Pat's fledgling private investigation company, PIP Inc., has a promising new case.
Pat is still wearing a wrist cast after breaking her arm in a confrontation with a killer, so when she's hired by the City of Watsonville to unearth the identity of an older woman who died in her bed, she's delighted when she thinks her next job promises to be a simple computer-based research project. Why is it that things are never as simple as she thinks they will be? Pat soon discovers nothing is as it seems, beginning with a corpse who had secret identities, murder, and a post-death ritual thought to have last been performed decades ago.