Jasmine Cresswell
Payback

For Alexander, always in my heart…

Contents

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

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Epilogue

One

Herndon, Virginia, October 3, 2007

Luke Savarini took a second bite of the lobster ravioli, just to be sure he hadn’t judged too hastily. He’d been right the first time, he decided, letting the flavors dissolve on his tongue. There was too much oregano, and the sauce splashed over everything was weighted down with excess cream.

Anna, his sister, watched his reaction and then gave a crooked smile. “Not up to scratch, huh? My veal is okay, but not spectacular. Want to taste?”

“I’ll take your word for it.” Luke put down his fork, pushing away his heaped plate. With all the food there was in his life, he avoided eating anything he didn’t completely enjoy. His waistline and his taste buds both thanked him.

“Why did you insist on bringing me here, Annie? You’re not usually a fan of second-rate Italian.”

“The restaurant is owned by Bruno Savarini. He’s a cousin of ours, sort of. His grandfather and our great-grandfather were brothers.”

Luke rolled his eyes. The most remote and fragile twigs of the family tree all made perfect sense to his sister, whereas he had his work cut out simply keeping track of the names and birthdays of his six nieces and nephews.

He mentally reviewed the vast clan of Savarini cousins. “Okay, I’m working hard, but I can’t place a Cousin Bruno.”

“He’s Great-Uncle Joe’s grandson. You must have run into each other at a wedding.”

Luke grinned. “Yeah, but that’s almost the same as saying I’ve never met him. Can you ever recall a Savarini wedding with less than two hundred relatives milling around and at least half of the men singing ‘O Sole Mio’ at the top of their lungs?”

Anna returned his grin, tacitly acknowledging the cheerful mob scenes that passed for family gatherings in the Savarini clan. “Bruno had his sixty-fifth birthday last month. He’s short and stocky, with brown eyes and an olive complexion—”

Luke laughed. “Well now, that narrows it right down. Short, stocky, brown eyes. I guess only ninety percent of Savarini men fit that description.”

Anna tried to look severe. “Just because you’re a six-foot, gray-eyed genetic freak, there’s no need to get snooty. Anyway, I brought you here because Bruno plans to retire as soon as he can find a buyer for his restaurant. He has crippling arthritis and he only comes into the restaurant occasionally nowadays. You’d be astonished at how much better the food tastes on the days when he’s here.”

“I wouldn’t be astonished,” Luke protested. “I’m a chef, remember? I know just how much difference it makes when you have somebody talented in charge of the kitchen.”

“The restaurant is in a fabulous location,” Anna continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “The decor is attractive and the kitchen is state-of-the-art. And Bruno has plenty of loyal customers. Look around you. The place is full. That’s pretty good on a Wednesday, especially since we’re eating late.”

Far from looking around the restaurant, Luke’s gaze fixed on his sister with suddenly narrowed focus. “Wait. I must be slow on the uptake tonight because I’ve only just realized why we’re here. You want me to buy this place, don’t you?”

Anna had the grace to blush. “Well, you’re a chef. You own restaurants. Bruno wants to retire and he’s our cousin. It seems a natural fit.”

Luke felt a surge of affectionate exasperation. It was a familiar sensation in Anna’s vicinity. She was a brilliant physicist, working for a government agency that she claimed was part of the Department of Education, although he’d believe crayfish grew on trees before he believed that. He loved her more than any of his four other siblings, which was saying a lot. But whereas she found quantum mechanics and string theory simple concepts, the economics of running a family business had always dangled far beyond her ability to grasp.

He took a sip of Chianti and then toasted his sister with the glass. “I appreciate your good intentions, Annie, but I can’t just randomly acquire restaurants all over the country. I live in Chicago, remember?”

“News flash. Have you noticed there must be thirty flights a day between Chicago and Washington, D.C.? A thousand miles isn’t so far.”

Luke laughed, genuinely amused. “From your perspective, maybe. That’s what comes of working all day with astronomers who consider Alpha Centauri to be practically banging on the back door because it’s only a billion miles away—”

“You’re missing several zeroes,” Anna said. “And it is banging on the back door as stars go.”

“Yeah, well, that’s my point, Annie. A billion or a gazillion, it’s all in a day’s work for you. However, when you’re running a restaurant, a thousand miles is a long way. You need to be on the spot so you can keep an iron grip on quality control, not to mention you have to be on hand to step in whenever there’s a crisis.”

His sister wasn’t ready to give up. “But you have three restaurants in the Chicago area already, and you can only be in one of them at a time. And they’re doing so well…”

Luke mentally crossed his fingers; he was superstitious where his restaurants were concerned. “You’re right, Luciano’s is succeeding beyond my wildest hopes. And part of the reason the restaurants are doing well is because they’re all in the Chicago area. Where I live.” And where he was already working a minimum of sixty hours a week.

She sighed. “I hoped that the lure of opening a restaurant in the D.C. area might be enough to tempt you to visit more often. I miss you, Luke, much as I hate to admit it, seeing as how when we were growing up you were a totally annoying snot.”

He raised his eyebrow. “Me? A snot? You must have me confused with one of your other brothers. Tom, maybe. He has major league snot potential.”

She shook her head. “Uh-uh. No confusion. I’m talking about you.”

“How quickly good deeds are forgotten.” Luke gave an exaggerated sigh. “What about the time I saved you from being discovered with the captain of the baseball team in Mom and Dad’s whirlpool tub? When you were both naked, no less. I figure that ought to have earned me at least a decade or two of gratitude.”

“My God, Robert O’Toole and the hot tub.” Anna’s expression was suddenly arrested. “I’d forgotten about that.”

“If Dad had found the two of you, trust me, it would be one of your more vivid teenage memories.”

She chuckled in wry acknowledgment. “Love is weird, isn’t it? For two whole months I was convinced my life would be over if Rob didn’t ask me to the senior prom. And I haven’t given him a single thought since the day I left for college.”

“He would be devastated to hear that,” Luke said dryly. “Rob definitely fancied himself.”

She gave a nostalgic grin and her gaze became wistful. “Damn, I miss you, Luke. Are you sure you don’t want to reconsider buying Bruno out?”

Luke quelled a moment of temptation. “I wish, Annie, but I’m already stretched way too thin, time-wise. I’m sorry.”

She gave a resigned shrug that didn’t quite conceal her disappointment. “Oh, well. It was worth a try.”

He leaned across the table and briefly rested his hand on his sister’s. The movement shifted his perspective and his gaze happened to land on a couple seated at the table closest to the entrance. The man’s back was turned toward their table, but as Luke watched, the man laughed and reached out to put his arm around the woman’s shoulder so that Luke glimpsed him in profile. The man listened to his companion for a moment, and then laughed again at whatever she had said. A sudden lull in the noise allowed Luke to hear the sound. It was teasing and low, a throaty chuckle. It was also eerily familiar.

Shock momentarily froze Luke in his seat. Then he jumped to his feet, grabbing his chair just in time to prevent it toppling over. “Be right back,” he told his sister, moving swiftly toward the couple.

“Luke, what’s wrong? Where are you going?”

He didn’t answer, partly because he was having a hard time catching his breath, partly because he was focused with hypnotic intensity on the couple by the door. The man must have sensed that he was being observed. He glanced up and his head jerked in visible shock. He immediately rose to his feet, putting his hand in the small of his companion’s back and hustling her toward the exit. She followed without a word of protest, oddly compliant.

A waiter carrying a heavy tray crossed Luke’s path, obscuring his view. He wished he could push the waiter violently aside, the way they did in the movies, and to hell with the food arrayed on the tray. But the habit of deferring to a server carrying dishes was ingrained and Luke skirted the waiter, losing another crucial few seconds in his journey toward the exit. He had to excuse himself twice to an oblivious woman whose chair stuck far out from the table, forming an impromptu barricade. When he’d negotiated that obstacle, he squeezed past the two final tables separating him from the hostess station and reached empty floor space. The man and his companion were nowhere in sight.

Luke ran outside, cursing himself for having wasted too much time being polite. Why hadn’t he just elbowed and shoved his way across the dining room, and to hell with flying dishes? Unfortunately, the parking lot was crowded and he couldn’t immediately spot the couple. Dammit, surely there hadn’t been time for them to drive off?

The lot served several specialty stores in addition to Bruno’s restaurant, and there were at least a dozen people strolling around, as well as a van pulled up to the curb, collecting trash. Although the lot was rimmed by lights, the humidity was high and there was a slight mist hanging in the night air, making it frustratingly hard to see. Luke finally picked out his quarry simply because the man was running, his companion jogging awkwardly in his wake, hampered by her high heels.

“Stop!” Luke yelled, ignoring the interested stares of passersby. “Stop, for God’s sake! Ron Raven, is that you? Ron, stop!”

The man didn’t answer. If anything his pace got faster. The woman, indifferent to the damp pavement, tugged off her shoes and ran barefoot across the lot.

Luke tore down the aisle of parked cars, catching up as the man clicked the car locks with his remote and slid behind the wheel of a silver-gray Mercedes. Ron, or his look-alike, didn’t even wait for his female companion to get into the car before turning on the ignition. He was already backing out of his parking space before she closed her door, and long before she could have latched her seat belt.

Luke gave a final burst of speed and caught up with the couple. He stood behind the car, waving his arms. It was impossible for the driver not to have seen him, but the car continued to back up.

Jesus! The guy was going to run him over if he didn’t move, Luke realized with a flash of total incredulity. At the last minute, he had no choice other than to jump to one side. Without a backward glance, the driver swung around on squealing tires and dashed for the exit.

“That man sure was in a hurry.” A middle-aged woman stared at the disappearing Mercedes, her frown disapproving. “Crazy drivers. He could’ve killed you. If he keeps driving like that he’s going to cause an accident for sure. You okay?”

“Yes, thanks.” Luke realized just in time that if he could get the license plate number, the police would have a way to track down the owner. “Excuse me. Really, I’m fine.”

He squeezed between two parked cars and dashed into the next aisle where he had a better view of the Mercedes racing toward the exit. It was a Virginia plate, he saw, with the license number AB7 4K3. Or maybe it was 4K8. He squinted, trying to confirm one number or the other, but the plate was dirty, the night dark, and the car was rapidly receding. The Mercedes sped down the block and made a sharp left turn at the first corner. Luke was a fast runner, but he knew he didn’t have a chance in hell of catching up with it. He reached into his jacket and pulled out his Palm Pilot, jotting down the license plate numbers before he could forget them.

