Elysia said, “We were seeing each other shortly before his death.”

Dora gave an unexpectedly harsh laugh. “Oh yes?” She took another sip of her wine. “Well, if you want to know my opinion, the little twerp got exactly what was coming to him.”

It didn’t get much blunter than that. A.J. had to wonder at such frankness to strangers. Once again she considered Dora’s voice. Had it been the voice of the woman in Dicky’s apartment? By now it was difficult to accurately remember those slightly harsh but definitely feminine tones.

“What did he do to you?” Elysia asked the other woman with genuine interest.

Dora said flatly, “He lied to me. He cheated on me. He broke my heart-”

“Did he try to blackmail you?” A.J. questioned.

Dora, mid-tirade, stopped. “Blackmail? No. What could he blackmail me about?”

Now there was a good point. Blackmail was only possible where the victim had something significant to lose by exposure. Dora did not seem like the retiring flower type.

“The papers said something about extortion. Some women are sensitive to-”

“Some women are idiots,” Dora retorted. “If that little weasel had ever suggested blackmail, I’d have…” She described in lavish and loving detail what she would do to any man foolish enough to, in Elysia’s vernacular, “put the squeeze on her.”

Two things became immediately clear to A.J. First, Dora had a slight impulse control problem. Secondly, Dora would be a very bad person to try and blackmail. If Dicky had been foolish enough to try, A.J. could believe that Dora might very well have killed him. Unfortunately, there remained the problem of Dora’s alibi.

Could it be broken? It seemed unlikely. If there was one person whom it would be all but impossible to fake out, it would be one’s hairdresser. She-or he-would be bound to notice one disappearing in the midst of the cut or color.

Besides, Jake was thorough about such things. He understood what was at stake.

Elysia was asking, “Where did you meet?”

“Egypt. I was part of an international professor exchange. My field is archeology. I met Dakarai in Cairo. He told me he was wary of involvement, a poor risk for a relationship; that he was getting over a bad marriage to a rich American actress.” She sneered at some memory and took another swallow of wine. “Oh, he did it beautifully, I’ll give him that. I realize now none of it was true.”

“He was briefly married to a friend of mine,” Elysia said. “The actress Medea Sutherland. That was probably what he was referring to.”

Dora the Explorer had no comment on that revelation. “Anyway, we had an affair. The sex was incredible. Then it was over. Just like that. He dumped me. No warning. I have no idea to this day what went wrong.”

Dora was a strange lady, but her pain and bewilderment seemed genuine, and A.J. felt sympathy-even if no one had tried to blackmail Dora, her life had still been disrupted. No one had the right to yank other people around like that.

“How long did you see him for?”

“Five weeks. I was in Egypt for one semester. Frankly, I never expected to see Dakarai again, but one day I was coming out of the dry cleaners, and there he was.” Her gaze zeroed on Elysia. “With you.”

Elysia’s eyes widened like a startled cat, but she said nothing.

Dora smiled. “Oh, yes, I recognized you right away. I followed you that day, you see. And it was obvious that I’d been played. Played from start to finish.” She drained her wineglass.

“So you started calling Dakarai,” A.J. guessed aloud.

She wondered if they were about to have a Miss Marple in the Drawing Room moment, but Dora scotched that when she said briskly, “That’s right. I started calling him. And following him. And, in general, harassing him. I didn’t want anyone else to go through what I went through.” To Elysia, she added, “Not that you weren’t old enough to know better.”

Elysia offered an acidic smile.

“In fact I called the DHS to try and get him kicked out of the country. They said they’d look into it, but I don’t think anyone ever did anything.”

“Did you ever try to talk to him directly?”

“I tried, of course. Oh, I admit when I first saw Dakarai I still had feelings for him. Embarrassing but true. They died fast. I realized he was just on the make. And apparently I wasn’t in his target income bracket.”

A.J. thought that was one possibility, but more likely Dora’s hostility and aggressiveness had made her a bad candidate for blackmail, regardless of her financial standing.

“What did he say when you recognized him?”

Dora laughed that edged laugh. “His first instinct, believe it or not, was to pretend I’d made a mistake.”

Not the brightest bloke, Elysia had been right about that. Not even a very developed sense of survival if he’d thought he could possibly get away passing that old line off on Dora. Why hadn’t he just told her his puppy ate his homework and been done with it?

Dora said, “Then he tried to suggest that we should… relive old times.” Her eyes were hard as onyx as they rested on Elysia.

Elysia said mildly, “Well, he would, wouldn’t he? That’s exactly the sort of thing he’d try if cornered. He was a lover not a fighter.”

“He was a user. A liar, a cheat, a-” Dora was on another roll.

A.J. interrupted, “Did you ever hear anything about Massri being involved in the theft or smuggling of Egyptian antiquities?”

Dora didn’t answer for a moment, her gaze on her empty glass. “There were rumors. Nothing overt. It was more a suggestion that he was lazy and not doing his job properly. He was lazy.”

“Apparently it was more than a rumor. He was fired from his position at the SCA.”

Dora’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know that?”

A.J. lied. “I contacted the SCA directly.” She thought it would be better if Dora didn’t know that their own relationship with the police was anything beyond adversarial.

“Well, I’m not surprised.” The teakettle was whistling in the kitchen. Dora rose to get it.

“She has the wherewithal to commit murder.” Elysia kept her voice low.

“The wherewithal?”

“The you-name-it. The gumption, the means, the motive.”

“But she’s got an alibi. Plus…”

“Plus what?”

A.J. opened her mouth, but Dora poked her head out of the kitchen. “Milk? Honey? Lemon?”

“Honey and lemon,” A.J. said.

“Milk,” Elysia said.

Dora disappeared, but her voice floated back to them. “Were you really going to marry him?”

Elysia’s smile was odd. “No,” she returned. “My experience was somewhat different from yours, Dora, but no.”

Dora reappeared with two mugs, which she set on the piles of paper on the long table.

“When was the last time you saw Massri?” A.J. asked.

“Months ago.” She seemed definite on that point. “After I turned him over to the DHS, I decided it was out of my hands.”

“There’s a colorful character,” Elysia commented as they left Dora’s and walked back to where they had parked the SUV.

A.J. snorted. “Boy, if that isn’t the pot calling the kettle black-as the Bard would say.”

Elysia gave her a cool look. “I do think she was telling the truth, though. At least as far as she understands it.”

A.J. agreed. “It seems unlikely that if she had killed Dicky she’d keep talking about how he got what he deserved and how angry she was with him.”

“Mmm.” Elysia said thoughtfully, “Perhaps. She doesn’t strike me as a particularly wise woman.”

“True.” A.J. remembered her impression that Dora might have impulse control issues. “She did seem a little headstrong.”

“If someone is running some kind of blackmail scheme I can’t imagine why they’d kill Peggy Graham and leave Dora running loose. I’d kill Dora, given a choice.”

A.J. said, hoping to discourage that line of commentary, “First of all, we don’t know for sure that Peggy was killed. It’s still very possible she committed suicide. Secondly, if Dora wasn’t being blackmailed, then she didn’t have much in the way of ammunition. Thirdly, Dora seems like a woman well able to take care of herself.”