which had gotten a paltry C-minus, had nearly robbed her of her sanity. This one looked like an A to her.
    Later, with the science project safely in its box and Brian tucked into bed, she fell gratefully into her own bed. But instead of getting some much needed sleep, she spent another restless night pondering the intricate web of lies being spun around Greg Kinsey’s death.
    Love—or some of its darker permutations—had made suspects of a wide variety of