I wear my dark hair short, and it had been a few weeks since I’d had it cut. Nalla was a hairstylist. Before I drove away from Northridge, I called the salon where she worked.

I was pleased to learn that she did indeed have an open spot that morning, about forty-five minutes from now. I’d get there in plenty of time, traffic along the western side of L.A. permitting—which was always iffy.

Once again I lucked out. I even got there enough in advance to find a relatively cheap parking spot, at a meter.

The salon was in Westwood. It was likely to charge less than a similar establishment in nearby Beverly Hills, but I figured my haircut, even a no-frills one, wouldn’t be cheap.

I walked into the Hair Today salon on Hilgard Avenue right on time. From behind a desk, a smiling young woman with streaked brown hair asked my name, then showed me through the door behind her into a long room that smelled of fragrant shampoos and the chemicals associated with hair dyes and permanents. The cubicles on both sides were separated by decorative half-walls, resembling those in a high-end commercial office.

Nalla’s was the third cubicle on the right. The chair I was shown to was royal blue and upholstered and appeared very comfortable, which proved to be true.

Nalla looked as if she’d just had her own blond hair styled. She was probably mid-thirties, buxom, and wearing a black apron similar to the ones I’d noticed on other stylists. Her eyes peered from behind small-framed glasses. ���Hello,” she said, and introduced herself.

“Hi. I’m Lauren Vancouver.” I watched her face, but there was no reaction. She apparently didn’t know who I was, nor should she. Good. It would be easier that way to get the information I sought.

I told her how I wanted my hair trimmed. With its caplike style, there wasn’t much way she could ruin it, even if she wanted to. I only wanted it shampooed and cut, no dying or streaking or anything else.

She was friendly, but wasn’t one of those stylists who appeared to believe the world would end if she failed to keep up a running conversation with her customers. That left it up to me to get her talking.

After she finished my shampoo and studied my hair before cutting it, I chatted about the weather and hair in general, then told her what I did for a living. “I’m a pet rescuer,” I said. “I run a private no-kill shelter in Granada Hills. Are you a pet person?”

“Yes, I am.” She smiled. “In fact, I just adopted the sweetest dog—a part pit bull.”

We talked briefly about how she believed the breed is maligned a lot thanks to some of them being bred for dog fights—which was a form of cruelty. And how owners still have to train them to be sure they wouldn’t attack other dogs—and keep them under control. Not always easy.

Then I asked where she’d gotten her pup.

I watched in the mirror as her face clouded over. “At a shelter that I thought would be perfect. The woman who owned it was so well known around here—used to be a star among those of us in the beauty community. She’d started, then sold, her own high-end cosmetics company. Her stuff is really great—I still buy a lot of it. She died recently, though. The bitch.” She met my eyes, then looked abashed. “Sorry. I know I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but the way she acted . . .”

“Toward the animals?”

“No.” Nalla began sectioning my hair and using clips to keep some out of the way. “Toward people. She made me come back three times before I could take Pitsy, and even then she kept giving me a hard time about how to treat my sweet dog. Telling me over and over how to train her and feed her and love her and . . . Did you know her? Her name was Bethany Urber. I know she started this whole network of other pet rescue organizations, Pet Shelters Together. Does your shelter belong to it?” She started trimming, and I became concerned suddenly that her emotionalism might lead to a really horrible haircut.

“No.” I kept my tone even as I watched every snip. “But I’ve heard of her. How did you handle her demands?” Unspoken meaning: Did you start hating her enough to want to quiet her by shooting her?

“I thought about just leaving the first day I visited her place, but I’d fallen in love with Pitsy. There were some other people around. I guess one was her assistant . . . Cricket? She tried to smooth things over. There were a few other women there—I gathered they all ran shelters, too, and were part of that network. One even suggested I might want to visit her shelter, that she had some pit bull mixes there, too. I figured, from the shocked looks the other two gave her, that recommending another place was forbidden around Bethany. If it weren’t for how strongly I already felt about Pitsy, I’d probably have just walked out, maybe even gone to that other person’s shelter.”

“Who was that?” I asked. “Which shelter?”

But she didn’t know.

She did, however, after adopting Pitsy, prevent Bethany from the home visit that was so important to many of the best private shelters. They’d argued about that, too. Also about Bethany’s many phone calls still telling her what to do. Nalla stopped taking Bethany’s calls and would only talk to Cricket.