When he realized he’d been staring at the empty road for a full minute, he walked back into the restaurant and wove his way around servers and crowded tables, returning to his sister. His legs felt surprisingly shaky and he slumped into his seat, breathing hard. Anna started to lecture him, but changed her mind when she got a good look at him.

“What is it?” she asked. “For heaven’s sake, what happened just now? Are you okay?”

“I’m not sure.” He reached for his wineglass and then pushed it aside and took a gulp of water instead. He put the incredible truth into words. “I think I just saw Ron Raven.”

Two

“Who is Ron Raven?” Anna’s forehead wrinkled in puzzlement and then she gave a jolt of surprise. “You mean the Ron Raven? The guy from Raven Enterprises who bankrolled your first restaurant and then turned out to be a bigamist?”

“Yes, that’s who I mean.” Luke tried not to sound impatient. “I just saw him. He was over there, eating dinner with some woman.”

Anna’s eyes widened in shock. “But you can’t have seen him—he’s dead! He died in Miami this past spring.”

“Supposedly.”

“What does that mean, supposedly? Ron Raven was murdered, and so was the woman who was with him in his hotel room the night he disappeared. We talked about the murder a half dozen times already. Good grief, Luke, you can’t have forgotten! There was a ton of stuff about Ron Raven on TV. It turned out he had one wife in Chicago and another in Idaho—”

“Wyoming,” Luke corrected.

“Right, Wyoming. He also had three kids. Two with the Wyoming wife, and another with his wife in Chicago. They’re all grown-up, of course.”

“Anna, I know all this stuff—”

“We talked about seeing his children on TV.” Anna shoved a swathe of shiny, dark brown hair off her forehead, oblivious to Luke’s answers. “They were all disgustingly attractive, although they didn’t look much like one another. And one of his children was in the news recently. Ron’s son. I don’t recall his name, but he’s a celebrity lawyer in Denver.”

“Liam Raven. I wouldn’t exactly call him a celebrity, although he’s tried a couple of notorious cases.”

“I didn’t mean he was famous,” Anna clarified. “I meant he works for famous people. He defended the mayor of Denver’s wife when she was accused of murdering her husband. That was just a couple of months ago, wasn’t it?”

Anna’s sense of time, like her sense of distance, worked better on the astronomic scale, but in this instance she was more or less correct. “Yes. The mayor of Denver was murdered back in August.”

“I watched some of the TV coverage because of the connection to Ron and your restaurants. Liam Raven got the charges against the mayor’s wife dropped before she ever came to trial.”

“Liam must be good at his job. Ron was good at his job, too.” Luke gave an ironic shrug. “I guess professional competence runs in the Raven family.”

“You can’t get away from news items about the Ravens these days.” Anna leaned back in her chair, nursing the last of her wine. “I saw a picture of Ron’s Chicago wife in a magazine at the dentist’s office last week.”

“Avery Raven.”

Anna wrinkled her nose. “Avery Fairfax. That’s the name she goes by these days, apparently. She was attending an opera performance to benefit abused wives, which struck me as somewhat ironic given her personal situation.”

“Or perhaps just very brave,” Luke suggested.

“Maybe.” Anna sounded unconvinced. “Avery’s beautiful, but I saw her interviewed on Larry King and she struck me as a real snob. The sort of woman who has her initials embroidered on her underwear and would never leave the house without wearing her pearls.”

“Is that how she struck you? In the clips I saw of her after Ron died, she looked pretty much shell-shocked to me.”

Anna shrugged. “That, too, I guess. Anyway, the point is you must have been mistaken about seeing Ron Raven.” Her voice took on a hint of amusement. “He’s six months dead, which kind of rules out the possibility that he was eating dinner here at Bruno’s.”

Luke suspected he was being foolishly stubborn, but he fought against Anna’s simple logic. “The cops never found Ron’s body, or the body of the woman who was in the hotel room with him. Who’s to say he’s really dead?”

“The entire world, except you.” Anna frowned, amusement vanishing. “The only reason the cops didn’t find any bodies is because the killer took a boat miles out to sea and tossed them into the Atlantic. You saw those chilling security videos of the murderer using a dolly to wheel the bodies onto a yacht. The video was on every TV channel and in every newspaper. You couldn’t avoid the clips even if you wanted to.”

Luke shrugged. “Those videos never struck me as proving very much. All you saw was a masked person—you couldn’t even determine male or female—pushing something onto a boat deck.”

“Not something. The guy was clearly wheeling body bags.”

“Okay, body bags. But they were zippered shut, for heaven’s sake! They could have contained anything from dirty laundry to the Russian Imperial crown jewels.”

“Yep, you’re right, they could,” Anna said crisply. “But the cops believe those bags contained the bodies of Ron Raven and the woman who’d been with him in the hotel room and they’re most likely right. After all, the cops found traces of blood in various places on the boat and you yourself told me a reputable lab used DNA testing to confirm that the blood belonged to Ron Raven. DNA matches don’t lie, Luke.”

“I understand that. I’m not disputing that the DNA evidence confirms the blood on the boat deck was Ron’s.”

“Well, there you are.”

“The fact that a lab established the blood was Ron’s doesn’t tell us anything about how the blood got onto the boat,” Luke pointed out. “If I took a vial of your blood and dripped it across the floor of my bedroom, it doesn’t mean you’re dead or even that you were in my bedroom. A DNA match would simply prove that the blood on my bedroom floor was yours.”

“And this is relevant to Ron Raven’s murder because…?”

“Because we have no clue if Ron was dead or alive when his blood ended up on the deck of that stolen yacht.”

“What exactly are you suggesting?” Anna’s gaze focused on him with new intensity. “That Ron and some unknown woman faked their deaths convincingly enough to persuade the entire Miami police force they’d been murdered? Good grief, Luke, get a grip.”

“I just saw Ron, so that’s what must have happened.” Luke knew he sounded as stubborn as he felt. “It would have been easy enough for Ron to cut himself and sprinkle blood to fake a shooting.”

“It wouldn’t have been easy at all.” Anna shook her head. “There was a lot of blood. We’re not talking about Ron pricking his finger. We’re talking lots and lots of blood, in a spatter pattern that suggested he’d been shot.”

“If Ron had a good reason to disappear—and presumably he did—he might have been willing to sacrifice a pint or two of blood.”

“You’re forgetting something important—the police identified his murderer.”

“Yeah, so they did.” Luke’s voice was heavy with sarcasm. “And we all know the cops have never pinned a murder on the wrong culprit.”

Anna turned her left hand palm up and wiggled her fingers. “Okay, on this side we have weeks of intensive professional investigation and a ton of forensic evidence suggesting Ron Raven was murdered in his hotel room by a man who’d already committed other murders.” She turned over her right hand. “On this side we have the fact that you saw somebody who looks like Ron Raven eating dinner in Cousin Bruno’s restaurant.”

She tilted her head in exaggerated perplexity. “Hmm…let’s see. Which theory should we go with? Is Ron dead or alive? Gee, I can’t imagine.”

Luke leaned across the table. “Stop being a smart-ass and explain to me what we know about Ron Raven’s disappearance that makes it impossible to believe the guy faked his own death.”

“I thought I just did that, but I’ll do it again.” Anna ticked off on her fingers. “There was enough blood in Ron’s hotel room to suggest he was seriously injured. Ditto for his female companion. In that same hotel room, the cops found DNA from a convicted felon who’d already spent years in prison for murdering two other people. So we have two bleeding victims and a known killer in the same hotel room. Plus there’s been no activity at any of Ron’s bank accounts since the day he disappeared. If he faked his own death, he walked away from a load of money. Why would he?”

“Because he was a bigamist and his life was getting complicated?”

“He’d been a bigamist for decades,” Anna retorted. “Neither of his wives suspected anything.”

“Maybe he left for financial reasons, then.”

“He wasn’t under any unusual financial pressure. Everyone agrees Raven Enterprises was profitable at the time he disappeared.”

Luke pushed back his chair, giving in to a burning need to do something more productive than argue the odds with his sister. Or maybe he just didn’t want to acknowledge the logic of his sister’s viewpoint. “I need to talk to the server who waited on Ron Raven.”

“The server who waited on Ron’s look-alike,” Anna corrected.

He ignored her reproof. “Sorry, Annie, I won’t be more than a minute or two. Choose something decadent for dessert, okay?”

Luke made his way across the room and stood quietly while the young woman served entrées to a party of five businessmen. He stopped her as she hurried back toward the kitchen, glancing at her name tag as she whisked past.

“Hey, Merrie, I’m sorry to delay you, but my name’s Luke Savarini. Bruno Savarini is my cousin.” He nodded across the room toward Anna. “And that’s my sister, Anna. You might recognize her since she’s one of your regular customers.”

“I’m sorry. I’m new here.” The server smiled, trying not to look as impatient as she undoubtedly felt. “Anyway, it’s great to have you with us, Mr. Savarini. I hope you and your sister are enjoying your dinner.”

“It was delicious, thanks.” Luke usually had a difficult time lying about food. This time, he barely noticed. “You’re the server for this table near the door, aren’t you?”

Merrie glanced to the empty table he was indicating and nodded. “Yes, why? Is there a problem?”

“Not at all.” She already seemed on the defensive, Luke thought. He needed to reassure her that she wasn’t about to get into trouble. “The thing is, I believe I saw an old friend a few minutes ago. He’d been eating at this table but he left before I managed to catch his eye.”

“I’m afraid I can’t help—” Now that she knew she wasn’t facing a reprimand, the server was visibly itching to get away.

Luke stepped in front of her, debating whether a healthy tip would make her more forthcoming. He decided against the tip, afraid it might be such an obvious bribe that she would clam up even more. “My friend and I lost track of each other when he moved to the D.C. area six months ago. I wondered if he was a regular here at the restaurant.”

“I wouldn’t know. Sorry, Mr. Savarini. Like I said, I’m new. I only started last week and I’d never waited on him before, that’s for sure.”

“Did he pay by credit card? If so, could you tell me his name? That would help me to confirm it really was my friend.”

Merrie wasn’t stupid. Her smile vanished. “I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t give out personal information about one of our customers. As it happens, though, the guest you’re inquiring about paid in cash. In fact, he left without even waiting for his check. He just dropped a bundle of twenty-dollar bills on the table, but it was more than enough to cover his bill. Now, if you’ll excuse me, we’re really busy and I need to get back to work.” She walked away before Luke could ask any more questions.

“Well, that got me precisely nowhere,” he said to his sister, sliding back into his seat. “The server admitted the guy didn’t wait for a check. He simply left a stack of twenty-dollar bills on the table to pay for his meal. As the owner of three restaurants, I can tell you that almost never happens.”

