Burt Stallings was a tall, distinctive-looking man in his fifties, with the commanding air that usually went with money -- lots of money, from way back.

When he asked Mike Shayne to find his irresponsible daughter, who had disappeared from home in the middle of the night, it sounded more like an order than a polite request.

And Mike was sweating, for the first time in his life, because he'd already found the madcap heiress.

Someone had strangled the poor kid to death -- and parked the body for safekeeping...between the sheets of Shayne's bed.