LAURIE BRETON
POINT OF DEPARTURE

This one’s for Jay and Jen

who’ve grown up to be amazing people.

I love you both more than words can say;

you are the joy in my life.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Prologue

Thank God for October.

Right through the end of September, Boston had been so ungodly hot that she’d come close to melting into a puddle on the sidewalk. But October, Kaye Winslow decided as she cruised Comm Ave in search of a parking space, was as close to perfection as it was possible to be. The days still warm, the nights comfortably cool, the sky a vivid blue, unmarred by summer’s haze, patches of it visible through an overhead canopy of green smudged here and there by daubs of brilliant red and gold.

Luck was with her. She spied a parking space on the opposite side of the street. At Dartmouth, she took an illegal left at the red light, cutting off a delivery van, whose driver blared his horn in token protest. She circled the pedestrian mall and reversed direction, swooping with practiced ease into the empty parking space in blatant disregard of the sign not ten feet away designating it for Back Bay residents only.

Kaye cut the engine, checked her reflection in the rearview mirror and rubbed a splotch of lipstick from her front tooth. Flinging her meticulously streaked blond hair over her shoulder, she gathered up her Gucci briefcase and slid smoothly from the BMW’s soft leather upholstery.

The house stood half a block away, a grand old pile of bricks and mortar situated on Boston’s most elegant thoroughfare. Commonwealth Avenue was the city’s finest jewel, a broad, tree-lined, old-world-style boulevard, bisected by a strip of lush green that rendered it unique in this city of narrow, congested streets. It was one of the most prestigious addresses in Boston. As her associates were fond of saying, location, location, location.

The Worthington house—and calling it a house was a great understatement—had been built by Gerald Worthington in 1886 and handed down through several generations of the Worthington family. When the reigning matriarch had died six months ago and rumors had flown that the heirs were interested in dumping the place and splitting the cash, the Boston real estate world had perked up and taken notice. There wasn’t a broker out there who wouldn’t have gladly sacrificed an appendage to get his or her hands on the property. By some miracle, it had been Kaye Winslow the Worthington heirs had called when they were ready to put the place on the market.

Selling this house, with its six-point-five-million-dollar price tag, would show the world that Winslow & DeLucca was capable of standing its ground against the big agencies: ERA, Coldwell Banker, Century 21. This sale, with a motivated seller and the right buyer, would cement her reputation as a major league player, and then she’d finally be able to put her farce of a marriage to Sam Winslow behind her.

Thinking about her soon-to-be-ex-husband always caused tiny frown lines to bracket her mouth, and Kaye made a conscious effort to relax her facial muscles. At thirty-three, she was too young to be getting wrinkles. But Sam knew just which buttons to push, and he pushed them with clocklike regularity. Two years they’d been married. Two years during which she’d catered to his every whim; two years when she’d been there on his arm, the consummate hostess, the perfect little faculty wife; two years of playing the loving stepmother.

Enough was enough. Sam’s usefulness had come to an end. Kaye had gotten what she wanted from him: respectability. As his wife, she’d gained the kind of acceptance she’d spent her entire life seeking. But now that she’d built a name for herself as a respected member of the real estate community, she didn’t need him anymore. It was time to slough him off like an old skin. Time for a new beginning, a new life. One that didn’t include Professor Sam Winslow or his crazy, anorexic daughter.

Kaye walked up the granite steps and unlocked the massive double front doors, letting herself into a sweeping two-story foyer. With its brass wall sconces and its majestic, winding staircase, both fanciful and uncommon in a Back Bay home of this vintage, the foyer never failed to take her breath away. Right now, it was bathed in light as bright afternoon sunshine poured through the antique leaded panes of the fanlight above the door.

As the clicking of her heels on the hardwood floor echoed through all that empty space, she walked from room to room, raising window shades to let in the light. The house possessed the stuffy feel that all houses seemed to acquire when they’d been closed up for any time, as though the lack of bodies moving about left the air too still and stagnating. She set down her briefcase on the kitchen island, flipped it open and took out the secret weapon she always carried. A quick spray here, another quick spray there, and she transformed stuffy into deliciously subtle vanilla. She knew all the tricks for making a house appealing, had learned most of them from her mentor, Marty Scalia, the man who’d taken her under his wing and taught her everything he knew about real estate. A few of them, including the vanilla spray, she’d figured out on her own.

She tucked the spray back into her briefcase and returned to the foyer, to take a last look at herself in the mirror there. Power suit. Check. Hair. Check. Makeup. Check. Everything was in order. The doorbell rang, and Kaye glanced at her Rolex. Two-thirty, just as scheduled. Promptness always garnered extra points with her. Pasting on a professional smile, she opened the door to greet her client.

Her smile wobbled and faltered at sight of the man who stood on the top step, his hands shoved into the pockets of his lightweight jacket. Shit, she thought frantically, her stomach instantly balling into a hard knot. Oh, shit. She’d thought she was rid of him, thought she’d given him what he’d wanted and that he would go away. Thought she’d made it abundantly clear that they had nothing more to say to each other, that she’d made a mistake, and now she was trying to rectify it.

Apparently, she’d failed to make him understand. “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“You know what they say, Kaye.” He smiled, but there was little humor in it. “Sooner or later, the chickens always come home to roost.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that you and I need to talk.”

“I have nothing to say to you. Get out of here. I have a client due any minute.”

“This won’t take long. Are you letting me in, or do I have to strong-arm my way into the house?”

“If you don’t leave, I’ll call the police.”

“I don’t really think you’ll do that. Too many awkward questions to answer. All I want is five minutes of your time. If you don’t let me in, I could make things pretty nasty for you. I could screw up that rosy future you have planned. I could screw up a whole lot of things.”

Glancing past his shoulder at the empty sidewalk, Kaye tried to figure out a way to stall him until reinforcements arrived. But her client was nowhere to be seen. They were alone, the two of them, and if she refused to talk to him, he could destroy her life. He’d have no qualms about it. He was the only person she’d ever known who had fewer scruples than she did.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

“Five minutes,” she snapped. If he scented fear in her, like a wild animal he would chew her up and spit her out. “And if my client shows before then, you leave. Understood?”

Arrogance propelled his smile, and she wanted to slap it from his face. “I thought you’d see it my way,” he said.

Kaye opened the door wider and her visitor stepped across the threshold. Hands flat against the door as she closed it, she took a deep, calming breath. This would all work out. If she was careful, if she used the right words, she could talk her way out of anything. After all, she was Kaye Winslow. She possessed the gift of gab, the power of persuasion. It was what had allowed her to rise so quickly from a nothing little secretary to a respected real estate broker, somebody in whom people like the Worthington heirs were willing to place their trust. As long as she remembered that, as long as she kept a cool head and made no missteps, her carefully constructed little world wouldn’t come crashing down on her head.

Raising her chin in a gesture of defiance, she turned and crossed her arms. Back pressed firmly against the closed door, she said, “I’m listening. Start talking.”

One

Doug Policzki was late for the party.

Here on Comm Ave, where town houses routinely carried seven-figure price tags, the presence of a half-dozen emergency vehicles had brought out the neighbors. They stood in small, hushed clusters, chatting quietly and casting nervous glances toward the house. One of the local TV stations had already caught wind of the situation. If this had been Dorchester, where kids were shot dead on the street daily—black kids, of course—the media wouldn’t have bothered to show up. Murder in Dorchester wasn’t news. But to nobody’s surprise, murder in this staunch bastion of WASP prosperity was deemed newsworthy. Policzki recognized the on-air reporter, a striking redhead who stood with shell-pink compact in hand, checking her makeup before the camera started rolling. She glanced up, met his gaze and studied him for a little longer than was necessary before she decided he was nobody of any importance, and returned to checking her makeup.

The house was impressive, one of those brick and stone monstrosities that the wealthy had built before the turn of the last century as a stronghold against the plebeian masses. He paused to gaze up at it for a moment before he showed his ID to the uniform whose job it was to keep away anybody who didn’t know the secret password. “Policzki,” he said. “Homicide.”

The uniform waved him on. Policzki climbed over the yellow tape that had been used to secure the scene, and sprinted up the granite steps.

At the broad double door, another uniform glanced without interest at his ID and gave him a curt nod. Policzki opened the door and stepped inside the house. Above his head, a massive chandelier threw a million crystalline particles of light over a foyer bigger than Rhode Island. Brass wall sconces highlighted the most spectacular staircase he’d ever seen. Most Boston homes of this vintage had narrow stairways steep enough to test the hardiest Puritan constitution. Whoever had built this house had deviated from the norm, building a wide, graceful spiral that seemed to hang in midair of its own free will.

The rooms were empty. Following the echo of voices to the back of the house, Policzki took in the scene in a single, sweeping glance: the corpse that lay in a crumpled heap on the kitchen floor, one arm outflung, palm up as if pleading for mercy; the forensic tech who whistled tunelessly as he dusted the briefcase on the broad granite island for prints; the paunchy, middle-aged man in a Ralph Lauren suit who sat, seemingly forgotten, on a folding canvas stool, mopping his bald pate with a snow-white linen handkerchief.

Two women knelt beside the corpse, studying it with clinical detachment. As Policzki approached, Lorna Abrams said without looking up, “About time you got here.”

Policzki crouched beside the body and studied with interest the hole drilled into the dead man’s temple. Beneath the man’s head, a pool of blood had started to congeal on the slate floor. “No need to be testy,” he told his partner. “Our friend here’s already dead.”

Neena Bhatti, the doe-eyed assistant M.E., glanced at him, eyes alight with humor, and made a valiant, if unsuccessful, attempt to suppress a grin. “Hey, Doug,” she said.

He was always surprised to hear that nasal Queens accent coming from the lovely and exotic Bhatti. It was like expecting Princess Grace and getting Fran Drescher instead. “Neena,” he acknowledged. “What do we have here?”

“What we have here,” Lorna said briskly, “is a John Doe.”

Policzki raised an eyebrow. “No ID?”

“No wallet, no wedding band, not so much as a sticky label on his shirt that says, Hi. My name is Bruce.”

“As you can see for yourself,” Neena said, “it appears that he died from a single gunshot wound to the head. Small caliber. Nice, neat entry hole. Exit wound’s a little messier. The bullet tore off a chunk of his skull on its way out.”

“Nice visual,” Policzki said. “Any idea who he is?”

“Not a one,” Lorna said. “But the house is for sale. The guy over there in the corner? His name’s Philip Armentrout. He had a two-thirty appointment with Kaye Winslow, of Winslow & DeLucca Realty, to look the place over. He was running a little late, got here at approximately two forty-eight. The house was unlocked, so he walked in and found Mr. Doe here. What he didn’t find was Ms. Winslow.”

Policzki rocked back on his heels. “Any indication of where she might be?”

“Nope,” Lorna said cheerfully. “But the briefcase O’Connell’s dusting for prints belongs to her.”

Policzki glanced briefly in the direction she indicated and said, “So she was here at some point.”

“It sure looks that way.”

Which they both knew thrust Kaye Winslow into the unenviable position of prime suspect, a position she shared with Philip Armentrout, at least until the evidence cleared one or the other of them. Policzki had learned early in his career to take nothing at face value, to question everything, no matter how it looked on the surface. Just because Armentrout said he’d stumbled across the corpse didn’t mean he was telling the truth.

Doug gave the body another long, searching glance and said to Neena, “Do we have an estimated time of death?”

“Need I remind you that fieldwork is an inexact science? I can give you a more accurate assessment once we get Mr. Doe into the lab.”

“Ballpark?” Lorna asked.

“Couple of hours, tops. I’d say he died no more than a half hour before Mr. Armentrout found him.” Neena stood and pulled off her rubber gloves with a snap. “I’m done here.”

“Thanks,” Lorna said. To Policzki she added, “And I actually thought I might get home on time tonight.”

“With your vast experience, you of all people should know better than that.”

She rolled her eyes. “Right. Thanks for setting me straight. I have to get somebody out there to talk to the neighbors. Find out if anybody saw or heard anything. Then we’ll try to locate Ms. Winslow. If we don’t find her lickety-split, we’ll have to issue an APB. She could be the perpetrator. Or…” Lorna paused, met Policzki’s eyes and shrugged.

The message that passed between them was unspoken, but clear. If Winslow wasn’t the perpetrator, chances were good that she was either dead or in serious trouble. “Want me to talk to Armentrout?” he said.

“Have at it. After that, you can check Winslow’s ID for next of kin.”

While Lorna headed outside to rally the troops, Policzki considered how best to address Philip Armentrout. The gentleman in question sat hunched over, his elbows braced on his knees, his head hung low between his shoulders. Obviously not a happy camper. Straightforward and sincere seemed the most appropriate route. “Mr. Armentrout?” Policzki said.

Armentrout looked up, focused on his face, recognized that this was yet another stranger, and scowled. “When can I leave?” he said.

“I’m Detective Policzki. Mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“I already answered questions. Twice. Don’t you people ever talk to each other? This is ridiculous. I already told you everything. I’m a busy man. I have work to get back to.”

Policzki hunched down in front of him, balancing on the balls of his feet. “I understand how busy you are,” he said. “And I realize this has inconvenienced you. But it won’t take long, and when we’re done, you can get back to your busy life. Unfortunately…” he paused, and in the silence he heard the rasp of a zipper as one of the EMTs maneuvered the DOA into a body bag “…the victim over there won’t be able to do that.”

Armentrout winced and closed his eyes. Sighing, he said, “Fine. What do you want to know?”

“Why don’t you tell me everything that happened, starting with the time you arrived?”

“We had a two-thirty appointment. I was twenty minutes late because my one o’clock meeting ran over. I got here about ten of three, knocked on the door. Nobody answered. It was unlocked, so I let myself in. I figured the Winslow woman was somewhere in the house and hadn’t heard me knock. I called her name a couple of times, came down the hallway and around the corner and saw this guy’s feet sticking out from behind the kitchen island. Hell of a shock.”

“I imagine it was. What did you do then?”

Armentrout rubbed the back of his neck with a beefy hand. His eyes were a little bloodshot. “I walked around to check. I thought somebody’d passed out or something, and maybe needed medical attention. I didn’t realized the guy was dead until I saw the blood.”

“How’d you know he was dead?”

Armentrout gave Policzki a long, level look. “I wasn’t born yesterday. It was pretty obvious.”