“Let it go, Luke.” His sister handed him the dessert menu. “The reality is that Ron Raven is dead and you saw somebody who looked like him.”

“The man recognized me,” Luke said. The more he replayed the incident in his mind, the more convinced he became that he’d seen Ron Raven, not some look-alike. “He knew I’d recognized him and he bailed without even waiting for his check. Then he damn near ran me down in the parking lot in order to avoid talking to me. If it was somebody who just looked like Ron, why was he so anxious to avoid me?”

“Because you made him nervous the way you were obviously pursuing him?”

“No.” Luke gave a decisive shake of his head. “He ran because he recognized me. Then he dropped a pile of cash on the table to cover his bill because he hoped to get out of the door before I caught up with him. And it worked.”

Luke knew he was being obstinate, but the sound of Ron’s laughter and the tilt of his head had seemed familiar even before he’d glimpsed the man’s features full face. A stranger might happen to look like Ron. What were the odds that the same stranger would also sound like him and have similar mannerisms?

Anna was silent for a moment, finally giving real weight to the possibility that her brother had seen what he claimed. “If that man was Ron Raven and he recognized you, that means he hasn’t lost his memory….”

“I agree.”

“But if Ron isn’t suffering from memory loss, he’s deliberately hiding. That can’t be good, especially for his families.”

Luke shrugged. “His wives and children already know Ron was a liar and a cheat. How is it worse for them to know he’s a live scumbag as opposed to a dead one?”

“Maybe it’s not,” Anna conceded. “But I sure as hell would think long and hard before I went to either of his previous wives and informed them that I’d just seen their supposedly dead husband eating dinner in my cousin’s restaurant. Their most likely reaction is to have you arrested for harassment.”

“Don’t they have a right to know?” Luke was unsure how he would answer his own question.

“Know what, precisely?” Anna demanded. “That you think you may have seen a man who looks like Ron Raven, but he left the restaurant before the two of you exchanged a single word? Wow! There’s news to set the blogosphere humming.”

“I wouldn’t be telling his families I saw a man who looked like Ron Raven,” Luke answered quietly. “I’d be telling them I’m pretty much one hundred percent sure that I saw Ron Raven, alive and in the flesh.”

Anna drew in a sharp breath, taken aback by his conviction. “You were simply a business acquaintance of Ron’s, not an intimate friend. You probably didn’t meet him more than a couple of times.”

“Try at least a dozen. Usually one-on-one, and sometimes for meetings that lasted as long as three or four hours. Ron Raven was a hands-on type of investor.”

“Even so, it was six years ago and you’ve been leading a hectic life ever since then. Memories blur. Impressions get distorted. Plus, you have no idea what sort of people his wives and children are. Do you have the right to mess with the lives of people you’ve never even met?”

Luke was silent for a long time. This was what came of stubbornly clinging to the notion of privacy in a family where if one person sneezed on Tuesday, by Friday every sibling and ten percent of the other relatives would have called to find out how the guy’s cold was progressing.

“I have met Ron’s family,” he said finally. “Or at least his Chicago wife and daughter. I know them quite well, in fact.”

Anna stared at him. She was thirteen months older, which meant that she’d known him for the entire thirty-four years of his existence. Apparently something in his voice had alerted her to the fact that his meetings with Avery and Kate Raven involved more than socializing with the family of the man who’d provided him with investment capital.

“Define what you mean by knowing them quite well,” she said, in an ominous, older-sister tone of voice.

Luke cursed silently. If he hadn’t been thrown for a loop by the glimpse of Ron Raven, he would never, ever, have laid himself open to this sort of sisterly scrutiny.

He tried to speak with brisk indifference. “Kate…Ron’s daughter…is a pastry chef. She was a member of the U.S. team that competed in the Coupe du Monde de la Patisserie last year. The design concept for their chocolate torte was Kate’s and their team took the bronze medal. The French team won, of course—they always do—but the U.S. has never even placed in that competition before. These days, Kate is working as head pastry chef for La Lanterne, the finest bakery in Chicago.”

He was rather pleased with his casual summation of Kate’s life. All professional accomplishment and nothing personal. Anna, unfortunately, was not deceived. “How long have you been dating her?” she asked. “And how the hell could you have kept quiet about her all those times we discussed Ron’s disappearance?”

“I’m not dating her.” Under his sister’s unrelenting gaze, he expanded his answer. “Not anymore. We broke up a while ago.”

“Before her father was murdered?”

“Yes. A few weeks before, in fact.” To be precise, not long after their argument as to whether Luke respected her professional ambitions enough to take time off from the opening of his newest restaurant to fly to Lyon and watch her compete in the most important contest of her professional life. The preparation and endless hours of practice for the Coupe du Monde were so arduous they had both known Kate would be unlikely ever to enter the contest again. Seven months after their breakup, he was finally able to admit that his decision not to fly to France had probably contributed to the chain of events leading to their final, hideous confrontation.

Anna looked hurt. “Quite apart from all the times we discussed Ron Raven’s murder, why didn’t you ever tell me you were dating somebody special?”

Because he’d worked his ass off to keep the affair quiet. Because while he and Kate were dating, he’d been desperate to develop the relationship minus the analysis of his parents, his five siblings and all the assorted in-laws and cousins who might decide to stick their noses into this latest interesting piece of Savarini family gossip. Ironically, the spectacular emotional storm that ended his relationship with Kate had taught him the hard lesson that there were far more ways to screw up a relationship than subjecting it to benevolent interference from a close-knit family.

“There was no point in talking to you about Kate. It wasn’t serious and we didn’t date all that long.” Eight months wasn’t very long, he soothed his conscience, so he wasn’t exactly lying. Luke hurried on, dodging more sisterly questions. “The thing is, I do know Kate and her mother well enough to be fairly sure that if Ron Raven is alive, they would want to hear about it.”

A gruff, rumbling voice greeted them from across the room, saving him from further cross-examination. Thank you, Jesus.

“Anna, mia piccola, come stai, carina?”

“Bruno! Che sorpresa piacevole! Sto bene, grazie. E tu?”

“Eh, cosi, cosi. No, no, don’t get up, Anna.” Cousin Bruno squeezed her shoulder. “What a treat to find you here! I’m glad I decided to stop by the restaurant after my daughter dragged me to the movies. We saw this horrible, boring movie about blowing up cars. If there was anything more to the plot, I must have missed those two lines of dialogue.”

Anna laughed and stood up to hug him, ignoring his command. “Bruno, stop complaining. You know you love movies with lots of car chases.”

“Yes, providing there’s a plot squeezed in between the chases.” He patted her shoulder. “You should have told me you planned to eat here tonight. I would have skipped the movie and been here to welcome you both.”

“I wasn’t sure what our plans would be. Luke’s only in town for twenty-four hours. By the way, do you remember my brother, Luke?”

“We never met.” Bruno shook hands. “But I ate at your restaurant last year when I was in Chicago. Luciano’s on Chestnut. I inquired after you, Luke, but the sous-chef told me you were at one of your other places that night. You can be very proud of what you’ve achieved with Luciano’s. The meal my brother and I ate was spectacular.”

“Thank you. It’s a relief to know you were there on a night when we didn’t screw up.”

“Somehow, I get the impression that you and your team don’t screw up very often.” Bruno pulled out a chair and sat down. “Well, I can’t compete with Luciano’s—we don’t even try to cater to that level of sophistication—but I’m proud of the desserts we make here. What can I get the two of you? Our tiramisu is made from an old family recipe handed down by my grandmother, and it’s the best ever, if I do say so myself. The panna cotta with caramel sauce is mighty fine, as well. We use buttermilk in addition to the cream and it’s not as bland as the traditional recipe.”

“I love your amaretto ice cream,” Anna said. “It’s my personal favorite.”

“Then amaretto ice cream it shall be for you, cara.” Bruno gave her hand a fatherly squeeze. “Luke, how about you?”

“The panna cotta would be great,” he said. “I’ve never made it with buttermilk and it sounds interesting.”

Their desserts arrived along with tiny cups of aromatic espresso and Luke chatted politely with his cousin, who seemed both a kindly man and an experienced chef. Maybe the ravioli has just been an unfortunate exception to generally good food, Luke mused. The panna cotta was certainly first-rate, and the buttermilk made for an intriguing variation on an old standby.

Bruno excused himself to have a word with his staff, and Anna worked hard to keep Luke from reverting to their previous conversation about Ron Raven. Since Luke was working equally hard to prevent her picking up their conversation about Kate, the atmosphere around the table was unusually strained. They were both relieved when Bruno returned after a few minutes and sat down across from Luke.

“Merrie, one of our servers, asked me to give you this,” he said, handing Luke a thin, crumpled credit card receipt. “She said you were inquiring about a couple that was seated at one of her tables. Apparently, they left this behind.”

Luke picked up the flimsy slip of paper. “I appreciate Merrie thinking of me. But she told me that couple paid their bill in cash.”

“They did. This isn’t one of our charge slips,” Bruno said. “If it was, I couldn’t pass it on. But Merrie found it tucked in among the stash of twenties they left behind to pay their bill. She was about to toss it away when she saw me ordering your desserts and realized you really are my cousin. Since this charge slip is nothing to do with us or the meal they ate here, and there’s no way to return it to the couple, I figure there’s no harm in handing it over to you. Merrie says you were interested in this man.”

There was a definite question in his cousin’s voice and Luke repeated his story about seeing an old friend he’d lost touch with. “I’m not sure if I’m enthusiastic enough to track him down through a credit card bill, but I appreciate Merrie’s gesture. Tell her thanks from me, will you?” He deliberately downplayed his interest, since he could only imagine how Bruno would react if Luke repeated his claim to have seen a supposed murder victim eating dinner on the other side of the dining room.

Bruno seemed satisfied with Luke’s explanation, and left to go back to the kitchen after another profuse round of good wishes and goodbyes.

Luke smoothed out the charge slip, scrutinizing the scanty information as he and Anna made their way back to her car. The charge of forty-three dollars and change had been made earlier in the day at an establishment called Sunrise. There was no indication of what sort of establishment Sunrise might be.

“What’s the name on the charge slip?” Anna asked, clicking her key to spring the locks on her car.

Luke held the slip up to the light. “Stewart M. Jones.”

“You see!” Anna looked relieved. “I told you the man you saw wasn’t Ron Raven. Now you can relax and stop obsessing about seeing dead people. I feel as if I spent the past hour living in an outtake from The Sixth Sense.”