I couldn’t fault Bethany completely. I acted similarly at times, in the interest of protecting the animals we adopted out. But I probably came across a lot more tactfully—something that didn’t come easily to me, either.

“I did go back there one more time, just to tell her off,” Nalla admitted. “Stupid, maybe, but I was pretty damned mad at her for her attitude. I accused her of abusing the animals under her care, in a way. If she turned off other potential adopters like she’d turned me off, how many of the animals she cared for wouldn’t get the right homes? She was so mad that she threatened to take Pitsy back, which is why I wouldn’t let her come see us. Fortunately, we live on a middle floor in a condo with a great security system, so she couldn’t just barge in. I’ve got a dog walker who takes Pitsy out days I’m not home, and I warned her to watch out for Bethany. And I threatened Bethany right back.” Nalla shrugged. “Even more stupidity? Yes. And the thing was, some guy was hanging around. He heard it all. He must have told the cops about it, because they came to talk to me after Bethany was murdered.”

I assumed the guy was Miguel, and that was why he’d told me to look at Nalla as a possible suspect.

“But,” Nalla said, flourishing her scissors as she gave what appeared to be a final snip to my hair, “I didn’t do it. If someone had to get murdered, I can understand why it was Bethany. But as long as she left Pitsy and me alone, I’d have had no problem letting her live forever. Here, want to take a look?”

She passed me a hand mirror, twirling my chair around so I could check the reflection of the back of my head.

The cut looked good.

The information she had provided gave me additional food for thought.

So when I saw the amount on my bill, I swallowed my gasp and even added a nice tip to my credit card receipt. This killer inquiry was costing me a lot, and it wasn’t the sort of expense that I could get back from HotRescues or Dante, even though he was very generous in bonuses and raises that helped me keep my kids in school. I’d better end my investigation successfully.

I’d add a section on Nalla to my find-Bethany’s-killer computer file.

Eliminate her as a suspect? Not really.

I’d place her toward the end, though, near Miguel and Mamie.

But thanks to her, I now had additional questions to ask a few people who were already in that growing file.

Sylvia Lodner, a member of the network, had been the first to tell me that my asking for eulogies over the fruit of Bethany’s efforts would most likely dredge up some pretty rotten stuff about her, too.

Sylvia’s shelter, Pet Home Locators, was in Torrance, about twenty miles southeast of Westwood. My GPS got me there in about half an hour, since traffic was cooperative, too.

The shelter was on a side street off Torrance Boulevard. I almost drove by it, since its entry was marked only with an inconspicuous sign. I parked on the street and headed up the driveway.

At its end was a nondescript building that people evidently had to go through to reach the shelter area. The exterior resembled a series of ticket windows, where visitors had to check in and talk to someone before going any farther.

I headed for the first window. “Hi,” I said to the teenage boy behind it who was thumbing through some paperwork. He looked up, apparently startled.

“Hi.” He smiled. “Can I help you choose a new pet today?”

I laughed. “You’ve been trained well. But I’m actually here to see Sylvia Lodner. Please tell her Lauren Vancouver would like to talk to her.”

The boy left, and Sylvia appeared at the window less than a minute later. “What are you doing here, Lauren?” Her voice sounded less than welcoming, and the expression on her face—which had almost always been solemn when I’d been around her—now looked downright suspicious.

Not surprising, the logo on her bright red shirt that contrasted attractively with her light African American skin tone said, “Can we help you choose a new pet today?” Obviously, that was a theme around here. A good one.

“I’d just like to talk to you about what you submitted to me on Bethany,” I said. “I had a few questions.”

“Ones you couldn’t e-mail to me? Never mind. Why don’t I show you around this outstanding facility, since you’re here, and we’ll talk.”

She pointed toward a door off to my right. It opened, and she motioned for me to join her.

She showed me through a small but well-kept facility. Dogs of all sizes leaped around in their enclosures, demanding our attention. There was a separate building at the rear where cats were each kept in their own generoussized crates.

In all, I really liked the place. I told Sylvia so.

“Thanks, Lauren.” We had just left the cat building, and she turned to me and gave me one of her rare smiles. “So what is it that you really want from me?”

I laughed. “I’m still trying to figure Bethany out, before I try putting the information together for the Web site I intend to create in her memory.”