Fair enough. “What did you do when you realized he was dead?”

“I got the hell out. If there was a killer on the premises, I wasn’t about to hang around and wait to become his next victim. I hightailed it out of there and called 911 from the park across the street. I waited there until the cops arrived.”

“All right. Did you, at any time, touch anything?”

“Just the doorknob.”

“Were you acquainted with the victim? Was he anybody you’d met before?”

Armentrout shook his head. “I figured he was one of Kaye Winslow’s associates. I don’t know who the hell he is. Maybe she can tell you.”

She probably could, Policzki thought, if they could just locate her. “All right, Mr. Armentrout,” he said, “I think we’re done. I’ll need verification of your whereabouts earlier this afternoon, and a number where I can reach you in case I have more questions.”

“Verification of my—what the hell, am I a suspect?”

“It’s routine, sir. You’re the person who found the body. In the absence of a smoking gun or a signed confession, we have to consider you a suspect until we can rule you out. Hopefully that’ll happen sooner rather than later.”

“I don’t believe this.” Armentrout fished in his pocket for his wallet. He pulled out a business card and shoved it into Policzki’s hand. “I go out to look at a house and end up in the middle of a mess like this. My whole goddamn afternoon’s been screwed up. You’d better believe I’ll be crossing this mausoleum off my list of possibilities.” Glowering, he slid the wallet back into his pocket. “Matter of fact, I wouldn’t buy a house in Boston if somebody paid me to take it off their hands. Not after this insanity. Maybe I’ll find something in Newton or Andover. I hear Lexington’s nice.”

He left in a huff, this short, self-important businessman whose schedule had been hopelessly derailed by his discovery of a dead body. Hell of an inconvenience, Policzki thought as he watched him go. A real shame that murder had disrupted the guy’s busy day.

The door slammed shut behind Armentrout. Across the room, O’Connell, the forensics tech, closed up his fingerprint kit. “That went well,” he said.

“Right,” Policzki said. “He didn’t pull a weapon on me, or threaten to have me fired, so I guess in the greater scheme of things, it could have been worse.”

“Oh, yeah. It could’ve been a lot worse.” O’Connell nodded in the direction of the black plastic bag the two EMTs were wheeling toward the front door. “You could’ve been that guy.”

The setting sun poured like honey through the closed windows of the lecture hall, infusing it with the ambience of a sauna. The dog days of summer were a thing of the past, but so was the air-conditioning that had rendered them tolerable. Cheap construction, minimal insulation and a simpleminded administration that insisted the heating system be turned on according to the calendar instead of the thermometer all conspired to ensure that learning take place in the most hostile environment imaginable. In the midst of this tropical paradise, Assistant Professor Sam Winslow sat reading the latest Dan Brown paperback while his art history students waded through the first exam of the semester. Fifty-eight heads leaned over fifty-eight blue books as fifty-eight pens scratched diligently against paper.

Sam had come to this job six years ago with the zealous idealism of a new convert. It had taken him awhile to accept the irrefutable truth that ninety-eight point eight percent of his students simply didn’t give a shit. Back Bay Community College wasn’t the kind of place that bred art majors. His classes were well attended because everybody who graduated from BBCC needed nine hours of humanities credit. They’d heard that Professor Winslow was an easy grader, and how hard, after all, could art history be? With a few notable exceptions—primarily those few students who signed up each semester for his introductory painting class—his students were here for one reason only: the three credits that would magically appear on their transcripts if they paid attention in class, showed up on exam days and regurgitated his words back to him in some kind of meaningful form.

This was what his life had come to: he trafficked in regurgitation. Not a particularly pretty realization, especially at four forty-five on a sticky Indian summer afternoon when the only thing he’d eaten since breakfast was a couple of purple Peeps that had been left to petrify on the table in the faculty lounge. Judging by their cardboard consistency, they’d been there for a while.

At a soft rap on the door, Sam glanced up from his book and saw the face of Lydia Forbes, Dean of Arts and Sciences and his immediate supervisor, framed in the tiny window. Setting down his book, he got up from his chair, crossed the room and, with a slow sweep of his gaze over the classroom—his students were supposed to be adults, but it didn’t hurt to give them the impression that he had eyes in the back of his head—he opened the door and stepped out into the corridor.

“Lydia,” he said, leaving the door open just a crack behind him.

“Sorry to interrupt, but you didn’t look busy.” Six feet tall in her conservative two-inch heels, Lydia met him nearly eye to eye. Thin almost to the point of emaciation, she wore a brown tweed suit, her gray hair pulled back in its customary severe chignon. Eyebrows that were a dark slash in her pale face gave her a look of perpetual surprise. The first time he’d met her, he’d thought she looked just like Miss Grundy, the schoolteacher from the Archie comics. It hadn’t taken him long to see that the outer package was merely professional camouflage for a woman with an infectious laugh, a bawdy sense of humor and a relentless addiction to unfiltered cigarettes. “Take a walk with me,” she said.

He glanced back at the classroom. Reading the uncertainty in his gaze, she said, “For Christ’s sake, Sam, pull that big stick out of your ass. They’re adults. Let them be responsible for their own actions.”

Sam latched the classroom door and fell into step with her, matching her leggy stride along the silent corridor and out into the crisp October afternoon. The sun’s rays, angling between brick buildings, bathed the entire scene in a muted pink glow. Lydia walked two steps from the entryway, fired up a Pall Mall and took a drag. Eyes closed in ecstasy, she exhaled a cloud of blue smoke and said without rancor, “Damn idiotic state laws.”

Behind her back, Sam discreetly waved away the smoke. She took another drag and said, “I forwarded your tenure application to the committee yesterday.”

Moving upwind of the toxic blue cloud, he took a breath of fresh air. Or as fresh as it got on a weekday in downtown Boston. “And?”

She turned and studied him with shrewd blue eyes. Took another puff and said, “I’m worried about Larsen.”

Professor Nyles Larsen was Sam Winslow’s nemesis. He was also the chair of the tenure committee. In theory, if a professor didn’t achieve tenure, there was nothing forcing him to move on. In reality, being denied was a slap in the face, best responded to by making a rapid retreat with tail tucked firmly between legs. There was just one problem with that: Sam didn’t want to retreat. He might have come to teaching by a circuitous route, but now that he was here, he had no intention of going anywhere.

Sam furrowed his brow. “You think he’ll give us trouble?”

“I think Nyles Larsen would take great glee in denying your tenure application. He’s had it in for you since the day you first walked through the door of this place.”

It was true. Larsen had been a member of the search committee that had hired Sam, and when the man had taken an immediate dislike to him, he’d come close to losing out to another candidate. If not for the staunch ally he’d made in Vince Tedeschi, Professor of Mathematics, he’d have ended up standing on a street corner, selling pencils from a cup. Fortunately for Sam, majority vote had ruled the day, but Nyles Larsen continued to wage a one-man campaign against what he claimed were Sam’s mediocre standards and slapdash teaching methods.

“He’s jealous,” Lydia said. “Your students think you walk on water. Nyles puts his students to sleep.”

A pair of twenty-something young women carrying backpacks passed them, talking animatedly, and entered the building through the wide double doors. “So how do we counteract his influence?” Sam said.

“We’ve done as much as we can do,” Lydia said. “I’ve read your materials all the way through. Proofed them twice. Just to be sure. Your tenure packet’s thorough. You’ve provided good documentation. Your student evaluations are top-notch. Your publication record is a little thin, but it’s outweighed by other factors, like your outstanding committee work. Your peer recommendation was stellar.”

Of course it was. If not for him, it would have been his peers sitting on all those mind-numbingly tedious committees. They’d do whatever it took to keep him on board so they could continue nominating him to do the dirty work they were all so desperate to avoid. He figured it was worth the sacrifice. No matter what he was asked to do, he accepted the job with a smile. Damn little ever got accomplished in those committee meetings, but membership always looked good on paper.

“Christ, Lyd,” he said, hating the thread of desperation that ran through his voice, “I have to get tenure. If I can’t make it in this place…” The rest of the sentence went unspoken, but they both knew what he meant. When you started at the bottom, there was nowhere left to fall. “I can’t make a living from painting. And I’m not trained for anything else. If they boot me out of Back Bay, I’ll end up waxing floors at the bus station.”

Lydia took another puff of her cigarette, held in the smoke and exhaled it. Flicking an ash, she said, “You’ve done everything we asked you to do. There’s no reason on God’s green earth why you should be turned down. Not unless Larsen starts flapping his gums, and even then, the rest of the committee should ignore him. The man is irrational, and everybody knows it. They also know he’s determined to hang you out to dry. If anything goes wrong at this point, I’m holding Nyles Larsen personally responsible. If that happens, the little weasel won’t want to cross my path.”

The lowering sun slowly leached the afternoon of its warmth. Just beneath the surface of that golden glow lay October’s surprisingly sharp little teeth, nipping unexpectedly when a sudden arctic gust caught and lifted a strand of Sam’s hair.

“I appreciate the support,” he said. “I owe you.”

“You don’t owe me a thing. I just wanted to give you a heads-up.” She dropped the butt of her cigarette onto the ground and crushed it out with her foot. “And to let you know that I’m watching your back.”

Detective Lorna Abrams had a headache.

She fumbled in her black leather purse for the emergency bottle of Tylenol she always carried, opened the bottle and popped two capsules into her palm. Snapping the cap back on the bottle, she glanced around the interior of the car for something liquid, then said, “To hell with it!” and swallowed them dry.

Policzki, his hands at ten and two on the wheel and his eyes focused on traffic to prevent them from becoming yet another highway statistic, said, “I don’t know how you do that.”

“Easy. I just work up a mouthful of spit and—”

“Thanks,” he said, “but you really don’t have to go into detail.”

“Stop being so spleeny. You’re a cop, for Christ’s sake. Act like one.”

Policzki didn’t respond. It was just as well. When she was in this kind of mood, heads were likely to roll, and Doug Policzki’s head, being the nearest one, was in danger of becoming her first victim.

None of the three telephone numbers listed on Kaye Winslow’s business card had yielded results. The first, her cell phone number, was useless because in the abruptness of her departure, Winslow had left her BlackBerry behind. The second, her private line at Winslow & DeLucca, rang twice and then went directly to voice mail. Lorna had left an urgent message, but the chances of getting a response were probably zip and zilch. That left door number three. But by the time they’d finished up at the scene, it was well past closing time, and the realty office answering machine had directed her to call back after eight o’clock in the morning.

“Three strikes and you’re out,” she muttered.

Policzki glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. “Having a bad day, are we?”

“They postponed the court date on the Moldonado case. Again.”

Arturo Moldonado, a soft-spoken supermarket meat cutter who’d lived in the same East Boston apartment for two decades, was known for taking in strays—both the human and the animal variety—and handing out penny candy to the neighborhood kids. One day last October, he’d come home early and discovered his wife in bed with a twenty-two-year-old college dropout friend of their son. Upon seeing his inamorata engaged in steamy passion with another, much younger and more virile man, Moldonado had tiptoed to the kitchen and taken out a meat cleaver—which, in consideration of his occupation, he kept razor sharp—then returned to the bedroom and the still unsuspecting couple, and proceeded to hack them into a jillion pieces. Afterward, he’d called 911, then sat calmly on the couch with the bloody cleaver and waited for the authorities to come and take him away.

“You can’t control the court calendar,” Policzki said. “They’ll do what they’re going to do. All we can do is roll with it.”

His logic was flawless. And maddening. “That isn’t even the worst of it,” Lorna said, rubbing at her throbbing temple. “It’s those crazy people I call relatives that have me one step from the edge and peering down into the abyss.”

“Oh,” he said as the light dawned. “Wedding stuff.”

“Yes, wedding stuff! You know what I did today? I spent my lunch hour watching my nineteen-year-old daughter try on wedding dresses. Do you have any frigging idea how much those things cost?”

Policzki made a noncommittal grunt of sympathy. Of course he was noncommittal, she thought irritably. He didn’t have a clue how much wedding dresses cost. He lived at home with his mother and banked all his money. “Too damn much,” she said, answering her own question. “That’s how much. All for a kid who has her head in the clouds and doesn’t have a clue what life is really about.”

And that was the crux of the matter: Krissy was too young to get married. She was nineteen years old, barely out of high school. A baby. She was also headstrong and determined, so the wedding preparations rolled merrily along, gathering momentum and gaining in size, until they threatened to crush anybody who failed to jump out of the way.

“Silk and taffeta,” Lorna grumbled. “Tulle and organza. What the hell is organza, anyway?”

“I haven’t a clue.”

She glanced out the window, down a darkened side street. “Ed and I got married at city hall. I wore a navy-blue suit and carried a bouquet of carnations. We spent our wedding night at a hotel in Revere, then got up and went to work the next day. We did not—I repeat not—spend two weeks on Maui. Who the hell was the idiot that decided the bride’s parents are supposed to pay for the wedding?”

“The tradition dates back to ancient times,” Policzki said, “when the bride’s family was expected to provide a dowry to the family of the groom, presumably in payment for taking her off their hands.”

Lorna snorted. “If I’d known that was all it took, I’d have gladly paid Derek to take her off my hands. He’s welcome to all of her—the nose ring, the messy room, the Real World addiction. The posters of Heath Ledger and Orlando Bloom. He’s an easygoing kid. I could’ve paid him off for a tenth of what this wedding will cost me. They could’ve eloped. Think of the money I would have saved.”

“I think this is it.” Policzki pulled up to the curb behind an aging Volvo wagon. Soft light spilled through a bay window of the South End town house onto the shrubbery below, giving the place the cozy, inviting look of a Thomas Kinkade painting. A shadow moved behind a curtained window. Policzki turned off the engine, and by silent agreement, they simultaneously opened their doors and stepped out of the car.

The day’s warmth had given way to a crisp, clear evening. As they moved briskly toward the front door of the house, Lorna said, “So I’ll be good cop and you can be bad cop.”

“How come I never get to be good cop?”

“Are you kidding, Policzki? With that grim expression of yours, you’d scare people half to death. Tell me. Do you take the face off when you go to bed at night, or is this a 24–7 kind of thing?”

“Hey, that’s not fair. I love babies and flowers and puppies.”

“I know. You’re just incredibly earnest. Or incredibly dedicated. Or incredibly something.”

They climbed the steps and Lorna rang the bell. Muffled footsteps approached and the door opened.