The fact that the name on the charge slip read Stewart Jones proved nothing at all about the identity of the man Luke had seen in Bruno’s, as his sister must realize. If Ron had faked his own death, he wouldn’t be opening charge accounts under the identity he’d just been at great pains to get rid of.

Anna must be afraid that he was seeing visions of Ron because he was hung up on his failed relationship with Kate, Luke decided. As it happened, his sister was way off the mark. He wasn’t fixated on Kate—far from it. Their affair had ended in nothing less than misery and he sure as hell wasn’t wasting any time regretting its end. Kate might be beautiful and sexy and have the same career interests as he did, but their personalities were polar opposites. Not to mention the fact that her concept of faithfulness bore no relationship to his.

He realized now that their character differences had mattered almost as much as the betrayals. As their affair started to unravel, their differences worked to the surface, causing unbearable friction. His frustrations had boiled over into the sort of noisy Italian explosiveness he’d spent most of his adult life learning to control. Kate had reacted to each of his displays of temperament with a deeper and deeper retreat into icily silent WASP disapproval.

Even the memory of those last few weeks was enough to make Luke feel slightly sick, quite apart from the horrors of the final denouement. Allowing his sister’s comments about the real identity of Stewart M. Jones to slide past unchallenged, Luke tucked the charge slip into his billfold and took his seat next to Anna in the car. He returned the conversation to family, food and the imminent birth of their youngest sister’s first baby and made sure he kept it there.

For all his silence, Luke’s conviction that he’d seen Ron Raven remained strong. But six months had already passed since Ron disappeared, and Luke decided he could afford to wait until he got back to Chicago before notifying the authorities that, far from moldering in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean, Ron Raven was alive and well, and seemingly enjoying life in one of the more prosperous suburbs of Washington, D.C.

Three

Chicago, October 10, 2007

The Miami police department didn’t even bother to be polite when Luke called to inform them that he’d seen the supposedly dead Ron Raven eating dinner in Herndon, Virginia, a week earlier. Dismissed by a bored clerk—his call never made it as far up the hierarchy as a real cop—he tried again with the Chicago police.

Smarter this time around, he directed his call to a detective sergeant whom he’d met eighteen months earlier when Luciano’s was being remodeled. The cop had been assigned to find out who was stealing construction materials from the restaurant site and Luke figured the two of them had a good rapport.

Their rapport apparently didn’t extend far enough for the cop to believe Luke’s claim to have seen Ron Raven. His tale was received with greater politeness, but with the same bored disbelief demonstrated by the police department in Miami. The bottom line was that cops in both places had fielded hundreds of reports alleging that Ron Raven was alive, and the fact that Luke described himself as an old friend and business acquaintance of the deceased carried no particular weight.

“Has it occurred to you that maybe you’ve received so many reports because Ron Raven is alive and people really are seeing him?” Luke finally asked, no longer bothering to hide his frustration.

“No,” the cop responded baldly.

“That’s it?” Luke asked, incredulous. “Just no?”

“What do you want me to say?” The detective sighed. “We receive reports like this every time there’s a murder that attracts a lot of TV coverage. And when there’s no body to be buried, you can guarantee that half the weirdos in the state are going to claim they’ve seen the deceased.”

It was sobering to realize that from the detective’s point of view he was simply one more wing nut craving notoriety. “But you’ve dealt with me before!” Luke protested. “You know I’ve met Ron Raven because it was right in your report about the thefts from the construction site. You needed a record of who was providing financing for the restaurant and I told you then—almost three years ago!—that I had a revolving line of credit with Ron Raven.”

“That’s true.” The cop’s voice added a layer of impatience to existing boredom.

“And it isn’t as if I’m calling you when Ron Raven’s disappearance is being hotly reported by the media. They moved on to fresh meat weeks ago. Months ago, in fact.”

“I’m sure you believe what you’re telling me, Mr. Savarini—”

“But you don’t believe me, and you have no interest in conducting any sort of follow-up investigation.”

“No, I don’t.” In view of their past acquaintance, the cop relented enough to expand on his reply. “Look, here are the facts. I pulled up the case notes while you were talking and I’m reading them right off my computer. In the three months the investigation was on active status, we took reports from a hundred and twelve people claiming to have seen Ron Raven. Do the math. That’s around ten supposed sightings a week. Miami police have taken hundreds more. On top of that, six callers told us they’d committed the murder, and another three identified themselves as the woman who’d been in the hotel room with Mr. Raven. We followed up on all six confessions and interviewed all three women who claimed to have been in the Miami hotel room. Our detectives concluded the closest any of those people had come to seeing Ron Raven was via the TV screens in their living rooms. That was your tax dollars at work, Mr. Savarini, from May until the end of July. A complete waste of time and police resources. Be grateful the case has been put into inactive status. Except for the warrant outstanding against Julio Castellano, of course. Now, if you thought you’d seen him, I’d be more interested.”

“The fact that crazy people like to confess to murders they didn’t commit proves nothing about whether I saw Ron Raven in Virginia last week.”

The cop no longer sounded bored, only impatient. “We have forensic evidence that proves Julio Castellano, a twice-convicted murderer, was in Ron Raven’s hotel room,” he snapped. “We have bullets and blood-spatter patterns in the hotel room, in the exact places forensic experts would expect if the victims were shot while they were running from the bed. We also have security video of two bodies being wheeled onto a yacht. Based on discrepancies between the ship’s log and data collected from the yacht itself, experts have calculated that the boat traveled a total of thirty-five nautical miles that night without knowledge or permission of the owners. Trust me, Mr. Savarini, we know exactly what happened to Ron Raven the night he disappeared. He was murdered. He’s dead and his body—what’s left of it—is at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.”

It was depressing to hear Anna’s arguments repeated more or less point by point. Luke realized that announcing he had the number of the car in which “Ron Raven” had driven away from the restaurant was going to get him nowhere. The chance of the Chicago police department agreeing to run the numbers was somewhere south of zero. He cut short what was clearly a useless exercise by thanking the cop for his explanations and hanging up.

It was approaching 11:00 a.m., almost time for him to leave for work, and way past time for him to stop obsessing about a sighting that apparently nobody cared about except him. He was sweaty after his morning run, and he retreated to the bathroom to take a shower in preparation for the long hours ahead. He’d be lucky if he was back in his Lincoln Park condo before two or three in the morning, and that was assuming the night produced no major crises at any of his restaurants.

Luke let the water pound in a scorching stream over his head and body. The cops were convinced they had the case of Ron Raven’s disappearance wrapped up, despite the minor detail that they hadn’t actually managed to arrest the alleged murderer. Who was Luke to persist in the claim that he’d seen Ron eating dinner in Herndon, Virginia, when the rest of the world was happy to accept that the guy had long since become an all-you-can-eat buffet for the Atlantic fishes?

Even if he was right and the rest of the world was wrong, he had no good reason to hurl himself against the brick wall of police indifference. The eight months he’d spent dating Ron’s daughter didn’t justify sticking his nose into Raven family business months after his affair with Kate had ended. God knew, he had enough problems within his own family to keep him occupied for the next lifetime or two. He sure as hell didn’t need to take on anyone else’s family problems.

But, dammit, he’d seen Ron Raven! The annoying conviction remained, despite his efforts to wash it down the shower drain. Luke reminded himself of all the reasons why this was a totally lousy time for him to set off on some idiotic quest to convince the world that Ron was alive. The sous-chef at his newest restaurant in suburban Winnetka had sliced open his thumb yesterday, which meant that Luke would be putting in ten long hours of intensive labor tonight, instead of merely checking in for a couple of hours before transferring to his flagship restaurant in downtown Chicago. The Food Network had called yesterday and asked him to tape a show for their upcoming series on America’s most exciting new chefs. Somehow, his already crammed schedule for next week had to be expanded to include eight hours of interviews, with a camera crew trailing him while he cooked and the network expert analyzed everything from his fall seasonal recipes to his underlying technique.

Luke turned off the shower and shook water from his body. Clearly, he didn’t have time right now for pursuing ghosts, literal or metaphorical. Nevertheless, he found himself grabbing a towel and padding wet-footed back into the spare bedroom that served as his home office. Tucking the towel around his waist, he grabbed his Palm Pilot and retrieved a phone number for George Klein, a private detective he’d hired over the summer to identify a dishonest Luciano’s employee.

George greeted him warmly, a soothing change after the indifferent cops. “Luke, it’s good to hear from you again. How are you?”

“I’m fine, but I need your help. Nothing to do with the restaurants, thank God. Either the security systems you put in place are working or I’ve managed to hire some really loyal and honest employees. I hope it’s the latter.”

“I do, too. There’s nothing I like better than to install protective systems that never get activated. So, how can I help you?”

“I’m hoping you can run a license number for me. It’s a Virginia plate, and I need to know who the car is registered to. Do you have any contacts in Virginia?”

“A couple. Hopefully, they’ll come through for me. Give me the plate number and I’ll give it my best shot.”

“I’m not sure of the final digit. I was reading the license in the dark and I couldn’t see whether it was AB7 4K3, or AB7 4K8. What I want to know is the name and address of the owner. The car was a silver gray Mercedes coupe, by the way. I don’t know if that makes a difference.”

“Absolutely. It’s a big help.” George Klein was far too discreet to inquire why Luke wanted to track down a Virginia license plate. “I’ll have both sets of numbers run through the DMV database, and if my contacts are still good, I should be able to get names and addresses for you before the end of business tomorrow.”

George called early the following afternoon, tracking Luke down at the smallest and least formal of the three Luciano restaurants, a trattoria in Oakbrook. He informed Luke that the vehicle registered as AB7 4K3 was a Hyundai, owned by a woman. Her name was Jennifer Parker and she lived in Reston, Virginia.

“Based on your description of the vehicle as a gray Mercedes, I assume that’s not the person you’re looking for,” he said.

“No, I’m trying to trace a man,” Luke said. “He’s an old friend and we…um…lost touch.”

George Klein was kind enough to ignore Luke’s lame attempt to justify his snooping. “The vehicle registered as AB7 4K8 is a Mercedes CLK 550 coupe,” he said. “The color is listed as Evening Pearl. That sounded more like the vehicle you’re looking for.”

“Yes, it sure does.”

“Apparently it was sold last week. The system caught up with the change of ownership only a couple of hours before I checked, so we got lucky. It’s currently registered to a Mercedes dealer in Arlington, Virginia. I figured you’d want to know the name of the previous owner—”

“Yes, I sure do.”

“It was a man called Stewart M. Jones.”

