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holy terror.”
    “What about the other guests? Was she feuding with any of them?”
    Molly was thrilled with the question, not because of the content but because it was proof that he was getting hooked after all. It was possible to take the cop out of his uniform, but obviously he couldn’t shut off his analytical mind.
    “Jason Jeffries,” she said at once, seizing the first name that popped into her mind. She wondered why. She barely knew the philanthropist, though she certainly knew his reputation for largess. Lines from needy organizations practically formed outside his office, like starving ants parading toward a bowl of sugar.
    “The man Liza expects to hand over big bucks to save the manatees?” Michael said.
    “That’s the one.”
    “He’s here tonight?”
    “Right over there,” she said.
    Jason Jeffries had pinned the detective in charge of the investigation against a pillar. That was no mean feat, given Detective Larry Abrams’s impressive stature and the fierce gleam in his eyes. Jeffries had him cornered all the same and was demanding that everyone there be released immediately.
    “Not bloody damn likely,” one policeman just behind Molly muttered wearily when he overheard the demand. “We’ll be lucky if we get out of here by dawn.”
    Thank God she’d had the foresight to arrange for Brian to stay overnight with a friend, Molly thought. There would be no need for her son to know about the murder before morning when she could tell him herself. Relieved on that point, and before Michael could stop her, she turned to the officer.
    “So,” she began as casually as if she were merely inquiring about the weather. “What’s the cause of death? Has the medical examiner determined that yet?”
    “You’ll have to wait for that information, just like everyone else,” he said stiffly.
    Molly interpreted that to mean he didn’t know.
    “I heard she was strangled,” a woman standing just behind Molly said in a conspiratorial whisper. Though she was a tiny, birdlike woman, she cast a defiant look at her scowling husband, a man Molly recognized as the chief financial officer for one of the remaining solvent banks in town.
    “Shut up, Jane,” Harley Newcombe snapped. “I doubt whatever you overheard in the ladies’ room came from the medical examiner.
    “Women are nothing but a damn bunch of gossips,” he added, looking to Michael for sympathetic support. He glared at the hapless Jane again. “I told you we had no business coming tonight. These people all hate each other. There was bound to be trouble of one sort or another.”
    Michael’s gaze narrowed. “What do you mean, they all hate each other?”
    “The infighting in this crowd, especially among the wives, makes one of those high-profile family feuds over money look like sandbox bickering. I never saw anything like it before in my life. You think men play down and dirty in business? That’s nothing compared to the way these women go at it.”
    He shook his head in obvious male bemusement at women’s ways. Molly was tempted to point out that at least half of the people at this affair and on the board of the charitable organizations involved were men, but Michael had latched on to a skimpy clue and clearly intended to shake it until it yielded real evidence. She was so grateful for that she kept her mouth clamped firmly shut.
    “Was Tessa Lafferty involved in the feuding?” he asked.
    “Hell, she’s the one who started it from what I’ve heard,” Newcombe said, his disgust evident. “Typical catfighting when you get a bunch of women together.”
    “Harley Newcombe, that is not so,” his wife retorted with unexpected spunk, saving Molly the trouble. “It’s the men who stuck their noses into things and made everything complicated. That horrible, overbearing Jason Jeffries has to control everything he’s involved with. He treated Tessa like she didn’t have a brain in her head.”
    “Why shouldn’t he treat her any way he