Lorna’s first thought was that Sam Winslow—if, indeed, the man standing in the open doorway, outlined by soft lamplight, was Sam Winslow—was a sinfully handsome man, with coal-black hair worn to his shoulders, electric blue eyes and a lean, craggy face topped by cheekbones sharp enough to slice diamonds. Somewhere in the vicinity of forty, if the wisps of gray at his temples were any indication, he could be a model—or a stand-in for George Clooney—if he ever tired of teaching. She could imagine him in a magazine layout, standing in a room full of glamorous and playful people, wearing Armani and sipping from a glass of Chivas Regal.

Christ on a crutch. His female students must be tripping over their own feet just to get close to him. Probably a few of the male ones were, too.

He eyed them warily. “Yes?”

“Sam Winslow?” Policzki said.

“Yes.”

The young detective held up his badge. “Policzki and Abrams, Boston PD. Is your wife home, sir?”

“My wife? I—no, actually, she’s not. What’s this about?”

“May we come in?”

“It’s dinnertime. I really don’t think—”

“Professor Winslow,” Lorna said, “there was an incident this afternoon involving your wife. I think you’d better let us in.”

“An incident?” He hesitated, looked momentarily nonplussed. Then he nodded and moved away from the door.

Winslow closed the door behind them, cleared his throat and ran a hand through his perfectly coiffed hair. “What’s this about?” he repeated.

“Professor Winslow,” Lorna said, “when was the last time you spoke with your wife?”

“This morning,” he said. “We had breakfast together. Then she went her way and I went mine. You still haven’t told me what’s going on. What kind of incident?”

“It’s almost seven o’clock,” Policzki said. “Your wife isn’t home, and you haven’t spoken to her since this morning. Is this your typical daily routine?”

“Kaye works crazy hours. Look, I wish you people would tell me what the hell is going on. Is Kaye in some kind of trouble? Has something happened to her?”

“Your wife had an appointment this afternoon to show a house on Commonwealth Avenue,” Lorna said, watching his eyes carefully for even the merest flicker of recognition. Or guilt. But she saw neither. “When the client arrived, Mrs. Winslow wasn’t there.”

Winslow wrinkled his brow in puzzlement and ran a hand along his jaw. “I don’t understand. You mean she never showed up?”

“Oh, she showed up,” Policzki said. “Her briefcase was there. Her PDA and her wallet were there. But no Kaye. We did find somebody else there, though.”

Winslow crossed his arms. “Who?”

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Lorna said. “Whoever he was, he’d been shot in the head. Does your wife own a gun, Professor?”

Two

Winslow’s color wasn’t good. He sat on a cream leather sofa, directly across from Lorna, who’d snagged herself a comfy armchair, while Policzki wandered the room, taking a casual inventory of its contents. The professor had loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar, but to Policzki he still looked like something that should be hung out to dry on a wash day morning. His pallor might be due to the shock of learning that his wife was missing. On the other hand, it could be traced to a more sinister source. Guilt had a way of taking its toll on a man.

“The very suggestion is ludicrous,” Winslow said.

Lorna leaned back in her chair. “Why is it ludicrous?”

“A, we don’t own a gun. And B, even if we did, there’s not a chance in hell that Kaye would ever shoot it. She’d be too worried about breaking a nail or getting her hands dirty.”

His ears attuned to every nuance of their conversation, Policzki studied the collection of African tribal masks that hung on the wall above the fireplace mantel. They looked like the genuine article. Somebody—presumably the good professor—had done a good deal more traveling in his lifetime than had Douglas Policzki of Somerville, Massachusetts. Six semesters spent at an Arizona university was hardly in the same league as a trip to the Dark Continent.

The Winslows had eclectic tastes. An antique open-fronted china cabinet housed a large collection of Hummel figurines. At least the Winslows kept them all in one place. Policzki’s mother collected Hummels, and she had dozens of them scattered all over the house, an excess of cuteness so saccharine it made his teeth ache.

“My wife did not kill anybody,” Winslow said. “There has to be some other explanation. Have you talked to the owner of the building? Maybe this dead guy is one of the Worthingtons.”

Policzki picked up one of the offending objects, a dimpled boy in knee pants and tight curls who carried a shepherd’s crook. Odd, he thought, absently running his thumb over its cool, smooth surface, that Winslow should seem more interested in the dead man than in his missing wife.

“Technically, the house is owned collectively by the Worthington heirs,” Lorna said. “The executor of the estate, Bruce Worthington, is out of the country right now, traveling in Europe. We’re trying to reach him.”

Policzki set down Little Boy Blue, leaned against the china cabinet and crossed his arms.

“Maybe…” Winslow’s brows drew together in concentration. “Maybe she witnessed something that frightened her. Maybe she saw the killer.” His skin, taut across his cheekbones, seemed almost too small for his face. Too tight. “Maybe,” he said, “she’s hiding from someone.”

Policzki met Lorna’s gaze and held it for an instant. She leaned closer to the professor, elbows braced on her knees. “What makes you say that?”

Winslow loosened his tie a little further, but it did nothing to heighten his color. He still looked like somebody’s washed-out bed linens. “No particular reason. I’m just thinking out loud. Trying to come up with some logical explanation.”

“Have you noticed anything unusual about your wife’s behavior lately? Any personality changes? Has she seemed more irritable than usual? More nervous? More secretive?”

“None of the above,” Winslow said. “Kaye’s just been her usual self.”

“Which is?”

“I’m not sure I understand the question, Detective.”

“If you could describe your wife to me in one word, what would it be?”

“Ah. I see. I’d probably say driven.”

“Driven?”

Winslow shifted position, digging his backside deeper into the sofa’s plush cushions. “My wife’s enough of a workaholic to make the rest of us look like slackers. I know it sounds like a cliché, but Kaye eats, drinks and breathes real estate. She’s never off duty. Evenings, weekends, holidays. If she’s not out showing properties, she’s on the phone, drumming up business.”

“I’d think,” Policzki said, “that might cause friction in the household.”

Winslow blinked a couple of times, as though he’d forgotten there was a third person in the room. “Friction?”

“Well,” Policzki said, his gaze focused directly on the professor’s face, “if my wife worked 24–7, after a while I’d start to feel neglected.”

“I’m not neglected. There’s nothing wrong with my marriage, if that’s what you’re implying. Kaye and I are adults. I understand the importance of her job, and she understands the importance of mine. We do our best to accommodate each other’s needs.”

Across the room, Lorna crossed shapely legs and adjusted the hem of her skirt. “Then you don’t fight at all?” she said.

“Of course we fight. All couples fight.”

“Of course,” she agreed. “About what?”

Had Winslow gone even paler, or was it a trick of the light? “I don’t know,” he said. “What does any couple fight about? Maybe I left the toilet seat cover up again, or she left the cap off the toothpaste. Or I forgot to pick up milk on the way home.”

Policzki stepped away from the china cabinet and stood behind Lorna’s chair. “Tolstoy once said that all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Winslow’s mouth thinned and his eyes lost some of their warmth. “We’re not unhappy, Detective.”

Soothingly, Lorna said, “Nobody said you were.”

“He implied it. I’m trying to be cooperative.”

“And we appreciate it,” Lorna said. “Let’s change direction for a minute. What was your wife wearing when she left the house this morning?”

“Ah…let me think.” Winslow ran the fingers of both hands through his hair while he thought about it. “A red suit,” he said finally. “Yeah, that’s it. A red suit and matching heels. White silk chemise top underneath.”

“Any jewelry?”

“Just her wedding ring. A wide gold band with a single marquise-cut diamond. One carat. Oh, and her Rolex. She never leaves the house without it.”

“Just like American Express. Karl Malden would be proud. And she was driving her car this morning? The red 2005 BMW?”

“That’s right.”

“Dr. Winslow,” Policzki said, “where were you this afternoon between, say, two and four?”

He wasn’t imagining the hostility he saw in Winslow’s eyes. It was real. But he had to give the guy points for control. “I was in my office,” Winslow said. “Working. I teach two classes every Tuesday. I spent the time between classes doing online research for a paper I’m presenting at a symposium in Kansas City next month.”

“Is there anybody who can vouch for your presence? Did anybody see you there? Did you talk to anybody, take any phone calls, while you were there?”

A muscle twitched in Winslow’s jaw. He looked at Lorna as if seeking support. When it didn’t come, he said, “No. I kept the door shut to discourage interruptions. If I leave it open, I don’t get any work done.”

“So you have no alibi for the time in question. That could pose a problem, Professor, if we don’t locate your wife.”

“Look…” Winslow’s eyes suddenly went damp. “You have to know how worried I am about Kaye. If something’s happened to her—” He closed his eyes and shook his head. A single tear escaped from the corner of his eye. Policzki watched in fascination as it trickled down his cheek. “No,” he said after a moment of silence, “I won’t even go there. Not yet. I refuse to believe that anything’s happened to her. There’s a reasonable explanation for all of this. I don’t know what it is yet, but we’ll find it.”

Gently, Lorna said, “Does your wife have any enemies, Professor? Anybody you can think of who might wish her harm?”

He looked at her, blinked a couple of times. “Enemies? What possible reason could anyone have for wishing my wife harm?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.”

Winslow had begun to perspire profusely. The underarms of his shirt were ringed with sweat. “No,” he said, his voice a little shakier than before. “I’m not aware of any enemies who might wish her harm.”

“She hasn’t mentioned anything about problems at work?” Lorna said. “A tiff with a co-worker, a disgruntled client? A deal that went south? A competitor who thinks Winslow & DeLucca is horning in on his territory and wants to even the odds?”

“She hasn’t said anything to me. You should probably talk to Mia. If anything like that was going on, Mia would know.”

“Who’s Mia?”

“Mia DeLucca. My sister. She and Kaye are business partners.”

Lorna and Policzki exchanged glances. “Call her,” Lorna said. “Get her over here.”

Mia DeLucca sat in a line of cars at the tollbooth, inching her way forward, one car length at a time, in mortal danger of being asphyxiated by exhaust fumes. Ahead of her, Boston rose like the Emerald City, a breathtaking vista of twinkling lights and soaring buildings. Behind her lay ninety miles of turnpike, ninety miles of brutal, bumper-to-bumper traffic, ninety miles of crazed Massachusetts drivers, at least half of them fueled by road rage.

The trip from Springfield had been a nightmare. After eight hours of tedious real estate seminars, all she wanted was to go home and soak in a hot bubble bath. But she’d been expected to eat dinner with the rest of the presenters before they went their separate ways, so she’d made the best of it and splurged on a meal of shrimp scampi and a single glass of white wine. Even taking into account the ninety minutes that dinner took from start to finish, she still would’ve made it home by seven-thirty if fate hadn’t intervened in the form of a semi truck that had jackknifed and overturned on the Mass Pike somewhere near Framingham. It had taken over an hour for emergency personnel to right it, while Mia and nine trillion other drivers sat at a standstill.

When she realized how late she would be, she’d called Kevin from her cell phone so he wouldn’t worry. She should have known better. Her son had expressed sympathy in typical unfocused teenage fashion, meaning he was wrapped up in some computer game and hadn’t been thinking about her at all. He’d undoubtedly forget her existence again the instant he hung up the phone. It was a good thing that she planned to amass a fortune in real estate before she retired. If Kevin was responsible for taking care of her in her old age, she’d probably end up living in a refrigerator box on some downtown street corner. Her son would be too busy playing Grand Theft Auto to remember the aged crone who’d given birth to him all those years ago.

The line of cars inched closer to the tolls, and as her engine shuddered in protest, Mia drummed her fingernails on the steering wheel. Somewhere between Springfield and Boston, her odometer had rolled past three hundred thousand miles. It was nearing time to send the ancient Blazer to the boneyard, but she was loath to spend the money on a new car. At least the old girl was paid for. Embarrassing to drive, but paid for. The previous owner, a twenty-year-old kid from Revere, had pimped it out with shiny black paint, chrome wheels and opaque, black-tinted windows. Kev, of course, loved the damn thing. He called it her Mafia staff car.

Kaye, on the other hand, was forever hounding her to buy a new car. Her sister-in-law was a strong proponent of the you-have-to-look-successful-to-be-successful philosophy. That might work fine for Kaye, who drove a flashy BMW and dressed like Ivana Trump. But Kaye wasn’t feeding and clothing a seventeen-year-old boy with a hollow leg and feet that wouldn’t stop growing. She wasn’t paying off student loans and a killer mortgage. And she certainly wasn’t going it alone. She had a husband to help pay the bills, a husband who was solid, respectable and gainfully employed.

Mia finally reached the tollbooth. The toll taker, a sallow-faced man in his sixties, wordlessly took the five-dollar bill she offered, and shoved the change into her hand with sullen impatience. Checking her rearview mirror, she pulled away from the tolls, changed lanes and shot across town through the Big Dig tunnel in a quarter of the time it had taken back in the days of the elevated expressway. She took a downtown exit and quickly found herself in the heart of the North End. Boston’s Little Italy, with its narrow, congested streets, its restaurants and its pastry and butcher shops, possessed an old-world charm and a warm, neighborhood feel Mia hadn’t known existed until she had married Nick and moved here. Now, she couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.

She climbed the hill and turned onto her street, found a tiny opening at the curb only two houses down from her own, and squeezed into it. Shutting off the engine, she studied her house, assessing its curb appeal, admiring the brick and stone exterior, the bay windows, the freshly painted front door. She’d bought the house seven months ago, and still the sight of it sent a tiny thrill down her spine. She hadn’t been in the market for a house; she’d originally brought a client here, a thirtyish yuppie banker looking to invest in the recently fashionable North End. He’d wanted something he could buy cheaply, renovate and turn over in five or six years. The house had just come on the market, and the asking price, while a little steep, still didn’t reflect the skyrocketing prices she’d been seeing all over the Greater Boston Area.

The house hadn’t been what her client was looking for. Too expensive, too much work to be done. But Mia had walked through the front door and fallen instantly in love. The house might need work, but she was handy with a hammer and a paintbrush. She’d walked from room to room, picturing what she could do with the place even as she extolled its virtues to her client and prayed he wouldn’t love it the way she did.