Luke’s breath caught at the now-familiar name. It might be sheer coincidence that Mr. Jones had sold his car right after Luke chased him down in the restaurant parking lot. But the hasty sale could also mean that Ron Raven was so determined not to be traced that he’d been willing to part with an almost-new Mercedes to avoid discovery.

“Do you have an address for Mr. Jones?” Luke asked the detective.

“I do. Mr. Jones gave his place of residence as McLean, Virginia—2737 Elm Court to be precise.”

“Thanks, George. I really appreciate the swift service. Can you do one more thing for me? Find out if Stewart Jones is still living at Elm Court.”

“I figured you might want that information.” George Klein sounded pleased with his forethought. “I already checked with the owners of the building. According to them, Elm Court is a short-term rental place but it’s pretty upscale, mostly catering to diplomats and international businessmen. Unit 6, which is where Mr. Jones was living when he registered his car, rents for five thousand bucks a month, furnished, weekly maid service included. That’s not out of sight for the D.C. area, but it’s obviously not cheap, either. Mr. Jones stayed there for only one month and left three months ago, with all his bills paid up. From the point of view of the management company, there was nothing in the least remarkable about his stay or his departure. They screen all tenants, of course, and Mr. Jones passed the screening without a hiccup.”

If Ron Raven were alive and wanted to conceal that fact, then Washington, D.C. would be an ideal city for him to hide in, Luke reflected. Nobody noticed strangers or transients in the D.C. area because the city was full of them. From Ron’s perspective, there were few cities in the United States that would offer better prospects for lucrative business deals, combined with plenty of comfortable places to hide.

The fact that “Stewart Jones” had passed a standard credit check didn’t surprise Luke in the least. Ron Raven had been running background checks on prospective clients for three decades and he would certainly know all the danger points he needed to protect himself against. On top of that, he’d been concealing his bigamous lifestyle for twenty-eight years. Never confiding fully in anyone, procuring duplicate documents and spinning stories to obscure the truth would be second nature to him. Now that he thought about it, Luke realized Ron Raven was almost uniquely qualified to disappear and reemerge with a new identity.

Unfortunately, the more convinced Luke became that Stewart Jones and Ron Raven were the same person, the more difficult it became to imagine how he was going to track the guy down. On top of that, he would soon have to consider the issue Anna had raised last week: Would he be doing the Raven family any favors by telling them he’d seen Ron? Or would he be heating up an emotional pot that had just started to cool down from the traumatic news of Ron’s death?

“I suppose it’s too much to hope that Mr. Jones left a forwarding address,” he said to George Klein.

“He left an address, but it’s in Australia. In Adelaide, to be precise. I haven’t followed up. I figured I’d talk with you first before going to that expense.”

“Stewart Jones’s forwarding address is in Australia?”

“Yes. You sound surprised.”

“I am.”

“I take it you didn’t know that Mr. Jones is an Australian diplomat?”

“An Australian diplomat?” Luke stared blankly at the contract with a seafood vendor that he’d been reading before he picked up the detective’s call. Ron Raven clearly had acting abilities his family didn’t know about if he’d managed to pass himself off as an Australian.

“Luke? Are you there?”

“Sorry, you surprised me, that’s all. I assumed…Mr. Jones…was an American.”

“Perhaps he is. If you’re a person trying to hide, adopting a foreign identity is a great first step.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because superficial identity checks in the States are all set up around social security numbers. An Australian diplomat doesn’t have an American social security number, meaning that credit checks are a lot more difficult. Not to mention more expensive.”

“And that would make it harder for somebody to identify Stewart Jones as a fraud,” Luke said.

“Absolutely,” George agreed. “But if Stewart Jones isn’t really Australian, we can soon find out. Do you want me to check the Australian address he gave the rental company?”

Luke’s first instinct was to stop this investigation right now. What the hell was he trying to achieve by chasing a chimera across thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean? In the end, though, he couldn’t quite let go.

“It can’t hurt, I guess, since we’ve come this far so quickly. Thanks, George. Some information about Mr. Jones’s forwarding address would be useful. Can you dig deep enough to find out if we’re talking about a mail drop or a residence?”

“Sure thing. I could also check with the Australian foreign ministry and confirm whether or not they have a Stewart M. Jones on their diplomatic roster.”

“That would be great. Although Mr. Jones passed the background check conducted by the Elm Court management company, so I’m not sure that we’re going to unearth any discrepancies without going to a lot of trouble.”

“You’d be surprised—make that alarmed—at how easy it is to pass a standard credit check. I’ll just peel back a couple more layers and see what we uncover.” George paused. “It would help if I knew what I’m trying to find out.”

“For now, I’d prefer just to tell you that you’re right, and I think Stewart M. Jones is a stolen identity someone has adopted.” Luke gave up on the unrealistic pretense that he was conducting a simple search for an old friend. “If the Australian authorities acknowledge they have a diplomat called Stewart Jones, could you get a description of him? That way, I can compare the man I saw with the Stewart Jones employed by the Australian government. I don’t want to make any accusations or leap to any wild conclusions until I’m sure I didn’t just see a hardworking Australian guy who happens to look like somebody else.”

“I’ll do my best. In fact, if I tell the Aussies that I’m investigating a suspected identity theft, they’ll probably be quite willing to cooperate.”

“Thanks for all you’ve done so far, George. I’m very grateful.”

“Glad I could be of help. I’ll hold off on sending you a bill until I’ve contacted the Australian authorities and traced this address in Adelaide.” The investigator’s voice took on a tinge of laughter. “If I give you the damage in one fell swoop, you’ll only be shocked once.”

Luke avoided thinking about Ron Raven for the rest of the night, which wasn’t hard, chiefly because the pressures of serving top-quality food in three crowded restaurants, one with an injured sous-chef, occupied every scrap of his attention. He assumed George would take at least a couple of days to get back to him and he was almost glad of the delay. However, he’d underestimated George’s efficiency. Luke opened up his e-mail the next evening and found a note from the detective already waiting for him.

Thought it might be easier to put this in writing, instead of interrupting your work schedule. Mr. Jones’s forwarding address in Adelaide turns out to be for an abandoned warehouse. I’ve attached an aerial picture of the site, which as you can see is surrounded by a chain-link fence and appears deserted. I spoke to a local cop (local to Adelaide, that is) and he assures me that any mail forwarded to this warehouse from the States during the past six months would have been returned to sender or delivered to a dead-letter box, since the ownership of the site is in dispute between two companies.

I checked again with the superintendent of the apartment building in McLean, Virginia. He has no memory of any mail either being forwarded to Stewart Jones or being returned from Australia. It seems likely, therefore, that no first-class mail for Mr. Jones ever arrived at Elm Court after he left there in late June.

I also contacted the Australian embassy in Washington, D.C. I informed them somebody might be fraudulently using the identity of a supposed Australian diplomat, Stewart M. Jones. The embassy informed me that there has been no diplomat of that name serving in any capacity in the United States for the past two years. They wouldn’t comment on whether they have a diplomat of that name assigned elsewhere.

The management company for the Elm Street rental properties at first declined to share with me how they checked the credentials and references for prospective renters. After some persuasion, a clerk parted with the information that all applicants are required to provide a security deposit equal to three months’ rent. If the applicant’s check clears, the rest of the credit check is cursory. Renters are required to provide a work phone number, and this number is always called. However, since applicants provide the work number themselves, they—in this case, Mr. Jones—have complete control over how the call is answered. Mr. Jones could pretend that a caller had reached the Australian embassy, and then provide himself with a glowing reference. Child’s play for anyone with experience in setting up a scam. Sometimes I wonder why anybody in this country bothers to be honest, when deception and fraud are so easy.

Bottom line: Anyone wanting to rent accommodations at the Elm Street location could use almost whatever name they pleased with little risk of having their alias exposed.

Let me know if you need to investigate further. Sincerely, George Klein.

P.S. Invoice attached.

Four

October 12, 2007

Tim, one of the sous-chefs at Luciano’s on Chestnut, stuck his head around Luke’s open office door. “There’s a woman waiting to see you in the main dining room. Says she arranged to meet you here.”

Luke glanced up from the stack of vendor accounts he was checking, one of his least-favorite chores. “Is it Mrs. Fairfax?”

“Could be. Something like that. Sorry, you know me and names.” Tim, who happily obsessed over the most obscure herbs and heirloom vegetables, and agonized over precise details of recipes, had only a perfunctory interest in the humans who would eventually consume his dishes. He gave Luke a casually apologetic salute and moved on to the kitchen.

Luke made his way into the dining room, breathing in the faint aroma of freshly chopped herbs. The restaurant was closed at this early hour of the morning, the tables shrouded in starched gray linen cloths, waiting for the stemmed water goblets, silverware and signature damask napkins that would be added later.

Even now, five years after the grand opening of his flagship restaurant, Luke’s heart still beat a little faster each time he walked across the stylish dining room. This morning he was especially aware of the fact that his success would have been impossible without Ron Raven. His requests for financing to start his own restaurant had been turned down by half the banks in Chicago. He was too young, the bankers said, not even thirty, with grand ideas but insufficient practical experience. Besides, restaurants were a notoriously risky investment.

And then he catered a meal for Raven Enterprises and everything changed. Ron agreed to underwrite the first Luciano’s to the tune of a quarter million dollars in exchange for twenty-five percent of the equity. The restaurant had been a success almost from opening night, and plenty of banks had fallen over themselves to finance Luke’s next two ventures. But the undeniable bottom line was that without Ron, there would have been no Luciano’s.

Luke had wrestled with the question of what he owed Ron for several days before finally placing his call to Avery Fairfax. In the end, he’d decided this couldn’t be about gratitude toward Ron; this had to be about honesty owed to Ron’s wife and daughter.

He pushed lingering doubts aside and smiled a greeting at the slender, elegant woman waiting by the door. “Avery! It’s great to see you again. Thanks for making the trip across town.”

Avery Fairfax turned to him, her classic features warmed by the friendliness of her smile. “Luke, how are you? It’s been much too long. I’ve missed you.”

He shook her hand since Avery wasn’t the sort of woman who invited random hugs. “I missed you, too.” He was surprised at how true that was. “Can I get you something to eat? A croissant? Some coffee? Juice?”

“Thank you, but I only finished breakfast a few minutes ago.”

“Then let’s go into my office. We have more hope of being left alone there.” Luke escorted her through the dining room and pulled out a chair across from his desk as soon as they reached his office. Avery sank into the seat, managing to look entirely comfortable without slumping, crossing her legs or disturbing the perfect lines of her tweed skirt.