“Bull-puckey, as we say around here, since we’ve got a lot of young volunteers. You’re still butting in, trying to figure out which of us killed her.” We’d reached a small outside sitting and exercise area paved in concrete, and Sylvia pulled lawn chairs up for each of us. “Have a seat, and I’ll tell you all I know, which isn’t much.”

“To clear the air a little,” I said, “you’re right. I am butting in. But I’m only looking for the truth. Mamie Spelling and I have a long history, but if she killed Bethany, so be it. If she didn’t, I’d like to help her. That’s all.”

“That’s enough, isn’t it? Never mind. Here’s my input. First, I didn’t kill Bethany but I can’t say I liked her much. I did like her idea of a network of shelters with combined resources. That’s why I joined. Not because she pulled any of her stupid stunts on me, though she tried.”

“Like what? Your place here is wonderful. She couldn’t have threatened you with going to the authorities, like she did with Mamie.”

Sylvia sat back on her chair and crossed her arms, as if fending off whatever Bethany had done to her. “No, but she did her homework and figured out my vulnerability, too. Pet Home Locators gets a lot of small donations from people who believe we’re hurting for money. That’s what we do when we’re begging—show how much our animals need the help of everyone out there who loves pets. We don’t have the kind of resources I understand you have, with your affiliation with HotPets. But . . . well, I don’t want to get into a lot of detail that you could use against me, too, but suffice it to say that, even though this is a nonprofit corporation, it runs on certain—shall we say—underreported profits from some unrelated products a few members of our board of directors make and sell. Some of the proceeds would be tax-exempt anyway for a nonprofit, but not necessarily all of them. And if you ever mention that to anyone, I’ll deny it.”

“Did you deny it to Bethany?”

“Wouldn’t have done any good. She knew and tried to hold it over me. But the main reason I wanted to join her network was to wean our organization away from that less-than-ideal situation. I hated what Bethany tried to do to me, but it was her normal course of operation. Any one of us could have hated her enough to kill her, I suppose. But if hating the way she asserted a nasty form of control over anyone was a motive, we all have one. And tight-fisted? Amazing! She kept detailed records about all sorts of piddly things, including how many PST T-shirts were bought, how many pins she gave out to members, everything. When one of the members lost a pin, she almost flipped her lid.”

“Give me your opinion, then. Assuming that Mamie didn’t kill Bethany, and you didn’t, who would you choose as top suspect?”

She looked at me as if assessing whether to hand her beliefs over to me. “This goes no further?”

It was a question. I had an answer. “You don’t know me well at all. I could say anything, then tell whoever you suspect what you said.” Her eyes widened in shock, even as her mouth pursed grimly. “But that’s not me. I won’t bother giving a list of references. I’d only choose people who’d back me up. I hope that the fact that a businessman as astute as Dante DeFrancisco put me in charge of the shelter he funds, and still has me there six years later, speaks in favor of my reliability. So, I swear on my job and my continuing good relationship with Dante that what you say will go no further.”

To my astonishment, she laughed. “You’re a character, Lauren, and I’d thought you were just another shelter operator with an agenda of your own. Okay, I’ll trust you. What I have to say isn’t worthy of your oath anyway. But if I had to choose someone I’d met who also knew Bethany—and I’ve even met that money-grabbing boyfriend of hers—I’d focus on Cricket.”

Not that much of a surprise, but I asked anyway, “Why her?”

“She hasn’t bothered me, but I’ve heard rumors she’s playing the same kinds of games that Bethany did—coercing people to join and toe the lines she draws. Lording it over members, and even, in some ways, making fun of Bethany and suggesting that her actions, before her death, were pathetic compared with how Cricket intends to run things. More conservatively, for one thing—so there’ll be more money available for those who buckle under to her demands . . . and also for her. A good motive for getting rid of her boss, don’t you think?”

“Could be,” I agreed. But that seemed too easy. I needed more information. “If she hasn’t acted that way with you, how did you hear about it?”

“I heard a conversation between a couple of members.”

“Who are . . . ?”

“Darya and Raelene. But remember, I haven’t told you a thing.”

“Gee, and I wish I could convince you to tell me something useful.” I smiled at her, and she returned it.

I left soon afterward, with names of two more people I intended to talk with soon.