It was the courtyard that sold her. It was exquisite, a sun-dappled oasis tucked away behind the house, accessible to the street only by a narrow alley that ended in a locked wrought-iron gate. Although it had been a blustery February day when she’d looked at the house, she had seen the tiny courtyard’s potential. She could picture it blooming in a riot of color, with tubs of pink and white impatiens and long wooden planters overflowing with red geraniums. A park bench over here, maybe some kind of water fountain over there, with cascading sprays of greenery everywhere.

She’d grown up without flowers, without any of the feminine touches a mother would have brought to her life. Johnny Winslow hadn’t exactly been Martha Stewart. Mia’s old man had been too busy drinking and committing the petty crimes that kept him on a first-name basis with various members of the local constabulary to place any stock in something as frivolous as flowers. Or any home decor more exotic than a tableful of empty Pabst Blue Ribbon bottles.

Mia had gone home that night and spent hours crunching numbers. Winslow & DeLucca was doing well, but she and Kaye had agreed at the start of their partnership not to bleed it dry. They lived on their personal commissions and filtered most of the agency’s share right back into the firm. The real estate business was notoriously unpredictable, and she had to be sure she had enough money tucked away to cover the next dry spell. In another year, Kevin would be off to college, and Mia didn’t even want to think about what that would cost.

She’d weighed her options and her finances carefully. It had been close, but in the end, the little courtyard, with its old-world charm, had won out. In the morning, she’d gone into the office, called the listing Realtor and made an offer. It had been accepted immediately. Four weeks later, she’d signed papers and the previous owner had handed over the keys. Now she had a home that belonged to her (or would, after 356 more payments), a never-ending renovation project that filled every hour of her spare time, and a hefty mortgage that kept her awake at night thinking up creative ways to put more cash into her bank account. Fear of starvation, she’d discovered, was a powerful motivator.

She found Kevin at his desk, his lanky six-foot-three frame hunched over a gargantuan computer monitor. He handled the joy stick with rapid and accurate movements as the vroom-vroom of racing automobile engines, accompanied by squealing tires and a frenzy of gunshots, poured from the wall-mounted speakers. Pausing in the open doorway, Mia made a sweeping assessment of his room: the empty pizza box beside his desk; the clunky size-thirteen sneakers—bought a month ago and probably already outgrown—carelessly discarded in the middle of the floor; the dog-eared Star Wars poster; the dirty socks collecting dust bunnies beneath the unmade bed. Kev’s housekeeping skills might be lacking, but this was his space. As long as there were no drugs hidden in his underwear drawer, as long as the dirty socks eventually got washed and nothing was growing under the bed, she let him keep his room the way he wanted it.

Leaning against the door frame, she said, “Killed any bad guys lately?”

“Shit! I mean, shoot.” Kevin glanced warily over his shoulder. “Geez, Mom, you just got me killed. Now I have to start all over again.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Forgive me for the intrusion.”

“You could at least knock first. You scared the crap out of me.” Finally remembering the manners she’d drilled into his head since birth, he leaned back in his chair, swiveled in her direction and said, “So how was the seminar?”

“Have you ever watched paint dry? Multiply that times ten, and you’ll have an idea.”

His grin was quick and broad. “Sorta like sitting through Miss Crandall’s English class.”

“Sorta like that.”

“So,” he said, “I have something to ask you.”

Cautiously, she nodded. “Okay. Ask.”

“Michelle’s family is flying down to Tampa for the Columbus Day weekend. They’re leaving on Thursday night. They invited me to come along. Can I go?”

“They’re flying all the way to Tampa for three days?”

“Three days, four nights. They do it all the time. They have a condo down there, and it’s right on the beach. There’s plenty of room. I’d have my own room and everything. It would be really cool, Mom. The sun, the sand, the swaying palm trees.”

The sex, she thought, but didn’t say it. What kind of supervision would the Olsons provide? Would it be sufficient to keep Kevin from sneaking into Michelle’s bedroom while the rest of the family was asleep? She knew the kids were deeply involved, and she’d spoken to Kevin some time ago about safe sex. Mia wasn’t sure if their relationship had reached that level yet, but if it hadn’t, it was bound to in the near future. Anybody who looked at the two of them together could tell. One of Mia’s biggest fears was that Michelle would get pregnant and both their young lives would be ruined. Could she trust her son to exercise good judgment?

Mia took a deep breath. “Who’s paying for your plane ticket?”

It wasn’t the question she wanted to ask, and they both knew it. But because it was the opening she’d provided, he jumped into it eagerly. “Don’t worry, Mom, I already told them I’d pay for it myself. I knew you wouldn’t want me to let them take on the extra expense. This time of year, a ticket to Florida’s pretty cheap if you buy it online. I have enough money saved up. I already talked to Denny. He says I can have the time off from work. And all my teachers are giving me my assignments early so I won’t miss anything important.”

Her son was one clever boy. He’d covered all the bases. “Let me think about it,” she said. “How soon do you have to have an answer?”

“Tomorrow. Mr. Olson needs to know how many tickets to buy.”

“I’ll let you know in the morning. Right now, I’m taking a hot bath.”

She started to move away from the doorway, but his voice stopped her. “Mom?”

Mia turned back to her son, waited. “I know what you’re worried about,” he said, raising his gaze to hers. “Michelle and I are seventeen years old. We’re smart and we’re careful.” A flush spread across his cheeks, but he bravely continued. “We respect each other, and we don’t take chances. We know how much we have to lose. So please don’t worry about us. We know what we’re doing, and we’re acting like responsible adults.”

Well. It looked as if she had her answer. Something tightened inside Mia’s chest, and she felt a momentary urge to cry over the realization that her son was sexually active. He was so young. It seemed just yesterday he was taking his first steps, learning to ride a bike, becoming an Eagle Scout. Was he emotionally mature enough to handle a sexual relationship? Who would guide him through those shark-infested waters? For the first time in Kevin’s young life, she felt totally inadequate as a parent. She’d done well, raising him alone after Nick died, but there were times when a boy needed a father, and this was one of them.

Mia stepped back into her son’s room, leaned over his chair and gave him a hug. “I’m proud of you,” she said.

Most kids his age, male kids anyway, would have struggled to escape, but not Kevin. He hugged her back with the same enthusiasm with which he faced everything in life. “Thanks, Mom,” he said. “I’m pretty proud of you, too.”

Kevin DeLucca was his own person. He didn’t let peer pressure influence him, and he didn’t give a rat’s behind that it wasn’t cool to actually like your parents. Most adolescents were sullen and sulky, but Kevin was sunny and upbeat. His and Mia’s relationship was based on trust, mostly because he had never given her any reason not to trust him. Mia knew how lucky she was to have a son like that.

“I’ll talk to you in the morning,” she promised. “Don’t stay up too late.”

She’d just started to run her bath when the phone rang. It was past ten o’clock, late for a phone call, and for an instant, the old fear crept up through her, fanning out in a wall of flame across her chest and tightening around her throat. Back in the day, back when she was a kid, a call after 10:00 p.m. invariably meant that Dad was in trouble again. Back in jail on a D&D, occasionally something worse.

But those days were in the distant past. It had been fifteen years since she’d last seen Johnny Winslow, nearly as long since a late-night phone call meant trouble. It was probably just Bev, calling to remind her about an early morning appointment. Or one of Kev’s buddies who’d chosen to ignore her no-calls-after-nine-o’clock rule.

Kevin’s voice yanked her back to the present. “Mom,” he yelled, “it’s for you.”

Tying her soft flannel robe more tightly around her, she eyed the claw-foot bathtub with great longing before turning off the taps and padding barefoot into her bedroom. “I’ve got it,” she said into the telephone receiver, and heard the click as Kevin hung up. “Hello?”

But it wasn’t her administrative assistant’s voice she heard. It was her brother’s. “Mia,” he said, “it’s Sam. Can you come over to the house? The police are here, and Kaye’s missing.”

Three

A single unmarked police car sat at the curb behind Sam’s Volvo. Mia parked three houses down and locked the Blazer. Adjusting the soft leather gloves she’d worn to ward off the evening chill, she walked up the three steps to the door and rang the bell. A plainclothes cop wearing a shoulder holster and a deliberately neutral expression answered the door. Beneath the police academy stiffness, he was cute as the proverbial button. Tall and lanky and handsome. But he looked so young that she felt like a pedophile for the salacious thoughts that raced through her head. She shoved them aside and followed him into the living room, where her brother sat on the cream-colored leather couch. His hair was mussed, as though he’d been running his fingers through it.

In the armchair across from him sat another plainclothes cop, a fortyish woman in a gray suit, her chestnut hair clipped in a short, no-nonsense style. Her blue eyes were sharp and intelligent as she gave Mia a thorough once-over.

Sam glanced up, looking unfocused and weary. When he saw Mia, his entire face changed. Warmth flooded his eyes, and one corner of his mouth turned up in a half smile so loaded with gratitude it was almost painful to witness. He looked like a drowning man who’d just been thrown a life preserver. “Mia,” he said, standing and crossing the room. He took her in his arms and hugged her, hard. “Thank God you got here so quickly.”

She glanced past his shoulder at the cops and whispered, “Sam? What the hell is going on here?”

“Ms. DeLucca,” the female cop said in a brisk voice as no-nonsense as her hairstyle. “Detective Lorna Abrams.” She gave a brief nod toward the younger cop. “Detective Policzki. We’d appreciate it if you could sit down with us and answer a few questions.”

Mia stepped free of her brother’s arms. Policzki, her erstwhile doorman, stood in front of the bay window, feet planted firmly apart, arms crossed, his silent demeanor rivaling that of the guards at Buckingham Palace. Mia had an overwhelming urge to tickle him, just to see if he was human.

Squelching it, she removed her coat and gloves and, tossing them over the back of the couch, took a seat. “Kaye is missing?” she said, her gaze moving back and forth between the two detectives.

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” Abrams said.

“Meaning?”

“This afternoon,” she explained, “Kaye Winslow had an appointment to show one of your listings. The Worthington house on Commonwealth.”

“Yes, of course. She mentioned it this morning.”

“When the buyer arrived, nobody answered his knock, but the house was unlocked, so he walked in—” Abrams and Policzki met each other’s eyes before she turned her gaze back on Mia “—directly into a homicide scene.”

Mia felt the color draining from her face. “Homicide,” she whispered. “Is Kaye—”

“We don’t know where Kaye is, Ms. DeLucca. The victim was a male, and so far we’ve been unable to identify him. Mrs. Winslow wasn’t at the scene.” Abrams paused. “But her briefcase was.”

“Oh, God.” This was every Realtor’s secret nightmare, the fear that they would place their trust in the wrong person and end up paying the price for the mistake. How many hours had Mia spent alone with some stranger in an empty house? Every time she met a new client, the fear was there, hovering at the periphery of her mind. Some of her peers had taken to carrying stun guns for protection. Just last week a fellow broker had shown her the Taser she kept hidden in her purse.

“What about the buyer?” Mia demanded. “Has anybody talked to him?”

Policzki spoke up. “Philip Armentrout. CEO of Geminicorp in Cambridge. They manufacture medical equipment. Mr. Armentrout has been questioned, and his whereabouts prior to arriving at the Comm Ave residence verified. He’s still not off the hook, but he looks clean.”

“He looks clean? What the hell does that mean?”

Policzki’s eyes were brown, a soft, rich shade that was completely at odds with his cool demeanor. “It means,” he said, “that we have no reason to believe Philip Armentrout was involved.”

“That’s just ducky,” she said. “In the meantime, what are you doing to try to find Kaye?”

It was Abrams who answered. “We’re following standard protocol—”

“Standard protocol? What the hell does that mean? My brother’s wife is missing. A man is dead. She could be in terrible danger! While you’re sitting here talking to me, the trail could be going cold. She might be—”

“Mia,” Sam warned, “please. Just listen to what she has to say.”

“Let me finish,” Abrams said, not unkindly. “We’re pouring all our available resources into locating Mrs. Winslow. But these things take time. In the absence of a crystal ball, we need to talk to a lot of people, ask a lot of questions. Which is why I’m sitting here talking to you right now.”

Mia reminded herself to keep her cool, reminded herself that these two people were supposed to know what they were doing. They were professionals who did this kind of thing every day, and they weren’t frazzled and frightened like she was. As Johnny Winslow’s daughter, she’d learned early that it didn’t pay to antagonize the cops. Taking a deep breath to quell her rising temper, she said, “I’m sorry. But I’ve never been faced with a situation like this before. Go ahead. Ask me anything. I’ll answer as best I can.”

From across the room, Policzki inquired, “Ms. DeLucca, can you think of any reason why Kaye Winslow might want to disappear?”

“You’re kidding,” she said. “Right? You’re not suggesting she disappeared of her own free will?”

“We have to look at all the possibilities.”

He was too damn cool, and her temper began to flare again. “There is no reason. I’m sure Sam has already told you that.”

Policzki barely gave Sam a glance. “We’ve heard what Dr. Winslow had to say. Now we want to hear your point of view.”

“You just heard it. This is preposterous. Tell me, Detective, exactly what do you know so far?”

“Three things,” Policzki said, with such unflappable cool that he reminded her of the infamous Mr. Spock of Star Trek fame. All that was missing was the pointed ears. “Number one,” he said, “a man is dead. Number two, Mrs. Winslow’s briefcase was found at the scene. Her BlackBerry, her wallet, her credit cards and identification were all there. Number three, Mrs. Winslow herself was absent.” He paused, those brown eyes of his burning a hole in Mia. “You do the math.”

“It’s all circumstantial. It means nothing.”

“Which is why,” Lorna Abrams said, “we have to ask so many questions. That’s how we find the truth.”

“Fine,” she said. “Here’s the truth. I have no idea why Kaye might want to disappear. She leads a charmed life. Look around you, Detectives. She has a successful business, a lovely home, a picture-perfect family. What possible reason could she have for wanting to leave that behind?”

“Homicide,” Policzki stated, “is a pretty compelling reason.”

“But there’s no reason why she would be involved in a homicide! Not unless she happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time!”

“That’s a possibility we’re looking into,” Abrams said. “What about enemies? Anybody you can think of who doesn’t like her?”