“You look very well,” Luke said truthfully.

“I feel well, too. Or perhaps energized would be a better word. October is always my favorite month and the weather’s been heavenly for the past few days, don’t you think?”

“Perfect, especially in contrast to the rotten summer we had this year.” The phone rang. Luke ignored the ring and pressed the button to switch his calls through to voice mail. “Did you manage to escape from the city during those hot spells back in June and July?”

“Only for the odd day, now and again. I was too busy selling the penthouse. Fortunately, we managed to find a buyer before the real estate market totally tanked. The new owners are a couple from India who’ve just moved to the States and they were eager to buy a lot of the furniture, too, which suited me very well. So it was a successful transaction all around, with happy buyers and a contented seller.”

Luke hoped the sale of the penthouse had left Avery financially secure. She undoubtedly needed the money. Even if Ron had made a will and left her a decent share of his estate, Luke doubted if she would see a penny of her inheritance anytime soon. There would surely be years of litigation over the disposition of the estate, even if all the parties tried to be reasonable. The tabloids had mentioned something about a three-million-dollar debt hanging over the heads of Ron’s Wyoming family, so it seemed safe to assume both wives had suffered major financial blows when Ron disappeared.

“Have you decided where you’re going to live now the penthouse is sold?” he asked Avery, wondering how the complicated Raven family finances would ever be unraveled if Ron was officially declared alive again. Just contemplating the potential legal nightmare of getting the estate back out of probate had Luke questioning his decision all over again.

“At first, I thought about moving back to Georgia,” Avery said. “Then I realized that would be silly. It’s so long since I’ve lived anywhere other than Chicago that my roots are here now. So I’m about to move into a small house in Wicker Park.”

“That’s one of my favorite neighborhoods.” It was where Kate lived, too, so Avery was moving away from the superexpensive lakeside and closer to her daughter. Wicker Park was a younger, trendier neighborhood than the only-millionaires-need-apply Gold Coast.

“I like my new neighborhood better the more I explore. Actually, I’m rather excited. Not just about the house, but about my prospects generally. I’ve started a small business and discovered that I very much enjoy being gainfully employed.”

“That’s great, Avery!”

Her smile turned into an outright laugh. “You should never play poker, Luke, you’d be wiped out in a couple of hands. I know everyone thinks I’m a useless social butterfly with all the management skills of a potted plant, but I’m actually quite efficient.”

“I’m sure you are.”

“You’re not sure at all.” Avery seemed amused by his doubts, not offended. “I’m like a lot of other Southern women of my generation, a great deal more competent than I look. We were brought up to hide our capabilities and defer to our husbands and flutter our eyelashes if any of the gentlemen discussed politics or money at the dinner table. But the truth is, I’ve raised millions of dollars for art galleries and museums and homeless shelters over the past twenty years. I’ve personally organized more benefits and charity balls than most people attend in a lifetime. When Ron died, and I was trying to think how in the world I should spend the rest of my life, it occurred to me that I already had all the training I would ever need to become a professional event planner. So that’s what I’ve started doing, and I’m loving every minute.”

Luke smiled. “That’s a brilliant career choice, Avery. It’s the perfect niche for you.” If anything, she was understating the number of important fund-raisers she’d planned over the past decade. “You already know the best venues in Chicago for every conceivable type of event, and you have a Rolodex full of outstanding caterers, florists, musicians—anything your clients could want or need for the perfect party.”

She laughed, drawing a sleek gray PDA from her purse. “Actually, I now have a BlackBerry as well as a Rolodex. Kate finally persuaded me it was time to take a few tentative steps into the twenty-first century, and I discovered technology is great when you understand it. I even know how to access my e-mail account while sipping coffee at Starbucks. I can send instant text messages, too. I can’t quite bring myself to sign off with a smiley face, but I’m getting there!”

“Congratulations.” Avery’s pleasure was infectious and Luke smiled back at her. “In addition to becoming a techie, you’re always so polite and serene that even the most neurotic client will calm down simply knowing you’re in charge. You’re going to be hiring extra staff and turning away customers before you know it.”

“Thanks for the compliments, Luke, I really appreciate them. Especially the bit about being serene. From my perspective, viewed from the inside, I’m a nervous wreck. Still, I don’t seem to be having any difficulty finding clients, especially since I don’t want to get overwhelmed before I have all my ducks in a row.”

“I suspect your ducks are already lined up and waiting to swim off into deep waters.”

“Perhaps.” Avery’s cheeks flushed with a mixture of excitement and pride. “I just finished putting together a wedding for the daughter of an old college friend. She gave me a bare four weeks’ notice and the ceremony was last weekend. Everything seems to have gone rather well, if I do say so myself. And I’m working on two new projects right now. One is a business conference next month and the other a coming-of-age celebration for a young woman who has fabulously wealthy parents, both remarried to other partners. They apparently hope that if they spend enough money on the party, their daughter will forget they ignored her for most of the past eighteen years.”

“That sounds like the very best sort of client.” Luke grinned. “There’s nothing like a double dose of parental guilt to shake loose a deluge of money.”

Avery pulled a wry face. “Ah, yes. Parental guilt, the gift that goes on giving. I’ve certainly experienced a full dose of that these past few months. Although Kate is a kind person and she’s almost managed to convince me that I wasn’t utterly foolish not to have realized the truth about her father.”

Luke drew in a deep breath. Avery had opened the door and there was no way to put off discussing Kate any longer.

“How is Kate?” he asked, hoping he didn’t sound as stiff and awkward as he felt. He was alarmed that even now, months after their breakup, he still felt a tightening in his chest at the mere mention of her name. Dammit, he must have some deep masochistic streak that he felt this crazy tug of yearning for a woman who’d made the final weeks of their relationship something pretty close to a living hell. Not that he’d exactly been a prince, he admitted silently. But, God knew, their final breakup had been caused exclusively by Kate, with zero assistance from him.

“Kate’s well,” Avery said, her voice cooling just a little. “Busy, of course. She spent a month in Vienna this summer, working with Torsten Richter. She found him as terrifying as his reputation, but she said the terror was worth it. According to Kate, Torsten can do things with chocolate that are somewhere between obscene and heavenly.”

Luke quelled an irrational surge of jealousy toward Torsten Richter, who was known as one of the finest pastry chefs in Europe. Pathetic as it was, it seemed he still craved Kate’s professional approval. “Is she planning to compete in the Coupe du Monde again next year?”

“No.” Avery didn’t expand on her answer. Perhaps she thought Luke didn’t deserve any insights into Kate’s professional plans, given that she believed their relationship had foundered on the rock of their demanding and incompatible schedules.

He hesitated for a moment. “I wrote to Kate in May,” he said finally. “After Ron…after her father disappeared.”

“I know. She showed me your note.” Avery’s voice was dry. “It was a very polite letter. Emily Post would have been proud of you.”

Luke didn’t misinterpret the seeming compliment. “I realize it was a lousy letter, Avery. But Kate and I broke up a month before her father disappeared and I had no clue what to say. We’d both made it clear that we didn’t want to see each other ever again, so it seemed wrong to get too personal.” He noticed he was drawing circles all over his vendor invoices and tossed the pen aside. “In the end, platitudes seemed better…no, not better. They seemed less bad than any of the alternatives.”

Avery relented slightly. “It was a difficult situation,” she conceded. “And the consequences seem never-ending. I’m getting so tired of the constant fallout.” She stopped abruptly, visibly chagrined to have lapsed into the sort of complaining she would consider bad manners.

And he was about to make the situation more difficult by several orders of magnitude, Luke reflected. Seeing Avery in person, he wondered why he’d been so sure he was entitled to disrupt her peace. She was poised on the brink of putting her life back together in a pattern that clearly pleased her. Why force her to confront the possibility that her bigamous husband might not be dead? After all, Ron had lied and cheated for the entire twenty-nine years of their relationship. Why would she care if the son of a bitch was alive?

It would certainly be kinder to Avery to allow Ron to remain buried. Kinder in the short term, he reflected, but maybe not right?

“You have your poker face on again, Luke, and it’s still not working.” Avery’s gaze didn’t waver and it was disconcertingly perceptive. “You’re agonizing over something. Why did you ask me to come here today? Is it something to do with Kate?”

“No, or at least it’s only indirectly about Kate.” It dawned on Luke with sudden, piercing clarity that it was precisely because Ron had deceived his family for almost three decades that he owed Avery the truth. She was an intelligent, mature woman who didn’t deserve to be lied to, even if the lies were supposedly for her own good.

He spoke quickly, before he could lose his resolve. “There’s no easy way to break this news, Avery, so here it is. Earlier this month I was having dinner with my sister at a restaurant in suburban Washington, D.C. While we were there, I’m fairly sure…scratch that. I’m confident I saw Ron in the restaurant. He was with a woman about my sister’s age, mid-to late thirties. Ron and this woman were eating dinner, but when Ron realized I’d seen him, he quickly got up and left. To be frank, it seemed to me that he ran away.”

Avery’s body stilled, all movement so controlled that even her breathing was invisible. When she finally spoke, after several seconds of utter silence, her voice sounded husky. “Did Ron look ill? Injured?”

“No, he looked well.” Luke realized she was the first person to ask him about Ron’s well-being, as opposed to launching into an instant denial of the possibility that he might be alive. “He was thinner than when I last saw him, which was at the birthday dinner he threw for you in early March. He looked fitter and more tanned, but unmistakably Ron.”

“You say he ran away when you tried to speak to him?”

“Yes, he did. I’m quite sure he wanted to avoid me.” Luke once again decided against cushioning the truth with a comforting lie. There had been more than enough lies already, most of them perpetrated by Ron himself.

Avery looked up and her eyes were no longer tranquil; they were now a tormented, storm-tossed gray. “Are you telling me Ron ran away because he recognized you and didn’t want to be confronted?”

Luke winced inwardly. “I’m sorry, Avery, but that’s exactly what I think happened.”

She made a distressed sound, hastily suppressed. She stared for several long moments at her hands. Then she turned to him, her ghost-pale face a silent plea for help. “I’m embarrassed to admit I have no idea what I should do next. Tell me, Luke. What must I do? Should I go to the police?” She gripped the edge of his desk, the white-knuckled intensity of her grip all the more devastating because she was trying so hard to hide the signs of her inner turmoil.

“I wish I knew how to advise you, Avery. I’ve already tried to inform the cops, here and in Miami, but they didn’t believe a word I told them and they had zero interest in reopening the investigation into Ron’s disappearance. I’d be amazed if you get any help from them. In fact, if you want to ignore what I’ve just told you, nobody will care. Not the cops, that’s for sure.”

