The woman who walked into my office did not look like the kind of client who carried ghosts. She looked like the kind of woman who owned them—expensive coat, expensive lipstick, eyes that had learned to use expense as camouflage.

"Mr. Moreau?" she said, standing in the doorway of my office on Spring Street. The neon sign outside was flickering through the window, painting her face in alternating pulses of red and shadow.

"That depends on who's asking," I said. I was not sitting at my desk. I was standing by the window, watching the rain start to fall on the city that had taught me to never trust anything that arrived looking expensive.

"My name is Elena Vasquez. My father-in-law died six months ago. He left me something that I don't understand."

"Everyone leaves me something I don't understand. Usually it's a bill."

This time she smiled, and it was the first genuine thing about her. She crossed the room and sat in the chair opposite my desk—the one I kept for clients who needed to sit down because their knees had given out. She placed a folder on the desk. It was thin, which in Los Angeles usually meant the story inside was either very short or very long. There is no medium.

"My father-in-law was Marcus Blackwell," she said. "He built a shipping empire from nothing. When he died, he left his fortune to a trust. The trustee is my husband. But the will contained a clause—Clause 14—that says: 'To those who heard the voice in the womb, my wealth shall pass in equal shares.'"

I looked at her. "That's the clause?"

"That's the clause."

"And your husband doesn't know what it means."

"My husband thinks it's poetic nonsense. The lawyer thinks it's poetic nonsense. I think it means exactly what it says."

"Someone heard a voice in the womb."

"Someone heard something. And if I'm right, there are more than one."

I should have turned her away. I should have told her to hire a PI, not a private detective who spent his days tracking cheating husbands and finding missing cats. But something in her voice—something underneath the money and the makeup and the practiced calm—told me that this was not a game.

"How much is the trust worth?" I asked.

"Forty million."

I went back to my desk and opened my bottom drawer and took out a bottle of bourbon and two glasses and poured a little into each one. I pushed one toward her. She did not take it, but she did not refuse it either, which I took as a sign that she was more interested in me than she wanted to admit.

"Tell me everything," I said.

What she told me was this: Marcus Blackwell had died of a heart attack in his study, alone, at ten in the evening. His son—Elena's husband, a man named Christopher—had found him. The will was read three weeks later, and Clause 14 had been included without explanation. The trustee, a man named Harrington, had told Christopher to ignore it, calling it "the eccentric flourish of a dying man." But Christopher had ignored it for six months, and in six months he had spent n

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