Mia clasped her hands in her lap and tried to find a diplomatic way of answering the question. “We all have people who dislike us,” she said. “Nobody’s universally loved. Kaye is a strong, vibrant, forceful businesswoman. A salesperson, with all the attendant clichés that go along with the title. She’s good at marketing, good at persuasion, good at manipulating people into doing what she wants. She’s a bit ruthless, and I mean that only in the most positive of ways. Because of that, she moves a lot of real estate. In our business, that’s the ultimate goal. Kaye can be very charming. She can also be—” she shot a glance at Sam “—shall we say difficult? A little abrasive at times. She goes after what she wants, and sometimes her methods aren’t quite conducive to winning friends and influencing people.” Mia gave an apologetic shrug of her shoulders. “But as far as anybody wanting to do her harm, no. That I can’t imagine.”

“Do you think you might come up with any names? People she may have had problems with in the recent past? Anybody who thought they got cheated in a real estate deal? Somebody she had words with? Somebody she cut off in traffic?”

“No. You’re going on a wild-goose chase. Whoever this dead man is, he was obviously the target. Not Kaye. Otherwise—” She shot another glance at Sam, took a deep breath and continued “—otherwise, you’d have found two victims. Or a different one. Am I not correct?”

“Possibly,” Abrams said. “Possibly not. It’s too soon to start theorizing about what happened. We have to look at all the information first, and we just don’t have that yet.”

“And while you’re gathering information, my sister-in-law could be dying. Or already dead.” Mia glanced at her brother, who sat beside her on the couch, his hands in his lap, his expression slack, as though he was in shock. “Has it even occurred to you people that she might be injured?” Mia turned her attention back to the cops. “That she might have driven herself to the hospital? Have you checked the local emergency rooms?”

“We have somebody looking into that.”

“I’d like to backtrack a minute,” Policzki said. “You said that people sometimes found Kaye to be difficult. In your personal dealings with her, have you found that to be true?”

Mia didn’t like the direction this was headed. Coolly, she said, “Only occasionally. I’m more of a soft sell than Kaye. For the most part, our personalities mesh in a way that works for us. We have good chemistry. Surprisingly few disagreements. We work well together.”

“Okay,” Abrams said. “She’s married to your brother. You worked together. You saw each other every day. Women in relationships like that often share the intimate details of their lives. Did she have any deep, dark secrets? Maybe something—” Abrams eyed Sam “—she didn’t want her husband to know about?”

Mia didn’t like the way the woman spoke of Kaye in the past tense, as if it were a foregone conclusion that she wasn’t coming back. “Kaye and I aren’t that close,” she said, deliberately using present tense. “We have a good working relationship, but we don’t share the intimate details of our lives with each other. She isn’t the type to share confidences. And neither am I.”

Don’t trust, don’t tell. That was what she’d learned at Johnny Winslow’s knee. The less said to outsiders, the better. The fewer people you trusted, the safer you were. She’d learned it as a little girl and still, at thirty-six, she hadn’t been able to erase it. If you don’t tell anybody your secrets, they stay secret. They still resonated in her head, the philosophies of the petty thief and small-time crook whose DNA she shared. Johnny Winslow’s legacy to his kids.

Thanks, Dad.

The policewoman’s cool blue eyes elicited in her an inexplicable desire to squirm like a little kid sitting on the miscreants’ bench outside the principal’s office. Mia hadn’t done a thing wrong, yet the woman’s intense scrutiny made her feel guilty. “Would you call her a friend?” Abrams asked.

Again, she pondered how to answer, finally decided on the truth. “We’re friendly,” she said.

“Which isn’t quite the same thing as being friends.”

“There are different levels of friendship, Detective.”

“Interesting answer. How long have you and Kaye been partners?”

“Three years. I started the agency four years ago. The market was strong and, as the business grew, I found myself with more work than I could handle. So I decided to take on a partner. It was a good business decision. Kaye’s brought in a tremendous number of new clients. Both buyers and sellers. As I said, she’s a real go-getter.”

“And has the agency been lucrative?”

“Lucrative enough. There are always start-up costs involved in running your own business, and it takes a year or two before you really begin to see any profits. But yes, the last three years, since Kaye came on board, we’ve done quite well.”

“And she’s been married to your brother for how long?”

“Two and a half years. They met at a dinner party at my house.”

“So you knew Kaye before your brother did.”

“Yes. Over the years, we’d met two or three times—real estate’s a small world. Even in a city the size of Boston, you keep running into the same people. But we didn’t really know each other as anything more than nodding acquaintances. She was recommended to me by Marty Scalia, a close friend of mine. He runs the Scalia Agency. I worked for five years for Marty before I left to start my own agency. When I realized I needed a partner, I turned to Marty because I knew he had his finger on the pulse of the local real estate world. Kaye had come to work for him after changing agencies a couple of times. She was a rising star, on her way up. He recommended her to me. It’s a decision I’ve never had reason to regret.”

“Is that common?” Policzki said. “Hopping from agency to agency?”

“It’s not uncommon. An agent can sell real estate anywhere, but like anything else, it’s better to have the right fit.”

Policzki crossed the room and sat on the arm of the couch, uncomfortably close to her. “Where were you today, Ms. DeLucca?”

Another facet of Johnny Winslow’s legacy sprang to life in full Technicolor: rampant paranoia. “Excuse me?” she said. “Are you implying that I might have had something to do with this—this mess? Because if you are, Detective, I resent the implication.”

“It’s a routine question,” Abrams said. “You’re one of the most significant people in Kaye Winslow’s life. The homicide, and her disappearance, took place at one of your real estate listings. We have to ask.”

Mia raised her chin. “I was at a conference in Springfield. I left at six-thirty this morning and got back about a half hour ago.”

Policzki said, “Is there anybody who can confirm your whereabouts?”

Every time the young detective opened his mouth, she liked him a little less. Of their own volition, her fists clenched. Forcing them to relax, she snapped, “Just the hundred and fifty real estate agents who attended the seminar I ran from two to four this afternoon, ‘Maintaining Strong Sales in a Troubled Economy.’ I can give you a brochure if you don’t believe me.”

Abrams scribbled something on a notepad. Ignoring Mia’s sarcasm, she said, “If we need it, we’ll ask.” She dropped the pad into her briefcase and snapped it shut. Rising from the chair, she said, “Dr. Winslow, we’ll need a recent photo of your wife. A good, clear one.”

“Check the agency Web page,” Mia said. “You’ll find a recent photo.”

Policzki reached into the inside pocket of his suit coat, briefly flashing his service revolver in its underarm holster, and pulled out a couple of business cards and a pen. He handed one of the cards to Mia, then flipped over the second one and wrote the URL she gave him on the back.

“That’ll do for now,” Abrams said. “I trust you’ll both be available if we have any more questions.”

To Mia, it sounded vaguely like a threat. She glared at Abrams, then at her stone-faced partner. “So what happens next?”

“We keep doing what we’ve been doing, and hope we get a break. We’ll contact you if there’s anything you need to know. We’d appreciate you doing the same. If you think of anything, no matter how small or insignificant it might seem, please call. Oh, and one more thing. We’ll need you to make up a list of Kaye Winslow’s friends, coworkers, people she sees on a regular basis. Names, addresses, phone numbers if you have them. Everybody who’s a significant part of her life. We’d like it as soon as possible.”

Was there any end to the woman’s demands? Mia followed them to the front hall and held the door for them. Abrams breezed out without so much as a goodbye, but Policzki paused at the threshold. His eyes met Mia’s and stayed there for an instant. “Have a nice evening,” he said.

“Right,” Mia said. “You, too.”

And she slammed the door behind them.

The house seemed too quiet. Even the movement of traffic on nearby Tremont Street seemed hushed and distant. Sam returned to the living room, his footsteps silent on the Aubusson carpet. His coloring was ashen, his hair a mess from his habit of raking nervous fingers through it. “Can I get you a drink?” he offered. “Glass of wine? Something stronger? You look like you could use one.”

“That goes double for you,” Mia said. “Scotch, if you have it. What the hell is this all about, Sam?”

He moved to the bar, dropped ice from a bucket into a pair of squat glasses and poured two fingers of Glenlivet into them. Crossing the room, he handed one to her. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Who is this dead guy? Is there something going on that I don’t know about?”

He sat down across from her, in the chair that Lorna Abrams had used. “Of course not,” he said. But he didn’t meet her eyes, and Mia felt a flicker of fear.

“Sam?” she prodded.

He let out a long-suffering sigh and closed his eyes. “Fine,” he said, opening them again. “I might as well tell you. We had a terrible fight the other night.” Still avoiding her gaze, he lowered his chin to his chest and studied the movement of the ice cubes swirling around in his glass. “I said reprehensible things to her. Every one of them true, but still—” He raised the drink and knocked it back in a single swallow. “I didn’t tell them.”

“The cops? Why?”

His troubled eyes finally met hers. “There’s no sense in confusing the issue,” he stated. “I don’t want Abrams and Policzki wasting their time focusing on me. They need to find her.”

This wasn’t adding up. “Why would they focus on you?”

“Are you kidding? The husband’s always the first person they look at. And I don’t have an alibi for the time in question. If only I’d known she was going to disappear—” He choked back a laugh. “I could have managed to manufacture one.”

“Oh, Sam.”

Darkly, he said, “Good thing Mom never lived to see this day.”

Their mother had died far too young. Johnny Winslow had seen to that, and Mia still hated him for it. But Mom’s death had nothing to do with this situation. Bringing it up was Sam’s way of redirecting Mia’s attention.

“Now you’re feeling sorry for yourself,” she said.

“Damn right, I’m feeling sorry for myself! Yesterday, my life was rolling along the way it always does. Stale and boring and comfortably predictable. Now my wife is missing, she might have been involved in a homicide, and I can’t even tell the cops the truth for fear of tying a noose around my neck.”

“You don’t think her disappearance has anything to do with your fight?”

“I don’t know what the hell to think.”

“What was the fight about?”

He lifted clear blue eyes to hers. “Please. Allow me a little dignity. Let’s just say it wasn’t pretty.”

“When was any fight ever pretty? But why keep it from the cops, if you don’t have anything to hide?” She gave her brother a long, considering look. “You don’t have anything to hide, do you?”

“For God’s sake, Mia. Don’t you know me better than that?”

She’d thought she did. But something wasn’t adding up here. Were there problems in the relationship? Issues she wasn’t aware of? She’d always believed that Kaye and Sam’s marriage was solid. Neither of them had given her any reason to believe anything else.

But now, he’d planted a seed of doubt. She wanted to prod, wanted to shake him if that’s what it took to get the truth out of him. But she knew her brother too well to push. If he’d thought it was any of her business, he would have told her. It would be pointless to pry. Instead, she asked, “Have you told Gracie yet?”

Sam shook his head. “She’s upstairs. I suppose I have to tell her something, don’t I?”

“Do you want me to do it?”

The ambivalence in his eyes told her he wanted to say yes. But to his credit, he shook his head again. “She’s my daughter. It’s my job. But thanks for offering.”

“What are you going to tell her?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to say. Or, for that matter, what to do.” He rose from the chair, walked to the bar and poured himself a refill. This time, he didn’t bother with ice. “I have a job I need to get to tomorrow morning. Classes to teach. Exams to grade. The semester won’t grind to a halt because my wife has disappeared.”

For the first time, the enormity of the situation landed squarely on top of her. Mia set down her untouched glass. “I think you should tell the police about the fight,” she said. “Better they should hear it from you than from some loudmouthed neighbor.”

“How the hell do you propose I do that? Call Abrams up and tell her I forgot one tiny detail? That’ll go over big.”

“Abrams won’t be happy no matter how she hears it. But if she has to find out from someone else, it’ll make you look as if you’re trying to hide something. And they’ll waste precious time trying to prove that you had something to do with Kaye’s disappearance. Time they could spend on finding out what really happened. We don’t know who this dead man is. Or where Kaye is. If somebody’s taken her…” Mia paused, her own words sounding implausible “…there might not be much time.”

Gracie Lee Winslow was fat.

Kaye kept telling her it was all in her head, but Gracie knew the truth. She saw it every time she looked in the mirror. She was chunky. Hideous. In response to this catastrophe, Gracie had tried every diet under creation: Atkins, South Beach, low-fat, low-carb, grapefruit, watermelon, vegetarian and plain old starvation. She’d even tried that crazy Bible diet, the one where you only ate foods that were mentioned in the Bible. She’d joined an online chapter of Weight Watchers, had bought a totally gay workout video and exercised until she grew so weak she nearly passed out. She’d even given laxatives a try. But nothing she’d attempted had managed to change the reflection gazing back at her from the mirror. All she could see were her chipmunk cheeks, her pudgy belly that curved out instead of in, and the thunder thighs that rubbed together when she walked. Gracie hated her oversize nose, hated her frizzy hair, hated her snooty private school with its cliques of skinny girls with their perfect hair and their perfect faces and their perfect bodies and their perfect lives. She hated that her mom was dead, hated that her dad barely noticed she was alive. Hated everything about her wretched life.

Most of all, she hated her stepmother.

If Kaye had been a nicer person, Gracie might have been willing to tolerate her. But there was something about the woman that set her teeth on edge. Not that she didn’t understand why her dad had married Kaye. Like those perfect girls at school, her stepmother was drop-dead gorgeous. The woman exuded sex like a cloud of perfume. Pheromones. What man could resist? Even though it was beyond gross to imagine her dad having sex with Kaye, Gracie understood that he was a man, and men were all alike. They all wanted the same thing, and any woman who looked like Kaye Winslow would always have men groveling at her feet.

It made Gracie want to hurl.

For the last two years and seven months, her stepmother had been destroying her life. Like Casper the Friendly Ghost, Kaye tiptoed around the house, silently following Gracie from room to room, spying on her. Watching. Listening. Judging. Kaye had snooped in her bedroom while she was at school; she’d pawed through Gracie’s backpack, looking for God only knew what. She’d even gone through the call list on Gracie’s cell phone to find out who she’d been talking to. The bitch undoubtedly would have read all her e-mails, too, if Gracie hadn’t password protected her computer.

It was infuriating. At fifteen, she was entitled to her privacy. But Kaye was determined to know every move her stepdaughter made. Determined to turn over every rock and uncover every last one of Gracie’s secrets.

But if Kaye thought she held the upper hand, she had another thing coming, because Gracie wasn’t the only one with secrets. Her darling stepmother had more than her share, and the secrets Kaye held would blow her marriage right out of the water if Dad ever found out about them. Thanks to the floor register in her bedroom, Gracie had a front-row seat to everything that went on downstairs. All she had to do was roll back the Oriental carpet and lie on the floor, and she could see and hear everything through that register. Kaye was so damn stupid she didn’t even notice. Which meant that Gracie had accumulated a lot of dirt on her stepmother. A lot of dirt.