“How can I ignore something so important just because the authorities aren’t interested? Ron might be in trouble….”

Luke resisted the urge to say Ron hadn’t looked troubled to him. In fact, the bastard had looked as if he was thoroughly enjoying his meal—and the company of the woman eating dinner with him—at least until Luke brought their cozy night to a swift end.

“Most people will advise you to pay no attention to my story, you can be sure of that,” Luke said flatly. “It’s definitely what the police would tell you.”

“Perhaps, but I’m not really interested in the opinion of the police.” Avery’s voice picked up a healthy note of anger. “The Miami detective in charge of the investigation formed his theory of the case the moment they identified one of the blood stains in the hotel room as coming from that Julio Castellano person. Castellano was an illegal immigrant and a convicted murderer, so the police essentially ended their inquiries at that point. Radio talk show hosts raged about illegal immigrants committing crimes for a few days. Then the media attention moved on, and so did the attention of the police. I don’t think the Miami cops even looked very hard for Castellano, despite the fact that he was their chosen suspect. They assumed he was in Mexico and left it at that.”

“You sound as if you’ve never accepted the cops’ theory about what happened to Ron.”

“I did at first.” Avery hesitated for a moment. “Later, I changed my mind.”

“Any special reason for the change?”

She hesitated again and Luke got the strong impression that she was choosing her words with care. “Did you know that Adam, my youngest brother, has met Julio Castellano?”

Luke was astonished. “No, I had no idea. You mean your brother met Castellano before he was accused of murdering Ron? That’s an amazing coincidence. Is Adam sure it’s the same man, not just the same name?”

Avery shook her head. “No, that isn’t what happened. My brother met Castellano this past summer. Ron had been missing for several weeks by then and Castellano was already the prime suspect in his murder.”

Luke frowned. “But if your brother found Castellano, why in the world isn’t the guy in custody?”

“It’s a long story. The short version is that Adam flew to Belize on the trail of some money that was missing from Ron’s estate. My brother traveled with Megan Raven, Ron’s other daughter by his Wyoming wife. Adam and Megan were married recently, so she’s my sister-in-law on top of everything else.” Avery paused after spelling out the ramifications of the relationship, as if, even now, she had trouble absorbing the reality of her supposed husband’s double life.

She gave her head a little shake. “Anyway, it seems Adam and Megan were rescued from a life-threatening situation in Belize by Julio Castellano. Adam is anything but a soft touch, and yet he’s convinced not only that he and Megan would have died without Castellano’s help, but also that the man isn’t a murderer.”

“But Castellano’s been accused of killing three different people,” Luke protested. “And he’s been convicted of the first two murders! I’m sure I remember reading that at the time the police in Miami named him as their only suspect.”

“I know.” Avery’s shoulders lifted in a slight shrug. “According to Adam, Castellano claims the first death was an accident and that the police were covering up a crime by one of their own when they pinned the second murder on him.”

“Well, yeah, Castellano would claim something like that, wouldn’t he?” Luke didn’t bother to hide his skepticism. “If you want to find a thousand innocent men all in one place, go visit your local prison.” The idea that a convicted felon implicated in three murders might be innocent of all of them struck Luke as barely this side of absurd. Then he remembered that if Ron Raven was alive, Julio Castellano was categorically innocent of at least one of the crimes he’d been accused of committing.

“Has your brother informed the cops that their prime suspect in Ron Raven’s murder is hiding out in Belize?” He gave a wry smile. “Where the heck is Belize, anyway?”

Avery almost managed an answering smile. “I’m glad you don’t know, either. I had to look it up myself. It’s a tiny country that shares borders with Guatemala and Mexico.”

“Is it one of those places where criminals go to hide?” Luke asked. “Is that why Castellano is there?”

“I don’t believe so. It’s a former British colony and the total population is around half a million, so it’s not exactly a place where you can disappear into the teeming masses.”

“So why would Castellano be there?” Luke found the story of Adam’s encounter increasingly odd the more he heard.

“According to my brother, Castellano was born in Belize and the police here were mistaken when they identified him as Mexican.”

“Can that possibly be right?” Luke shook his head. “Man, I’m willing to buy a certain level of police incompetence, but your brother is basically suggesting that the cops have the entire story on three separate killings screwed up in every detail, right down to the citizenship of the guy accused of the murders!”

“My initial reaction was the same as yours, that Castellano had every reason to lie to my brother. The police in Miami conducted a thorough investigation, so why not accept their conclusions? But Adam was pretty convincing. On top of that, you’re telling me now that you may have seen Ron. If you’re correct, that means Castellano can’t possibly have murdered him. Since he isn’t guilty this time around, it does give cause to wonder if the police might have been wrong on the previous occasions, as well.”

“Even if Ron is alive, we don’t know what happened the night he disappeared,” Luke pointed out. “There’s no reason to give Castellano a free pass. Ron might have managed to trick him and escape. In which case Castellano would be guilty of attempted murder at the very least.”

Avery was silent for a moment. Then she shook her head. “If Castellano tried to kill Ron and didn’t succeed, why is Ron still hiding? Why didn’t he come home and identify Castellano as the would-be killer? Even if Ron was injured or suffering from amnesia for a while, it seems his memory is in full working order now. You yourself said that he ran away when you saw him. That means he recognized you and didn’t want to talk to you. Why doesn’t Ron want to be discovered? Who is he hiding from?”

“Castellano is the logical suggestion,” Luke said. “He’s a convicted criminal and his blood was in the hotel room, so there must have been a fight.”

“Not necessarily. The fact that Castellano’s blood was in the hotel room doesn’t provide any information about why he was there.”

“Why else would he have gone to Ron’s hotel room if not for robbery or some other crime?”

“He might have been there for the simple reason that he was an accomplice of Ron’s,” Avery suggested. “If Ron wanted to disappear, what could be more convincing than staging a room to look as if he’d been fighting for his life against a known killer?”

Avery seemed as determined to believe Ron was alive as the police were determined to believe he was dead. Luke found himself in the bizarre position of trying to rein in her willing acceptance of his own story. “But if Ron isn’t hiding from Castellano, who is he hiding from?”

“His families,” Avery said quietly. “Both of them.”

“That can’t be the explanation.” Luke hoped he sounded convincing. “Avery, if Ron was tired of his families, why not say so? You don’t go to the huge trouble of faking your own death just to avoid the hassle of getting divorced!”

“Most men don’t go to the huge hassle of maintaining two marriages, two homes, two completely separate lives. Most men aren’t bigamists. Ron apparently doesn’t react like most people.” With a sudden, jerky movement Avery pushed back her chair. “The more you try to dress it up and make it look pretty, the more convinced I become that Ron wanted out of his life—and so he ran.”

“I don’t agree with you,” Luke said.

“Then give me a better interpretation of the facts.”

“We don’t have enough facts to speculate in any meaningful way. Right now, though, I suspect professional gamblers would say the odds are in favor of me being mistaken and Ron being dead.” Luke felt obligated to provide Avery with that out if she wanted to take it. Hell, everyone else who’d heard his story had taken the route of assuming he was an idiot, so she was entitled.

She tilted her head back, searching his face. “You don’t think you’re mistaken, do you?”

He debated for a second and then gave her the truth. “No. I’m sorry, Avery. I’m almost as certain as I can be that I saw Ron Raven.”

“Then I’m grateful to you for telling me what you saw. Now all that’s left is for me to decide how to deal with this. I just finished telling you how competent and self-sufficient I am. I need to prove it.”

“Even the strongest and most independent person sometimes needs a friendly listener. Anytime you want to discuss your options with me, Avery, I’ll be happy to listen and offer any advice I can. After all, I’m the person who opened up this can of worms.”

“Right now, I’ve just about exhausted my capacity for rational discussion. I need some time alone to think. Thanks for the offer, though, Luke. Later on, I’ll probably take you up on it.” She got up and walked in the direction of his office door, bumping into the corner of his credenza as she passed by. For graceful, controlled Avery, the clumsy movement demonstrated a distress level that was the equivalent of a normal person tumbling flat on her face.

Luke escorted her to the restaurant door, his hand beneath her elbow. “You’re upset. Let me call you a cab.”

“Thanks, Luke, but I’d rather walk. Fresh air seems very appealing right now. Goodbye.”

Luke watched Avery weave a not-quite-straight path to the corner of the block. When she turned out of view, he didn’t even attempt to return to his office and his chore of checking invoices. Instead he made his way to the kitchens and silently began preparing a port wine reduction to garnish the beef tenderloin that would be on tonight’s menu. Cooking was usually absorbing enough that he could lose himself in the process. But today, his brain remained disengaged from his hands. Despite the heavy weight in the pit of his stomach, he was fairly sure he’d done the right thing in contacting Avery. Unfortunately, doing the right thing apparently could leave you feeling like hell.

Perhaps he should call Kate and warn her that her mother…He cut off that insidious thought before it could carry him down any of the dangerous paths that led to Kate. He’d taken that walk too many times already, and he sure as hell didn’t plan to take it again. He’d told Avery what he’d seen and his responsibilities in regard to Ron Raven’s resurrection were now ended.

It was time to move on, leaving Kate locked safely in the past, where she belonged.

Five

Later the same day

Kate Fairfax—formerly Kate Raven—not only loved her mother, she’d always admired her. Her respect had been heartfelt, even during her teenage years when she’d been intimidated by her mother’s unfailing elegance and exquisite taste. In self-defense, Kate had indulged in a few years of grunge dressing just to prove that she didn’t give a flying flip about clothes or makeup. On her eighteenth birthday she’d reinforced her rebellion by getting a tattoo of a dragon on her butt, a gold ring threaded through her left nostril and multiple piercings in both ears.

Her efforts provoked a satisfactory bellow of outrage from her father, but unfortunately nothing much from her mother. After complimenting Kate’s choice of earrings, Avery offered a mild comment to the effect that she’d always wanted to have a tattoo but was too much of a coward to endure the pain.

Since her mother didn’t seem to care in the slightest about the nose ring, and it was a major pain to keep the hole disinfected, Kate had given up on it within three months. By the end of her first semester in culinary school, she’d allowed half of the ear piercings to close, and by the time she graduated, she had acquired a fair-size wardrobe of clothes that weren’t black, weren’t denim and had no rips anywhere.

