Again, she heard footsteps. She walked faster, and the clicking of heels behind her seemed to quicken, matching her own pace. She stepped off the sidewalk and continued through the grass. The sound of footsteps vanished, as if someone were tracing her silent path. She returned to the sidewalk at the top of the S-curve. Her heels clicked on concrete, and a few seconds later the clicking resumed behind her. She turned and said, “Who’s there?”

She saw no one, and there was no response. In the darkness beneath the trees, however, she sensed someone’s presence. I wish I had my gun, she thought. She never carried it when out drinking.

She turned toward her townhouse, and her heart leapt to her throat. A man was standing on her front step. She was a split second away from delivering a martial-arts kick, then stopped.

“It’s me, Felipe,” he said.

A wave of relief came over her, though she still felt like killing him. “Don’t ever sneak up on me like that. What are you doing here?”

“What do you think?” he said.

Felipe was one of her father’s bodyguards. He was about six-foot-six and built for the fireman’s calendar, with handsome skin that was just a shade too dark to be called olive. His crew cut was nicely groomed, except for the crescent-moon bald spot on the crown of his head. The scar was exactly the size of the bottom of a beer bottle, and it smacked of a bar fight gone bad. His five-o’clock shadow was perpetual-at least in the sense that it was there without fail every time Alicia saw him. The first time they’d met was at a victory party the night her father was elected to his first term as mayor. Felipe was a hottie, she had to admit, and she figured that he must have been drunk and off duty when he introduced himself by saying that he’d like to guard her body. It soon became apparent that he was just another sober jerk, with one redeeming quality: He loved the mayor like his own father and, if he had to, would probably take a bullet for him. That kind of loyalty more than made up for the occasional and mostly harmless lousy come-on.

“Did my father send you?” she said.

“Of course. He just wanted to make sure you got into the townhouse safely.”

“I know. But I think you can see that’s not really necessary. I’m sorry you had to come all the way over here so late.” She started up the stairs. He followed. She stopped at the front door and said, “You can go home now, Felipe.”

He had a smug expression, as if he knew how much this was going to bug her. “Your dad specifically told me to go inside ahead of you and check things out. Make sure no one is hiding in the closet, that sort of thing.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake. I’m a cop.”

“Hey, I’m just doing as I’m told.”

This was turning into a night that she’d sworn would never happen-the two of them standing at her front door as Felipe the Conqueror flashed the macho man’s grin, the kind that came only with the right to enter. But it was too darn late to phone her father and argue about it. She unlocked the door and stepped aside. “Make it fast, please.”

Felipe gave her an obnoxious little wink as he crossed the threshold and switched on the light. “Nice place,” he said in a breezy tone, as if he were expecting her to turn on some music and offer him a drink.

Alicia’s townhouse was cozy-a nice way of saying “small.” The kitchen and living room were downstairs. There was no dining room per se, just a dining area that was really part of the living room, separated from the kitchen by a little pass-through opening over the sink. Alicia followed him to the sliding glass doors. He unlocked them and stepped outside to check the patio. It was late, she was tired, and she was losing her patience for this. Then something caught her eye. Her computer was in a little work area directly off the kitchen. She had DSL ser vice, so her computer was always online, and she noticed several new e-mails in her in-box.

“All clear. Where’s the bedroom?” Felipe asked as he came in from the patio.

“Upstairs.” She wasn’t about to go up there with him, and her expression had apparently conveyed as much.

“Be right back,” he said.

Alicia’s attention returned to her e-mails. There was the usual smattering of spam, but it was another message from an unknown sender that caught her eye. The subject line read, ABOUT YOUR PURSE. She opened it with a click of her mouse, and her heart skipped a beat. The sender was identified only by a jumble of numbers and characters, not a real name. She read the message once, then read it again. It was short, to the point, and downright creepy:

“I’m sorry. Please don’t be frightened. Soon you will see, it is only out of love that I seek you.”

Felipe was back. “Everything’s fine upstairs. Are you-” He stopped himself in midsentence. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” She managed an awkward smile, trying to keep it cool as she showed him to the door and opened it.

“I’ll let your dad know that everything checked out okay.”

She was about to say good night, but he interrupted. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“You look like you seen a ghost.”

“Nope. No ghosts here,” she said. None that I care to tell you about, anyway. “Good night, Felipe.”

“Good night.”

She closed the door and locked it, her thoughts awhirl. This was no longer a drifter’s one-time demand to speak to the mayor’s daughter. The stolen lipstick, the e-mail-this was outright stalking.

Alicia checked the lock again, making double sure that the deadbolt was secure. Then she went upstairs to her closet-to get her gun.

T he next morning, the Miami-Dade crime lab found a fingerprint on Alicia’s compact that didn’t belong to her. A scientific confirmation that Falcon had stolen her purse would have made things pretty simple. Nothing, however, was ever simple.

The print didn’t match Falcon’s.

“That’s weird,” she said. “If it’s not mine and it’s not Falcon’s, then whose is it?”

“No one in any of our databases,” was the answer she got.

She wanted to ask if they were sure, but she knew these guys were thorough. Fingerprint analysis wasn’t just a matter of pushing a button and seeing what came up on the computer, the way it was portrayed on television. The Miami-Dade crime lab checked and double-checked. When they said “no match,” there was no match.

Around ten o’clock, Alicia headed over to the tech geniuses in the audio-visual department. Her laptop was in the hands of Guy Schwartz, one very smart geek, who had done the trace on the “Sorry about your purse” e-mail.

“The message was sent from the Red Bird Copy Center,” Schwartz said. “That’s in the big shopping plaza on the corner of Red Road and Bird Road. Easy to find, but now comes the hard part.”

“How do you mean?”

“The Red Bird Copy Center is the kind of place that rents computer time by the hour, like an Internet café without the lattes. People can come in off the street and send e-mails to whoever they want. I can’t just look at your computer and determine the sender’s identity. Your only hope is that the clerk at the copy center can tell you who rented the particular computer in question. Or maybe you can pull a fingerprint from the keyboard or mouse.”

“I’m on it,” she said.

Twenty minutes later, Alicia and Detective Alan Barber were in the Red Bird Copy Center. Alicia had “a personal stake in the case”-a rather lame way to say “the victim,” but such was police lingo-so she had to beg for permission to accompany Detective Barber and his team of crime-scene investigators. The last thing the prosecutor needed was for Alicia to testify at trial as both the victim and the investigating officer. She was allowed on the scene strictly as an observer. Period. End of discussion. Alicia was okay with that.