None of which meant diddly-squat compared to what she’d just heard. This was some serious shit.

When the cops had first come to the door, she’d freaked, afraid they were here about her. Afraid they knew what she’d done. But that hadn’t been it at all. Something had happened today, something bad. Kaye was missing, and a man was dead. There was talk of a gun. Murder. And Gracie had the sick feeling that she might have been the one to set all this in motion.

He was only supposed to follow Kaye. Find out where she went, who she saw, what she did when she was away from the house. Gracie’s directions to him had been very clear: Be discreet. Whatever you do, don’t let her know you’re following her.

Something had gone horribly wrong. Dad was downstairs right now, pacing the floor and drinking Glenlivet straight from the bottle. That wasn’t a good sign; Dad wasn’t much of a drinker, and that stuff tasted like crap. She knew how awful it was because she’d been taking the occasional nip since she was thirteen, since the day Dad first brought Kaye to the house and he’d looked at the woman that way. Like she was some piece of meat on a stick. That was the night Gracie’s life had started its downhill slide. It was also the first time she’d ever gotten shit-faced drunk. She’d woken up the next day with the mother of all hangovers, but at least she’d remembered to refill the bottle with water so nobody would notice how low the level of the liquid inside had dropped.

She flipped the carpet back over the floor register, went to her desk and logged on to her laptop. Please let him be online, she thought as she signed into AIM. Please, please, PLEASE let him be online. She typed in his screen name, then checked his availability.

AIM told her: Magnum357 is not currently signed on.

Gracie let out a hard breath as dread bottled up inside her chest. She swallowed a couple of times, just to make sure her throat still worked. She didn’t know any other way to reach him. They’d only started hanging out together a couple of months ago. She didn’t know where he lived, didn’t have his cell phone number. All she knew was his screen name—Magnum357—and his real name—Carlos—which, for all she knew, might not even be the real deal.

This was bad. This was really bad. If Dad found out she’d been seeing Carlos, who was definitely on the wrong side of twenty, not to mention dangerous, she’d be grounded for the next thirty years. And if the cops thought she knew something about Kaye’s disappearance—not that she did, but if they found out what she’d done it would make her look pretty damn guilty—she could go to jail. For a really long time.

This was a lose-lose situation, and guess who the loser would turn out to be? Sooner or later the truth would come out about what she’d asked Carlos to do. When it did, the shit would hit the fan.

And at that point, no matter how you looked at it, she was toast.

Four

“You got in late last night.”

Doug Policzki stood in a square of morning sunlight, his gaze focused intently on the shiny stainless toaster as he awaited the arrival of two perfectly browned squares of whole wheat bread. “New case,” he said. The toaster popped. He pulled out his toast, tossed his necktie over his shoulder to keep it clean, and picked up the butter knife.

“When you gonna get a chance to mow the lawn? It’s starting to look like Wild Kingdom.”

Policzki opened the dishwasher and dropped the butter knife into the basket. “I don’t know,” he said. “This is a complicated case. It’ll probably suck up a lot of my time.”

“They’re all complicated.”

He felt a twinge of guilt. His mother was right. From earliest childhood, he’d been made to understand that his primary obligation was to the people who’d raised and nurtured him and tried to mold him into a civilized and decent human being. And he’d been a dutiful son; after his dad died, he’d moved back home to take care of his mother. But over the last year or two, he’d been increasingly remiss in those duties. The truth was that homicide took up most of his waking hours. And it was hardly fair to his mother that he always seemed to place her lower on his list of priorities than the dead bodies of strangers.

“Maybe Bernie could do it,” he suggested. “Or one of the boys.” His oldest sister, Debbie, and her husband, Bernie, lived three houses down and had a new lawnmower and two strapping teenage sons, neither of whom ever lifted a finger to help out their grandmother. Under the circumstances, one of them should jump into the breach before the lawn reached shoulder height.

Sounding exasperated, Linda Policzki said, “Doesn’t it ever bother you?”

Policzki shot her a quizzical glance before he sliced the toast in half with a quick incision from corner to corner. “You mean Wild Kingdom?”

“Oh, for the love of all that’s holy. I’m not talking about the lawn!” His mother’s strong and capable hands momentarily stopped kneading the meat loaf she was preparing for dinner, and she gave him the evil eye. Which wasn’t good news. Strong men had been known to weep when Linda Policzki turned the evil eye on them. “I’m talking,” she said, “about the fact that all the people you meet are dead.”

“Oh.” He relaxed a little and leaned against the counter. “I meet live people all the time.” He punctuated his sentence with a bite of toast.

His mother snorted. “Right,” she said. “Cops and murderers.”

“And lawyers, and judges, and—” he took another bite of toast, briefly considered the lovely and sophisticated Mia DeLucca, who’d looked at him last night as if he were the lowest form of pond scum “—other people.”

“All that talk of autopsies must make for scintillating dinner conversation.”

“They’re my colleagues, Ma. These are professional relationships. We don’t do dinner.”

Linda went back to kneading, pouring all her energies into a meal he likely wouldn’t be here to eat. Guilt gnawed at him. That was probably why she did it. She wanted him to feel guilty. It was what kept her going. His mother needed something to complain about, and she’d been blessed with a son who always managed to excel at filling that need.

It was nice to know that he excelled at something, but he wished fervently that she’d find somebody else to focus on. Anybody else. He had three sisters. Why couldn’t she meddle in their lives for a change? All of them were married and, between them, they’d given her seven grandchildren. Managing the lives of seven kids should be more than enough to keep her busy. Especially Jake and Jesse, who could definitely use a little more management. Deb and Bernie were both lawyers, which meant that the boys had been raised by a series of housekeepers. Which was pretty much the equivalent of being raised by a pack of wolves. There’d been little structure and less discipline. Jake and Jesse could undoubtedly benefit from a little of Gram’s influence.

But no dice. Linda Policzki had apparently decided her mission in life was to focus all her attention, all her energy, on her youngest child and only son.

A few months ago, he’d tried to convince his mother to take a cruise. Fantasies of a shipboard romance had played in his head like an old-fashioned movie reel: Linda meeting up with some lonely widower and being swept off her feet. Then traipsing around the world on a once-in-a-lifetime honeymoon. He could picture his mother backpacking through the rugged terrain of the Himalayas or riding a camel across the desert. The woman was as solid and invincible as concrete.

He’d brought home a stack of brochures. He’d even gone so far as to offer to pay for her ticket. But she’d laughed at him. He needed her here, she’d said, and that had been that.

Policzki had a suspicion that somebody had gotten a raw deal. He’d moved back home to take care of his widowed mother, but it seemed that more and more, it was his mother who was taking care of him. Whether he wanted her to or not. He wasn’t sure which of them had gotten the short end of that stick. But one of them surely had. And he’d begun to wonder if, when his sisters had ganged up on him and practically begged him to move back home, that had been their intent all along.

Without looking up from the meat loaf she was spooning into a baking pan, his mother said, “I need a favor.”

Policzki froze, his morning cup of coffee halfway to his mouth. This could mean only one thing. He could feel it coming, could feel the change in the air, like the stillness before a storm. An electrical charge that hadn’t been there a moment ago. No, he screamed silently. Please. Don’t say the words. Don’t do this to me.

But it was too late. “Brenda Petrucci’s niece is visiting,” she said. “Melissa. She’s never been to Boston before. Brenda says she’s a nice girl, maybe a little backward socially, considering that she was raised on a farm in Iowa. She just graduated from veterinary school, and since Brenda doesn’t know anybody else who’s Melissa’s age, I told her you’d be happy to show her the town.”

He closed his eyes. Sighed. “Ma,” he said.

“What?” She carried her mixing bowl to the sink and filled it with hot water. “You’re too good now to do a favor for my oldest and dearest friend?”

“You know it’s not that.”

“Then what is it?”

“You have to stop playing matchmaker. I’m fully capable of finding my own women.”

“I’m not playing matchmaker. I’m just trying to help out a friend. I asked your sister to invite her over for dinner. Maybe that’s matchmaking, too?”

“Stop trying to confuse the issue. I can see right through you. I’m thirty years old. You have to stop treating me like I’m twelve.”

Linda washed her hands at the sink. Drying them on a dish towel, she said, “If you don’t want to do it, fine. Brenda will be disappointed, but she’ll understand.”

“I’m in the middle of a messy case. I have an unidentified corpse and a missing woman who’s probably either the perpetrator or the victim of a homicide. Even if I did manage to find a few free hours, what would I talk to this girl about? I don’t know a thing about veterinary medicine, and I highly doubt that she’s familiar with police procedure.”

“You’re right. I know you’re right. I’ll just tell Brenda you can’t do it.”

He closed his eyes, knowing he was defeated. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it.”

“Thank you.” She tossed down the dish towel and took his face between her hands, and Policzki felt the noose tighten around his neck. “I’m not asking you to marry the girl. Just spend a little time with her. Get to know her. Show her a good time.”

He didn’t dare to ask just how far he was expected to go to ensure that Brenda Petrucci’s niece, the Iowa farm girl who’d just graduated from veterinary school, had a good time during her first visit to Boston. It was probably better if he didn’t ask. He might not like the answer.

But he’d do what his mother asked. It wouldn’t hurt to escort Brenda’s corn-fed niece to a play or two, maybe to the Museum of Fine Arts, or even on a harbor cruise. It would make his mother happy, and it would assuage his guilt about being derelict in his familial duties.

Policzki picked up his travel mug and kissed his mother on her smooth, scented cheek. “Tell Brenda that unless somebody else dies an untimely and violent death, I’ll be happy to show her niece the town. And I’ll call one of the boys about mowing the lawn. Oh, and don’t hold dinner for me tonight. I might not make it home.”

Her voice followed him out the door. “Am I supposed to be surprised by that?”

Sam Winslow unlocked the door to his office and flipped the light switch. The overhead fluorescents sputtered to life, casting harsh blue light over a cinder block room just big enough for his desk, a file cabinet, a narrow bookcase and a single straight-backed visitor’s chair painted a hideous mauve. Sam set a steaming cup of McDonald’s coffee on his desk, dropped the exam booklets he’d taken from his mailbox, and pulled the door closed behind him. He prayed that he’d managed the ten-second sprint from the department office to his cubicle without being seen. The story of the unidentified homicide victim and the missing Realtor had been front-page news this morning, and he’d fielded a half-dozen phone calls before breakfast. Reporters looking for an exclusive. Friends who’d heard the news and wanted to offer their support. The last thing he wanted was to socialize, and if he didn’t hide behind closed doors, Nikki Voisine, the newly hired French instructor, was bound to stop by with her own cup of coffee to get the rest of the story right from the horse’s mouth.

He hadn’t slept worth a damn. Who could, under the circumstances? He kept picturing Kaye’s face the last time he’d seen her, the accusation in her eyes. The disbelief. The fear. And the guilt he’d felt so deep in his stomach that it had been an actual physical ache.

Ever since the cops had shown up at his door, he’d been a wreck. Just how much did Abrams and Policzki know? Who had they talked to? Even his sister didn’t know the truth, and he wasn’t about to tell her. He couldn’t cope with the disappointment on her face when she found out that her brother had feet of clay. Unless he could find a way of bringing the investigation to a halt, it was only a matter of time before Abrams and Policzki discovered the truth about him. When they did, his life, the life he’d worked so hard to build, would implode with the force of a ton of TNT.

Sam picked up his coffee with hands that trembled like his father’s had the morning after a drinking binge. He raised the cup to his mouth and took a slug of coffee. He had to stop this. Had to stop the shaking, had to stop the thinking, had to stop the endless going around in circles, the perpetual game of what-if and if-only. If he didn’t, he’d make himself crazy. Normal, he told himself. You have to keep up the pretense of normal.

Okay, so he could do normal. He would do normal. Sitting down behind the desk, Sam pulled out his red pen, tuned the stereo to a classical station and began grading exams.

Not his favorite job, but a necessary one. His students came from all walks of life and from a mix of age groups, but the vast majority of them shared one thing in common: they were monumentally unprepared for college. Most of their papers were riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. At some point before they entered his classroom, every one of his students had managed to graduate from high school. Yet invariably, in every class he taught, when he assigned the first three-page research paper, he had to waste valuable class time teaching them how to write one.

But this morning, he just couldn’t concentrate. Couldn’t differentiate between good grammar and bad, couldn’t seem to remember the difference between Doric, Ionic and Corinthian columns. He checked his watch for the third time in five minutes, set down his pen and rubbed his bleary eyes. Acting as-if wasn’t working. He could pretend until the cows came home, but normal didn’t exist anymore. Not in his life.

And he had nobody to blame but himself.

He pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk where, tucked away beneath six years of grade books, he’d hidden a framed photo of Rachel. Kaye wouldn’t have liked it if she’d known he kept his first wife’s photo in his desk. She would have liked it even less if she’d known he took that photo out regularly and had long, rambling conversations with his dead wife.

It still hurt to look at her. After eight years, it should have stopped hurting. But every time he gazed at her face, his chest ached with a pain no medicine could take away.

“I’ve really botched things up this time, haven’t I?” he told her. “Christ, Rach, I wish you were here to impart a little of your worldly wisdom. I know just what you’d say. ‘Snap out of it, Winslow. Life’s too short to waste it worrying.’ That’s what you used to tell me. I guess you were right about the short part. At least for you it was short.

“I’m scared,” he murmured. “I’m not sure what to do, Rach. Maybe I should be wearing a sign that warns women away from me—Don’t Marry Sam; You’ll Never Survive the Marriage.”

Rachel didn’t answer. She never did. No matter what he told her, she just smiled at him in that loving, nonjudgmental way.

“Everything’s falling apart,” he said. “My marriage, my life. Payback, I guess, for past sins. I guess you’d know about that, wouldn’t you?”

Rachel smiled silently back at him. Sam swiveled in his chair, stared out the window at a passing cloud. “I’ve been a terrible husband. I haven’t even made an effort. What does that say about me? A man who lets his marriage disintegrate without even bothering to try to repair it doesn’t have much of himself invested in that marriage, does he?”

