The super looked alarmed. "She asked the officers. They said it was okay. And she was a very nice girl – "

"I'm sure she was and I'm sure she did speak to them. But I need to make a record of it, and you probably got a better look at her than they did."

He jotted down the information. Why would anyone lie to get into Peltier's apartment? If Peltier was holed up with a friend, Finn could imagine that friend sneaking in to get her some clothing. But a single shirt? Or was it something about the shirt? He tried to recall what witnesses said Peltier had been wearing that night. A dress, the one found at Judd Archer's.

He told the super he'd check with the officers and get their details, and ask them not to let anyone else in without an escort. The super got the message: don't open this apartment door again.

Finn's "Persons Of Interest" list for the Portia Kane case was starting to look like a roster of ghosts. Phantoms, at least.

As he suspected, no young woman had asked the stakeout officers for access, so he had one more nameless description to add to his list, along with Peltier's Indo American friend, her boyfriend and the red-haired teenage boy. Not to mention the most elusive ghost of all – Peltier herself.

Next the team met for another update so Finn could report to brass. When the meeting finished, Finn gathered his papers and headed for the coffee room. It was more of a closet than a room, barely big enough for the tiny table with the coffeemaker. Someone had made good use of the space, though, covering the walls in the safety posters the department was required to post.

He laid the pages on the table, facedown, and reached for a Styrofoam cup. Beside the stack, the ancient drip machine hissed. The quarter-filled pot was so stained it looked as if they'd misread the "auto-stop" feature as "auto-clean," and hadn't so much as rinsed it since buying it.

Finn lifted the pot and swirled the contents.

"Please tell me you aren't going to drink that," Damon said.

Finn sniffed the opening, judging the degree of burning by both the smell and the quantity of floating flakes. He filled his cup halfway.

"Oh, man. Please. There's got to be a coffee shop around."

"Block away. Two bucks a cup." He added creamer. Sniffed. Added more. "Got two hits for Peltier's friend."

Damon stopped eyeing the coffee cup and went very still.

"The one she was at Bane with Thursday night," Finn continued. "I called a buddy at the Times. He came up with two journalists matching the description." Finn picked up his pages and showed the top one to Damon. "One's a photojournalist with the Times. The other's a copyeditor at La Opinión. "

Finn waited. It took almost a minute.

"Neither of those is the woman you're looking for," Damon said finally. "Her name is Hope Adams. She's a reporter with True News."

Like any couple, Damon and Robyn each had interests the other hadn't shared. Damon loved detective shows; Robyn couldn't see the attraction, but had watched them with him anyway. If someone had asked her whether she'd learned anything from them, she would have laughed and said she barely paid any attention, usually using the time to mentally plan her week's schedule. In the last couple of days, though, she discovered that even if she hadn't been actively watching, obviously she'd learned something.

Today's lesson? Stalking 101.

For three blocks she'd been following the man who'd stopped at her motel door and she'd come to a matching number of conclusions.

One, he wasn't red haired. What she'd seen through the distorted image in the peephole had been a dark red baseball cap.

Two, he wasn't from around here. The fact that he'd walked four blocks in car-obsessed L.A. suggested it. His constant stopping and looking around, as if getting his bearings, confirmed it.

Three, if he was a private investigator, he wasn't very good at his job. Despite all his looking around, he never once glanced backward to see whether anyone was following him. He just strolled along, confident and unhurried.

Robyn did look over her shoulder. Repeatedly. She could be following the guy who'd killed Judd and planned to do the same to her. Shut her up permanently.

She bit back a giggle. There was a classic bad movie line. As silly as it sounded, though, to dismiss the idea would be sillier still. She'd seen two people die and even if common sense told her this was more likely a private investigator than an assassin, she wasn't taking any chances.

So she wasn't doing anything as stupid as following this guy down an alley. But there weren't any alleys here. The motel was in some part of L.A. 's endless suburban sprawl. Which part, she didn't know, and blasted herself for not paying better attention yesterday when Karl had driven her in. Around here, though, it was difficult to be on the edge of anything for long and, as Karl had said, it had taken only a short walk before she found herself in a warren of strip malls, three-story walkups and offices. A neighborhood in serious need of a planner.

As a place to follow someone, though, it was perfect. She could dart from hiding place to hiding place, keeping her target in sight while never leaving populated areas. It got even easier when the young man bought himself a snack at an ice cream stand and settled in at one of the umbrella tables out front.

He didn't seem to be in any rush to report that he'd found her. She hadn't even seen him pull out a cell phone. Did that mean he wasn't working for anyone else? Or that he wasn't looking for her at all? Maybe he'd been meeting someone at the motel, arrived early and headed out to pass the time.

That was one problem with having watched all those mysteries: she saw too many possibilities. One thing was for certain. The guy looked like he'd be here awhile, having bought a massive banana split and soda. That meant, as much fun as she was having playing detective, it was time to notify Hope and Karl.

As she headed for a pay phone across the lot, she passed a convenience store advertising prepaid cells. Robyn fingered the emergency money Hope had brought from her apartment. Over two hundred. Should she pick up one of those for later? A cheap, untraceable phone?

Untraceable phone? For what? Her new career as a PI?

But as she continued on, watching her target through dark sunglasses, safely disguised in her oversized sweats and baseball cap, she couldn't deny her pulse was pounding, and that her quickening breath didn't come from walking faster.

Maybe it was exhilaration. Maybe it was plain old fear. But she felt something, and that was more than she'd done in months. She imagined what Damon would say.

See, Bobby, that's all you needed – to become a fugitive, a murder suspect and a possible assassination target.

A snorted laugh made an elderly woman warily glance her way.

Robyn reached the phone, put in her money, dialed the number and pulled the cord as far as it would reach, so she could keep an eye on her target without looking too suspicious.

Robyn Peltier, supersleuth. All she needed was the decoder ring.

Hope's phone rang twice before she answered with a tentative hello.

"It's Robyn."

A relieved laugh. "Thank God. I saw a pay phone number and thought the local cranks with alien abduction stories had tracked me down already. It usually takes them – " She stopped. "Why are you calling from a pay phone? What's wrong?"

"Nothing. Well, nothing I can't handle." Oh yeah, one hour on the job and she was bragging already. "There was a guy hanging around our motel room – "

"What?" The alarm in Hope's voice rose. "Did he knock? Try to break in?"