Publisher's Synopsis
Tracy is hosting a dockside party for the launching of her sailboat, the Strumpet. During some repartee with Lee brooks, her boss, a man garishly clad in a yellow aloha shirt asks her if he can talk to her about his missing family; it's a life and death emergency. His wife and daughters are missing from their summer cabin in Incline Village, NV. Tracy agrees to meet him at Lake Tahoe in the morning. She is at the appointed place and time, but her client is a no-show. After a half-hour or so, she begins to wander around the cabin. The hairs on her neck and arms begin to prickle. Wisely, she calls a new friend at the local police station. Together, they enter the cabin, citing Exigent Circumstances and discover her client in the kitchen, on the floor with a big butcher knife in his belly. While Donovan is out getting the crime scene people in site, Tracy takes many photos with her cellphone and immediately sends them to her website. Captain Landis, the man in charge, takes an immediate dislike to Tracy, which she willfully reciprocates. He orders her out of the scene, but stay in town. She has a room booked at one of the larger hotels on the north end, She drops her car in valet service and goes to her room. Soon Landis and Donovan knock on her room door and begin to question her. Landis demands her photos. She hands over the media card. Down on the beach, she starts to question the teens about seeing the Cox girls. She finds the girls and their mother were taken off the beach by a man wearing a gray suit, sporting a pencil moustache and driving a 30' speedboat. Tracy convinces Donovan to get a young police artist to talk to the kids and get a sketch of Grey-suit. With her friend Shelly Summers, up and coming western singer, they manage to get the trust of the teens and gather a lot of anecdotal information. Tracy immediately takes a photo of the sketch. Later, while waiting for Donovan to meet her for a dinner date, she gets a call from him. He's in the lobby. When she gets there, he is still in uniform. "Tracy," he asks, "Where is your car?" "In the Valet parking lot." "No it's not. It's in a gas station, with a girl shot through her head laying beside it." Everyone knows Tracy had nothing to do with the murder, but they're also convinced the girl was shot because of mistaken identity. Tracy is driven to her car, and escorted to the state line with the suggestion that she not return. When she gets home, Greg tells her to get out of the case, it's too dangerous. She breaks up with him. Lee gives her the same ultimatum. She quits the firm. So many people have come down on her she hatches a plan. She's going to have a fatal traffic accident up the coast. After "driving off" a fifty foot cliff, she changes clothes in the brush and emerges as one of her alter-egos, Kelly McAllister. She hitches a ride to San Francisco, where she purchases a used corvette. Back at Lake Tahoe, she tracks the Cox women to a blue custom Van. Finding out only four blue Dodge Vans were sold by the custom shop, she heads for L.A. Process of elimination finds Tracy staking out a villa in the Pacific Palisades. While watching for the blue van, she is captured by the people she was tracking. Turns out she was staking out Michael Scaramella's home, he of the mob. Tracy converts Scaramella to a friend. She also calls her father to tell him she's not as dead as everyone thinks she is. With the help of a Chief of Detectives and a Mafia Boss, she determines that the Cox Family is undoubtedly being hidden by the US Marshals. She heads north to figure who killed Bonnie. That part of the case takes her to Incline Village, Stockton CA, and Reno. There she sets up a meet with Donovan to give him the identity of the killer. Instead of finding Donovan, she is arrested by Captain Landis for cop-killing and taken to a remote Nevada desert substation of the State Troopers, where they don't particularly like cop-killers.