Somebody knocked on his door, and Sam winced. Maybe he should just pretend he wasn’t here. But pretending had gotten him nowhere so far, and he couldn’t hide forever. It was better to brazen it out than to look more guilty than he already did. So he tucked Rachel’s photo back into the drawer, pushed away from the desk and said, “Come in.”

The door opened and Vince Tedeschi stuck his head in. “Hey, buddy,” he said, his face etched with concern. “Want some company?”

Not particularly, he thought, but this was Vince, his closest friend. Sam couldn’t turn him away. “Come on in,” he said wearily.

Vince closed the door behind him, pulled the visitor’s chair from its corner, spun it around and straddled it. “I just heard about Kaye.” He folded his arms across the chair back. “This is unimaginable. Have you had any news?”

“No.”

“Man, that’s hard. How’s Gracie taking it?”

“Gracie’s the same as always. Quiet as the tomb. She and Kaye don’t get along. For all I know, she could be jumping for joy about this. But there’s no way to tell when she keeps it inside. Half the time I think she hates me, too.”

“She doesn’t hate you. She’s a teenage girl. At that age, nothing you do or say is going to be the right thing. Believe me, I speak from experience. Kari and Katie barely acknowledge me. Unless they want something, and then the Bank of Dad is their favorite place for one-stop shopping.”

They fell silent, both of them contemplating the mystery that was teenage womanhood. “We can’t even carry on a conversation,” Sam said. “We haven’t been able to for years. It’s as though I’m speaking English and she’s speaking Swahili.”

“She’ll grow out of it. Until she does, good luck trying to have any kind of normal relationship with her.” Vince got up from the chair and stood there awkwardly. “Do the police have any theories about where Kaye might be?”

“If they do, they haven’t bothered to share them with me.”

Vince shuffled his feet a little. “Listen,” he said, “if you need a babysitter, or if Gracie gets lonely, she’s welcome at our house anytime. Day or night.”

Vince and his third wife had a young daughter. Every summer, the two families spent a couple of weeks together in a rented beach house on the Cape. Gracie thought of five-year-old Deidre as a younger sister, and always loved spending time with her. “Thanks,” Sam said. “I appreciate the offer.”

With false heartiness, Vince said, “Well, I’m off to slay the dragons of ignorance.” He tucked the chair back into its corner and paused, hand on the doorknob. “Hang in there,” he said. “If you need anything, Ellen and I are just a phone call away.”

When he was gone, Sam buried his face in his hands and exhaled a hard breath. How had his life deteriorated to this point? It just kept getting worse and worse.

There was a knock at the open doorway. He looked up. The man who stood there, dressed in jeans, a navy windbreaker and a Red Sox cap, was unfamiliar. “Dr. Sam Winslow?” he said.

“Yes?”

“This is for you.” He handed Sam an envelope. “Have a nice day.”

Sam looked stupidly at the envelope, picked up his letter opener from the desk and slit it open. He pulled out a thick sheaf of papers and unfolded what appeared to be some kind of official-looking documents. It took his sleep-deprived mind a couple of seconds before the words in bold print at the top of the page took on form and meaning.

Petition for Divorce.

Five

The squad room was noisier than a junior high cafeteria at noon, abuzz with conversation, ringing phones and the deathly slow ka-thunk ka-thunk of the photocopier that was the bane of Lorna’s existence. At the desk across from hers, Policzki was on the phone. “Thanks, guy,” he said. “I really appreciate it, and so does Gram. Give me a call this weekend, and we’ll catch that movie. Maybe pick up some pizza afterward.”

Policzki hung up the phone, caught her watching him. “My nephew,” he explained. “My mother’s on my case about mowing the lawn. I bribed him.”

“That always seems to work at my house,” she said. “Just be careful you don’t go overboard. By the time you’re done paying for two movie tickets, popcorn and soda for two, and a teenage-boy-size pizza afterward, you could’ve paid to have it done by a professional.”

“True, but it’s worth more brownie points if I keep it in the family.”

“Christ, Policzki, you need a life. Matter of fact, what you really need is your own place. How long have you been living with your mother?”

“Six years,” he said. “Six long and—did I mention long?—years.”

“Lord love a duck. If I had to spend six years living with my mother—or worse, Ed’s mother—I’d tie a rope over the nearest rafter and end it all.”

“She’s not that bad. She means well.”

“Of course she means well. She’s your mother. It’s part of the job description. So is making your kid’s life hell if he’s past twenty-five and still living at home.”

“It wasn’t my idea to move back home.”

“Which is why you need to move out. Listen to me, kid. I know what I’m talking about. You’ve paid your dues and then some. If you don’t cut the apron strings pretty soon, you’re going to wake up some morning and realize you’re forty and still living at home with Mom. Get a clue, Policzki. You must have enough money saved up by now for a down payment. Buy yourself a condo. Something small, something you can turn over in a few years if you get married and need more space.”

“And leave my mother alone? I’d never be able to live with myself. The guilt would do me in.”

“Oh, but you see, Policzki, there’s where you’re wrong. That’s one more thing about mothers. We’re really good at playing the guilt card. But you know what? You’re not helping her by living there.”

“How do you figure that?”

“You’re creating an unhealthy dependence. She needs to reclaim her independence. She’s a strong woman. You step back a little and watch what happens. I bet you’ll see her bloom.”

“You’ve been watching Oprah again, haven’t you?”

“I’m serious, Policzki. The two of you need some space between you or you’ll never figure out that you’re two separate people. And how convenient for you—you just happen to know a genuine, card-carrying Realtor.”

“Mia DeLucca? Be serious. She hates my guts.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure. To know you is to love you.”

“Not if I’m eyeing your brother as a possible murder suspect.”

Lorna thought about it, shrugged. “I suppose that would tend to put a damper on my enthusiasm,” she said.

“You think?” He leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms over his head, then lowered them. “So, tell me. Did you have any luck with the M.E.’s office?”

“Nothing yet,” she said, “although not due to a lack of badgering on my part. How about you?”

“Salvatore’s starting work on the BlackBerry. He’ll fax us over a list of all Winslow’s calls, all her appointments. We should have it by noon. Delvecchio just e-mailed me a couple photos of the victim. Maybe they’ll help us with the ID.”

“Shit. Can’t Salvatore put a rush on it? I have a feeling we need to move fast on this one.”

“That is his version of a rush. Just because you eat Wheaties every morning, Abrams, doesn’t mean the whole world does. Some of us have to sleep occasionally.”

Dryly, she said, “I’ll try to remember that.”

“I just shot the photos of the vic to the laser printer. And while you were on the phone with the M.E.’s office, I went to the Winslow & DeLucca Web page and pulled Kaye Winslow’s photo. I’m having copies distributed even as we speak. I also have Jiminez working his way through the list of Winslow’s friends that Mia DeLucca dropped off this morning. If he runs across anything worth more than a phone call, he’ll let me know and I’ll follow up with a visit in person.”

Lorna rested her chin on her hand. “You know,” she said, “something about this really bothers me.”

Policzki leaned back in his chair and studied her with interest. “Besides the obvious?”

“Besides the obvious. Kaye Winslow fled the scene. What does common sense tell you?”

“That she’s more than likely the perpetrator. But since when is homicide supposed to make sense? And we don’t know for sure that she fled the scene. She may have been coerced.”

“There’s something about Sam Winslow. I don’t like the guy. He’s hiding something.”

“Which might or might not be germane to the case.”

“You did see the tears, right? Tell me I didn’t imagine them.”

“I saw the tears.”

“Crocodile tears. That guy is as substantial as toilet tissue, not to mention insincere.”

“Polite and cooperative on the surface,” Policzki said, “but, yes, I could see a boatload of hostility in those eyes.”

“Oh, yeah. The body language was a dead giveaway that something’s rotten in Denmark.”

“He certainly didn’t seem too distraught for a guy whose wife is missing.”

“Missing and possibly dead. Almost as bad as missing and possibly responsible for somebody else being dead. He didn’t even bother to worry about Kaye until he realized he’d better make it look good if he wanted us to believe him. That’s when the crocodile tears came into play.” She mentally chewed on it awhile longer. “What’s your take on the sister?”

“DeLucca? She struck me as pretty straightforward. A little protective of her brother.”

“Interesting,” Lorna said, “how she danced her way around saying that she and Kaye Winslow were friends.”

“I caught that. What do you suppose that’s about?”

“Beats me. She seemed genuinely concerned about Winslow’s welfare, and she admitted they have a good working relationship. But she wasn’t about to commit to anything as intimate as friendship.”

Policzki considered for a moment. “You think there’s something there?”

“Something. Might not have anything to do with what’s gone down, but it’s there. Her body language didn’t scream guilt, but there was something I couldn’t put my finger on. She’s maybe not as fond of her sister-in-law as she’d like us to think.”

“If it was a crime to dislike your in-laws, half the population of the United States would be behind bars.”

“Good point. Understand, I’m not ready to write her off completely. But I like the husband better for this.”

“So you think he did her?”

“I dunno.” Lorna picked up a pen from her desk and began doodling on the desk blotter. “Scott Peterson was polite and cooperative with the authorities, too. At least he was at first. Handsome son of a bitch, too. Just like Winslow. Didn’t seem particularly distraught, either, if memory serves me.”

Policzki nodded slowly. “Mark Hacking reported his wife missing and then went out, cool as a cucumber, and bought a new mattress.”

“Lot of wives going missing these days.”

“Lot of guys who seem tired of being married.”

“Guy reminds me of Chuck Stuart. Slick, sincere, good-looking. With a dark side lurking underneath the surface.”

“I know I’ll hate myself later for asking this, but who’s Chuck Stuart?”

Lorna grinned. “I forget you’re just a baby. You were probably in diapers when the Stuart murder came down.”

“Hey, watch it. I’m not that young. The name’s vaguely familiar. I just can’t place it.”

Lorna got up, walked to the coffeepot and poured herself a cup of sludge. Perching on the corner of her desk, next to the stack of empty paper cups that were starting to resemble antique collectibles, she crossed one leg over the other and said, “Guy’s driving back from Lamaze class with his pregnant wife. They’re somewhere in Mission Hill when he calls 911, says they were robbed and shot by a black man. He’s got bullet wounds in the leg, the abdomen. Wife was shot in the head. She never stood a chance. Baby was born by C-section, but he never really had a chance, either. The case started one hell of an uproar. Black perpetrator, middle-class white victims just minding their own business. Everybody was, ‘Poor Chuck this,’ and ‘Poor Chuck that.’ Except that poor Chuck’s story started unraveling after his kid brother admitted he’d ditched a gun for big brother that night. Once the story fell apart, so did Chuck. A couple months after his wife and kid died, he took a header off the Tobin Bridge. And if you think racial tension was bad before he jumped, imagine how much hotter things got when the truth came out that there was no black man, that Chuck’s gunshot wounds were self-inflicted.”

“Sounds to me like the plot to a bad Lifetime movie.”

Lorna took a sip of coffee. “Now that you mention it,” she said, “I believe they turned it into one.”

Policzki tapped his PaperMate against the edge of his desktop. “So you think Winslow’s tired of being married?”

“I couldn’t say for sure, but you know what they say. If it walks like a rat and smells like a rat, has a long, skinny tail and likes cheese—”

“Chances are pretty good,” Policzki said, “that it’s a rat.”

“Exactly. I think we should do us a little checking up on the good professor. Open a few closet doors, see if we rattle any skeletons.”

The show must go on.

The old showbiz cliché ran through Mia’s head all Wednesday morning. No matter how hard she might wish it, the real estate industry wasn’t about to grind to a screeching halt because there’d been a homicide and her partner was missing. Mia still had to check the Multiple Listing Service for new listings, still had to answer a raft of e-mails and wade through a dozen voice mail messages. She had to finish the comparative market analysis she’d promised a new client who was in a rush to put his condo on the market because he’d just been transferred to San Francisco and had to move in three weeks. She had to make follow-up calls to touch base with contacts she’d met at yesterday’s seminar who might prove useful to her in the future. A closing to attend at eleven-thirty, which meant she probably wouldn’t get a copy of the settlement statement until ten forty-five, at which time she would have to call the client to make sure everybody was on the same page before they all converged on the title company. She had to follow up with a nervous buyer who needed a gentle nudge to commit to bidding on the house she’d looked at three times but couldn’t quite make up her mind about.

In her spare time, Mia had to deal with the fallout resulting from Kaye’s absence. The story had hit the papers this morning, and the phone was ringing off the hook. The ever-competent Bev was a godsend, juggling phone calls and walk-ins, routine paperwork and the random crisis with a finesse so smooth it seemed choreographed. She gleefully hung up on reporters, then, in an abrupt Jekyll-and-Hyde, offered warm reassurance to clients who phoned to inquire about Kaye’s welfare.

Yolanda Lincoln, the part-time agent Mia and Kaye had brought in six months ago, did her best to help pick up the slack. But Yolanda and Mia both had their own busy schedules to keep, so plugging the holes Kaye left was a challenge. She’d been scheduled for two closings today. Mia sent Yolanda to the nine o’clock in her place, but Yolanda was already tied up midday, and Kaye’s own one o’clock was too close to Mia’s eleven-fifteen to guarantee that they wouldn’t overlap. So Mia conveyed her regrets to the title company via Bev, then called the buyer and spent twenty minutes calming his fears and convincing him that everything was in place, just as it should be, and that he’d make it through the closing just fine without his Realtor by his side.

The closings were the only piece of Kaye’s schedule that Mia was privy to. Because they worked in a small office with only three agents, she knew many of Kaye’s clients, just as Kaye knew quite a few of hers. But without access to the woman’s electronic date book, she had no way of knowing where Kaye was expected to be or when, not until a disgruntled client phoned to complain, or a stranger walked through the door to announce that he had an appointment with her.

Mia forwarded Kaye’s calls to her own phone and left a message on her partner’s voice mail saying that she was away from the office until further notice. This thing would probably blow over, or at least that was what she tried to tell herself. Kaye would come home, everything would be explained satisfactorily and her disappearance would turn out to be just a simple misunderstanding.

Kevin called from school around ten o’clock. “You didn’t give me an answer about Tampa,” he said.

With all the chaos surrounding Kaye’s disappearance, Mia had completely forgotten about Tampa. Or maybe it was just unconscious avoidance. She glanced at her watch and said sharply, “Why aren’t you in school?”

“Relax, Mom, I have a free period. I’m sitting in the cafeteria right now, drinking an orange juice. You should be proud of me. It’s not even carbonated.”

