MURDER on the ROCKS (Allie Griffin Mysteries Book 2) by Leslie Leigh

"Why?"
                  "Because I have a feeling."
                  "That's not enough. Besides, hitmen don't get paid before a job."
                  She had trouble concealing her impatience. "Then what is your theory, wise one?"
                  "I think it was some illicit debt problem. Maybe gambling. Maybe drugs. Something he had trouble keeping under control. I think his wife was going to find out about it and he wanted to cover it up, so he came up with the blackmail story. Only he was sidelined by her actual murder. Look at the facts of the case." He began ticking them off on his fingers, which Allie found annoying, for it implied an authority that he possessed only in theory here. "You have these withdrawals from his account, fifty bucks a week every week for some time. Now, sure this fits a scenario of gathering money together for some purpose. But it also fits the scenario of a habit."
                  "He said he paid the guy."
                  "Any evidence of this?"
                  Allie found she couldn’t answer.
                  "Allie, you’re doing a good job here. You're able to access areas I could never access. Now, I promised I wouldn’t ask you about how you managed to come across all this financial information, but I have a feeling that however you got it, that method won’t stand up in court. To the contrary, it could create a big ol' loophole for the case to slip right through without any indictments. You have to come up with more evidence. Admissible stuff that corroborates what you suppose is the truth. Otherwise, you got nothing in the eyes of the law."
                  Allie mentally kicked herself. She knew he was right but had not wanted to admit it. This lecture he gave her was nothing more than a necessary scolding to remind her that she had to bring her 'A' game. Still, she didn’t appreciate his talking down to her like that. For that, he'd earned a lukewarm goodbye and a quick departure.
                  In the car she thought about how she now had to backtrack a bit. The thought of this was daunting, and brought back the feeling she'd had in the library, that feeling of wanting to go far off somewhere and stay there for a while, free from responsibilities.
                  But the same feeling she'd had before all this had started — the ennui that found her living the same old boring life from day to day without any excitement, without any challenges to her newfound affinity for puzzle solving — would soon return, she knew.
                  So she looked at her dashboard clock. 9:35 p.m. Still time to take a drive that would bring her closer toward the end of this mess.

10.
     
                  "Do you know how they say you can tell when you’re being conned?"
                  "Where are we going?" said Del.
                  "They say it's details. The person telling you the story — the con artist — pads the story with a lot of unnecessary details. Your brain picks up on this and attributes the detailed mental picture you're getting to an authentic account. But it's all horse hockey."
                  "Horse hockey? Can you tell me where we're going?"
                  "I'll tell you when we get there. Here. This will do fine."
                  She pulled the car into an alleyway off Cherry Street. They were in Burlington, and it was 11:30 at night.
                  It was perfect. A nice clean place between a laundromat and a café with two stories of apartments above it. A couple of cars were parked alongside the café. The alley let out at the far end with a space barely big enough for a bicycle to get through. She could see the dim view of another apartment complex through that. However, none of this implied company did anything to assuage the feeling of