It was a not-so-subtle dig at her determination to save her son from the self-imposed junk food diet he was equally determined to live on. They’d had a number of go-rounds on the topic. She’d lectured him on good nutrition and he’d pointed out that he was a teenager and that junk food went with the territory. They’d finally reached a compromise. He agreed to eat the healthy, nutritious meals she prepared for him at home, and she agreed not to ask what he was eating when he walked out the door. What else could she do? Soon he would be eighteen, and her flimsy parental control, such as it was, would be ended for good. She might as well start getting used to it. Once he went off to college, she’d be an empty nester, rattling around that big old house all by herself. She might as well start getting used to that, too.

“Well?” he said. “Can I go or not? They need an answer today.”

She’d loved him since the first moment she’d laid eyes on him. It seemed only yesterday. Hard to believe that seventeen years had passed, harder to believe that it was time she started loosening the apron strings. She knew she was an overprotective mother, but she couldn’t seem to help it. “Fine,” she said. “You can go. But I’ll want to talk to Mrs. Olson before you leave. And you’ll have to promise to call me while you’re gone.”

“Mom, it’s only four days.”

“And you’re the only kid I have. Humor me.”

“Thanks, Mom. Listen, I gotta run, the bell just rang. If I’m late for English class, Miss Crandall will have a bird. See you tonight.”

And he was gone, the connection broken, leaving Mia holding a dead telephone receiver. She should be glad he was growing up, should be proud of the man he was turning into. And she was. It was just happening so soon. She wasn’t ready. Maybe she never would be.

She’d just hung up the phone when her brother burst into her office, looking like a wild man, his hair awry, his shirt wrinkled and blind fury in his eyes. He flung a sheaf of papers on her desk and demanded, “Did you know about this?”

“What’s going on?” she said. “Have they found Kaye?”

Her brother planted both fists on the edge of her desk and loomed over her, his face dark with fury. “You heard me, damn it! Did you or did you not know about this?”

She’d never seen Sam like this, not even when they were kids and he’d had one of his weekly go-rounds with their dad. Fury didn’t set well on her brother’s handsome features. His complexion was mottled with rage, his eyes bloodshot and wild. Like some kind of caged animal.

“I don’t know,” she said, reining in her own too-short fuse. “Maybe it would help if I knew what ‘this’ refers to.” She fumbled for her reading glasses, slid them onto her face and peered through them at the paperwork he’d so unceremoniously deposited amid the sales contracts and the flyers and the gazillion notes that littered her desk. “‘Petition for Divorce,’” she read. “‘Katherine Bradford Winslow, plaintiff.’” Mia raised startled eyes to his, then continued reading. “‘Samuel L. Winslow, defendant…’ Christ, Sam. I had no idea.”

He continued to sway over her desk, so close she could smell the coffee on his breath. And something else, something slightly medicinal. Had he been drinking? At ten-fifteen in the morning?

“No idea,” he said. “You’re her business partner. Her sister-in-law. You see her, you talk to her, every blessed day of your life. And you want me to believe she decided to file for divorce and didn’t bother to mention it to you?”

Mia’s anger caught up to her. “Believe what you want,” she snapped, removing the reading glasses and tossing them down on the desk. “But you might want to take a look in the mirror before you attack me. Because it seems she didn’t bother to share her plans with you, either.”

“Jesus Christ.” He wheeled away from the desk, raked his fingers through his hair as he paced to the window and back to Mia’s desk. Through the open doorway, she saw Bev watching, her hand on the phone and her face etched with concern.

Behind Sam’s back, Mia frowned and shook her head. Bev took the hint, discreetly moving to another corner of the office, where she pulled out a file drawer and focused intently on her filing.

“Shut the door,” Mia ordered him.

His mouth set in a grim line, Sam closed the door with a little more force than was called for. “This is a place of business,” she snapped. “You can’t just come storming in here, roaring like a lion and sending people running for cover. Around here, we act civilized.”

“How could she do this to me? After all the shit I’ve gone through with that woman, how could she do this now? I’m on the verge of getting tenure. The least little thing rocking the boat could end it all. I could strangle her.”

Mia just stared at this wild-eyed stranger who looked like her brother, walked like her brother, even sounded like her brother. Except that the words coming from his mouth made no sense. “Under the circumstances,” she said, “that’s a pretty unfortunate choice of words.”

“If I don’t get tenure, my career is over!”

“Your wife is missing,” Mia said. “Maybe dead. And all you can think about is your career? I don’t think I know you anymore, Sam. I don’t think I want to know you anymore.”

He deflated abruptly, like a balloon stuck with a hatpin. “Shit,” he said.

“Will you please sit down? Have you called Detective Abrams yet?”

He slumped onto the chrome-and-tweed chair opposite her desk. “I’ll get to it.”

“You’ll get to it,” Mia repeated. “While your wife is out there God knows where, maybe hurt or kidnapped or dead, you’ll eventually get around to telling the cops about evidence you’ve been withholding?”

“I’m not withholding evidence!”

“You lied, Sam. That’s withholding evidence.”

“I didn’t lie. I just didn’t tell Abrams everything. It shouldn’t matter anyway. My fight with Kaye is not relevant to any of this.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“Because! Because I just know!”

“Oh, so now you have a crystal ball? Tell me, oh great one, what are my odds of winning the lottery next week? Probably one hell of a lot better after you look into your crystal ball and give me the numbers ahead of time.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“Listen to me, shit-for-brains. I hate to tell you this, but relevant or not, that divorce petition is a matter of public record. It’ll take the cops about ninety seconds to unearth it. When they do, you can be sure they’ll come knocking at your door again. If you’re on their short list—which we don’t know for sure yet—right now all they have is suspicion. Once they get their hands on that—” she indicated the legal papers “—then they’ll have motive. In my experience, cops are quite fond of motive.”

“You know damn well I didn’t do anything to Kaye.”

“Well, the cops don’t know it, and they’re the ones that matter. It’s time to come clean with them, Sam, before this gets any worse than it already is.” She eyed him speculatively. “Unless there’s some reason you don’t want her to be found.”

“Jesus, Mia, I can’t believe you’d say that.”

“Why not? Your wife just filed divorce papers. Maybe she’s leaving you for another man. Maybe your ego can’t take it. Maybe she’s threatening to take you to the cleaners. Leave you with nothing but a toothbrush and a pup tent. Take away your daughter. Lie to the courts and tell them you’re an abusive husband, a lousy father. So maybe you decide there’s only one way to shut her up, and that’s to get rid of her—”

“Stop it!” he shouted. “Just stop it!”

“What do you expect, Sam? That’s exactly what the cops will be thinking once they find out about the divorce petition. You have to tell them before they stumble across it.”

“You don’t know, do you?” he said. “You really don’t know.”

There was more? Awash with dismay, Mia clasped her hands in front of her and stared at him, not sure she wanted to hear it. She hadn’t slept worth beans last night. She’d skipped breakfast, she was exhausted, and it wasn’t yet ten-thirty. She still had a lot of day to get through. “What?” she said wearily. “What is it I’m supposed to know now?”

“If the cops start digging, they’ll find ample motive. Kaye’s been cheating on me.”

“What?”

Her brother’s eyes softened. “You really didn’t know, did you?”

“Come on, Sam. You must be wrong.”

“She admitted it, Mia. I confronted her, and she admitted it to my face.”

“Oh, Sam,” Mia said. “I’m so sorry.”

He tucked his hands into his pockets, walked to the window and stared out at the back of the brick apartment building across the alley. “Yeah, well, it’s not the first time.”

“She’s done it before?”

He turned away from the window, his eyes as bleak as a January afternoon. “The first time—or at least the first time I know about—was last winter. I found out about it in March, but by the time I discovered it, the affair’d been going on for months. His name was Mickey Slattery. She met him at work. He was a client.”

Her brother paused, as if waiting for a response from Mia. What the hell did he expect her to say? “I don’t know him,” she said, resenting the defensiveness she heard in her own voice, “if that’s what you’re asking.” She had nothing to feel defensive about. It wasn’t her fault his wife hadn’t been able to keep her knickers on.

“We had one hell of a go-round over it. I yelled a lot and threw a few of her precious knickknacks. She cried and swore to me that she was sorry, promised she’d clean up her act and kick Slattery to the curb. Promised it wouldn’t happen again. Being the sucker that I am, I believed her.”

“But…?”

“A week ago, I found condoms in her purse. And before you ask, no, I wasn’t snooping. She’d borrowed my car that day because hers was in the shop. I needed to run to the store to pick up milk. She was busy doing paperwork in her office, and she told me the keys were in her purse. I went to get them. I wasn’t expecting to pull out a fistful of Trojans along with the keys.”

Mia didn’t know what to say. Because she didn’t, she said nothing. The Kaye Winslow she knew was not the kind of woman to allow herself to be derailed by stupid slipups, not the kind of woman to be blindsided by unfortunate, avoidable little accidents. She conducted her life with deliberation and forethought, leaving nothing to chance. She would never have forgotten those condoms were in her purse. Which led to an obvious conclusion, one Mia hated to even consider because it seemed so cruel: Kaye had wanted her husband to find the evidence of her infidelity.

This wasn’t a burden Mia’d expected to have dropped in her lap. She didn’t want to become entangled in her brother’s marital difficulties, didn’t want to find out that her sister-in-law wasn’t the woman she’d thought her to be. But Sam had been carrying this burden alone, and he needed to share it with somebody. It was only natural that he’d turn to her. Even though he was three years older, Mia had been taking care of him for most of their lives. She’d been the one who protected him from their father when he became drunk and violent. She’d been the one who stepped into the breach when Rachel died, leaving Sam alone with a seven-year-old daughter. And now, like it or not, she would be the one to see him through this.

“How much sleep did you get last night?” she said.

“An hour. Two at the most.”

“Go home, Sam. Get something to eat, take a sleeping pill if you have to, and get some rest. I’ll call you later. Okay?”

He stood in front of her, shoulders quivering, a pathetic wreck of a man. Nodding, he said, “Fine.” He scooped up the divorce papers and, without another word, strode from her office, leaving her sitting there with her mouth hanging open. The bell over the front door jangled when he opened it, sounding slightly less melodic and slightly more affronted when he slammed the door behind him.

“Damn it,” she said. “Damn it all to hell.” And for lack of any other solution to her frustration, she picked up a fat black marker from her desk and hurled it at the wall.

Six

Back Bay Community College was located in a butt-ugly post–World War II cinder block building that had probably started out life as a warehouse. Tucked away on a narrow side street just off Kenmore Square, its campus sat within spitting distance of Fenway and the bars and clubs that lined Lansdowne Street. Lorna hadn’t thought it was possible to find a building less aesthetically pleasing than Boston City Hall, but she might have been wrong about that.

They stood on the sidewalk for a moment, breathing in the school’s ambience. Policzki cleared his throat and said, “It has a solid, no-nonsense, academic look to it.”

She glanced over at him, but his eyes, hidden behind dark lenses, gave away nothing. “Looks like a junior high school,” she said. “Or a penitentiary.”

“Which, if memory serves me, is pretty much the same thing.”

They went inside. The interior wasn’t much of an improvement over the exterior. The lobby sported cracked green-and-white floor tiles. Somebody had made an attempt to brighten up the place by painting the walls a pale yellow. It was a dismal failure. Instead of sunny and cheerful, the walls looked sallow and jaundiced, like somebody in the advanced stages of liver disease. It wasn’t a look that BBCC wore well.

Lorna walked up to the reception desk and asked a corpulent woman in a fuchsia dress and a black telephone headset where she could find Sam Winslow. “Down the hall on the left, Arts and Sciences Department,” the woman said, and segued back into her telephone conversation without missing a beat. The two detectives followed her directions, passing a room full of vending machines, a couple of empty classrooms, then a bulletin board laden with notices: a reminder about the annual flu shot clinic; an announcement of a poetry reading taking place on Sunday afternoon at a nearby café; a photo of a 1999 Toyota Celica. Runs great, low mileage. $1500 or B.O. Call 555-3372.

The Arts and Sciences office was marginally more welcoming than the lobby had been. The secretary’s desk was sleek and modern. The overhead fluorescents had been left off in favor of the gentler, more muted glow of floor lamps, and the carpet, while an ugly dirt-resistant brown, appeared to be relatively new. A slender young woman with a magnificent head of red curls sat behind a flat-screen Gateway computer. She glanced up, gave them both the once-over. Lorna could see it in her eyes, the instant she recognized them as cops. It didn’t seem to faze her too much. Red’s gaze returned to Policzki. In spite of his aloof manner—or perhaps because of it—women always took a second look at Doug Policzki. Being a pretty boy was sometimes useful.

“Can I help you?” she said to him, pretending Lorna didn’t exist.

“Detective Policzki.” Doug held up his badge. “This is Detective Abrams, and we’re looking for Professor Winslow.”

“Sam? Is he in some kind of trouble?”

“No, ma’am,” Policzki said in that earnest, by-the-book manner that women seemed to find irresistible. “We just want to ask him a few questions. If you could point us in his direction, we’d greatly appreciate it.”

“I’d love to,” she said, “but I’m afraid you won’t find him. He came in earlier and worked in his office for a while, then he left. He isn’t scheduled to teach today, so I don’t have any idea where he went or when he’ll be back.”

Neither of them bothered to tell Red that they already knew they wouldn’t find the good professor on the premises. She might have turned really frosty if she’d known they’d seen him leave a half hour ago, then sat in a parking space halfway down the block and waited until they were pretty sure he wasn’t coming back.

“In that case,” Lorna said, “we’d like to speak to his supervisor.”

Red looked a little surprised by this rude reminder that there were three people in the room instead of two. Tearing her gaze away from Policzki, with his lantern jaw and his pure heart, she said, “That would be Lydia Forbes. Dean Lydia Forbes.”

“Is the dean in?”

“She’s in, but I’m not sure she’s available. I’ll have to check.”

The secretary left them alone, disappearing down a short corridor that led deeper into the suite of offices. Lorna took advantage of her absence to take a look around. There wasn’t much to see. A potted palm in a corner. A row of battered gray file cabinets. A wooden shelving unit that upon closer inspection turned out to be mail cubbies. She scanned the names beneath the boxes, pausing when she reached Sam Winslow’s. The professor’s mail slot was empty.

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