The tattoo, however, she’d never for a single moment regretted. Luke had christened the dragon Puff, and had woven several highly erotic fantasies that supposedly revealed the secret story of how Puff came to end up living on her butt. It was only after they broke up that she happened to hear the old Peter, Paul and Mary song and understand why he’d picked that name. It annoyed her every time she glimpsed the dragon in her bathroom mirror and realized that she was still mentally calling him Puff. There was also the problem of the tiny jeweled egg that she kept buried in a shoe box in her closet. This, according to Luke when he gave it to her, was the egg from which Puff had hatched several centuries earlier. The fact that she had neither given the egg away nor found the courage to display it on a shelf suggested an unhealthy level of neurosis about the ending of their relationship.

Her memories of Luke sometimes seemed impossible to shake, and Kate was frustrated by her inability to banish him to the trash can of past mistakes. She was twenty-seven, for heaven’s sake, which ought to be old enough to recognize when a relationship had been doomed from the start. She constantly repeated the reasons why they had made a lousy couple and her brain was finally convinced by the mantra. Unfortunately, the rest of her was having a hard time getting with the program. A succession of dates in the past couple of months had merely reinforced the forbidden judgment that Luke Savarini was the world’s most superlative kisser, bar none. Why couldn’t he have been an arrogant, uncaring lover to match the rest of his arrogant, uncaring personality? That was one of life’s more annoying puzzles.

Kate switched her thoughts back to her mother, which was a lot more agreeable than thinking about Luke. In the six months since her father had died, her lifelong admiration for her mother had blossomed into full-blown hero worship. She had learned how much more there was to Avery than a kind heart, a pretty face and a knack for selecting attractive clothes. She watched the bravery with which her mother set about rebuilding a life that had been shattered not only emotionally and socially but also financially, and she was torn between pride and an odd sense of role-reversal protectiveness.

Today, as she looked around the little house that her mother had just begun to restore, Kate’s admiration was tinged by a dose of worry. The house was structurally sound, but it had been owned by an elderly couple for fifty years, and routine upkeep had clearly defeated them over the past decade. Avery had acquired the house for a rock-bottom price, despite the excellent location. Still, ten days of hard work had barely made a dent in what needed to be done.

The kitchen had the very latest in modern conveniences, circa 1973. The shag carpet looked as if it might date from approximately the same era, and the drapes seemed to be held together by twenty years of solidified grime. Last weekend they’d managed to clean the master bedroom and bathroom and get both rooms painted. On Monday, a new bed had been delivered, so Avery now had somewhere other than Kate’s small row house where she could take showers and sleep. The rest of the place, however, was still a complete disaster.

Carrying a pail of steaming water, her mother returned from the kitchen just as Kate poked gingerly at an unidentified gray object on the decrepit living room sofa. “I think it was a cushion,” Avery said.

“I’ll take your word for it.” Katie shoved the putative pillow into a giant plastic garbage bag, already half full of similar unidentified objects. The house should have been cleared out by the sellers, but pursuing them out of state to their retirement villa was more hassle than doing the cleanup themselves. “How much money have you set aside for hauling trash, Mom?”

“Sorry? What was that?” Avery set the pail by the fireplace and pulled on rubber gloves.

“I wondered if you’d budgeted enough money for hauling trash,” Kate repeated.

“Oh, yes, I’m sure I have. I got several quotes, you know. It’s less expensive than you’d expect. Or less expensive than I expected, anyway.” Avery looked vaguely around the room, as if waiting for hard copy of the quotes to leap into her hand. “The men I contracted with are scheduled to come on Friday, and they’ve agreed to rip up the carpet, too.”

“Good.” Kate reviewed her mental checklist. “The hardwood gets refinished next week, right?”

“Hardwood?” Avery looked vague again. “Oh, yes, the floors. That’s right. They’ll take a day to sand everything down and then another day to apply the coating. They promised to be done by the middle of next week, so I decided to hold off on getting any more of my new furniture delivered until then. Thank goodness, everything I ordered seems to have arrived from the manufacturers.”

“Sounds like you have a plan. You seem preoccupied today, Mom. What’s up?” Kate gingerly pulled out the sofa, afraid of what she might discover between the furniture and the wall. Dust bunnies frolicked in abundance, but there were no live critters, thank God.

“I am a little distracted, I suppose. I’ve…had some surprising news.” The tension in her mother’s voice was palpable. Belatedly, Kate realized that Avery had been on edge the entire afternoon. She would have noticed earlier if they hadn’t mostly been working in separate rooms.

“Surprising good news?” she asked, straightening. Searching her mother’s face, she shook her head. “No, it’s bad news, isn’t it?”

“I’m not sure.” Avery’s laugh was harsh, an astonishing fact in and of itself. Kate was even more astonished when her mother covered her face with her grimy hands and burst into tears. “Oh, God, how can I possibly say I’m not sure? I loved him! I did. Once upon a time I loved him. So what’s the matter with me?”

Loved who? Kate put her arm around her mother’s slender shoulders. “I could answer that better if you’d give me some clue as to what we’re talking about.”

Avery wiped her tears with the backs of her hands, leaving a streak of dirt. Not only that, she didn’t immediately find a pure white tissue and remove the smudge. Kate wouldn’t have been shocked if the world had shuddered to an immediate halt at such a betrayal of the accepted order.

“I saw Luke Savarini today,” Avery said.

The name struck Kate like a blow. She stepped back, hoping her smile looked more natural than it felt. “Well, that would certainly be enough to reduce me to tears. I can’t imagine why he made you cry, though. He’s quite civilized in company.”

Kate’s feeble attempt at humor flew right past her mother. Avery drew in a short, shaky breath. “Luke was in Washington, D.C., with his sister a couple of weeks ago. They were eating dinner in a restaurant there. Luke says he saw…your father…eating dinner there, too. Right in the restaurant. In D.C. Well, a suburb, actually. But basically in the D.C. area.”

Kate knew she couldn’t have heard right. “Wait. I’m confused. Luke was in Washington, D.C., with one of his sisters and he claimed that he saw my father? He saw Ron Raven?”

“So he says. He seems remarkably sure of his facts.”

“Did he speak to my father?” Kate realized she was shaking. Despite that, her voice sounded oddly controlled.

“No.”

“Why not? Didn’t it occur to him that it might be helpful to find out what the hell my father was doing alive in Washington, D.C., when everyone thinks he’s dead in Miami?” She was still shaking and it was a lot easier to be sarcastic than to work out what she was actually feeling.

“It seems that your father…that Ron ran away as soon as he realized that Luke had recognized him. Luke tried to catch up with him, but he couldn’t. Apparently, there was a woman with him.”

Kate’s brow wrinkled. “With Luke?”

“No, sorry. I’m not being entirely coherent, am I? Your father was with another woman. Quite a young woman. Luke thought she might be in her thirties. Early forties at most. But he definitely said that your father recognized him.”

She was going to kill Luke, Kate decided. She was going to find some long, slow, agonizing way of causing his death and then she was going to stand over him and watch it happen. In fact, she wouldn’t just stand passively and watch. She’d dance a celebratory jig as the lifeblood oozed out of him. For what conceivable reason had the stupid man found it necessary to share his delusions about seeing Ron Raven? Her father was dead, murdered in a Miami hotel room along with his companion, a still-unidentified woman. Luke must know how badly Avery had suffered from the media frenzy provoked by reports of Ron’s bigamy, not to mention the sinister security video of the body bags being wheeled onto the yacht, presumably by the murderer himself. Why would Luke choose to open a wound that had been closed only with great courage and slow, painful effort on her mother’s part?

“Obviously Luke was mistaken.” Kate managed by some miracle to keep the rage out of her voice. Luke had no idea how lucky he was not to be anywhere within striking range of her supersharp chef’s knives or he’d be singing soprano from now on. “Heavens, Mom, you’re not paying any attention to his nonsense, are you? He must have sniffed a few too many of his own cognac fumes.”

“Is that what you think? That Luke was imagining things?”

“Yes, that’s what I think! Of course it is.” Contemplating the alternative possibility that her father might be alive and deliberately hiding from his wives and children left Kate feeling sick to her stomach. She had assumed nothing much worse could happen than losing her father before she had a chance to confront him about the lifetime of lies and deception that he’d perpetrated. Apparently she’d been wrong. The possibility that he might be alive and in hiding was even more difficult than accepting his death. Anger lodged as a hot pain in her chest, making it difficult to breathe.

Avery turned and recommenced scrubbing the shelves built at the side of the brick fireplace. She spoke to the wall. “The thing is…Well, in an odd sort of way, what Luke said didn’t come as a total surprise to me.”

Kate stared at her mother’s back. “I don’t understand.”

“After the initial shock of Ron’s disappearance wore off, I was never as sure as everyone else that he was dead. I know his…other wife in Wyoming never doubted that he’d been murdered. But I…wondered.”

“What are you telling me, Mom?” Kate forced herself not to shout as she struggled to keep her anger with Luke separate from the surprise caused by her mother’s admission. “Why aren’t you sure Dad was…is dead? The police seemed pretty certain of what happened that night in Miami.”

“Yes, I know, but the penthouse was mortgaged, you see.”

“You’re going to have to spell that out more clearly, Mom. What has a mortgage on the penthouse got to do with Dad’s death?”

“What happened to the money?” Avery asked. “That’s what I kept asking myself after the initial shock wore off. Where is it?”

“Where is what money, Mom?” Kate was beginning to worry that her mother was losing it. Normally the most precise of women, right now Avery was making no sense at all.

“The money Ron raised with the mortgage,” Avery explained. “We owned the penthouse free and clear, I’m sure of it. It’s true that I never paid close attention to Ron’s business deals—there were so many of them—but I was quite well-informed about our personal finances.” Her voice flattened. “Or, to be more accurate, I was well informed about those parts of our personal finances that Ron felt safe to share with me.”

Which left out a hell of a lot, Kate reflected grimly, given that her father had been supporting another entire family in Wyoming that neither she nor her mother had known anything about until Ron Raven was officially declared missing.

“There could be a dozen reasons why Dad needed cash,” she pointed out. “Hundreds, in fact, given that he lied to both of us all the time. We haven’t the faintest clue what was going on with his finances, or any other part of his life, if you get right down to it.” After months of coming to terms with her father’s betrayal, Kate managed to state the sordid truth without being overwhelmed by bitterness.

“That’s true,” her mother conceded. “But Ron never expressed any need to mortgage the penthouse in the twenty years since we bought it. Why, two months before he disappeared, did he suddenly decide to take out a three-million-dollar loan? We weren’t facing any unexpected expenses, and it’s inconsistent with the way he’d handled our personal finances for the entire time we were together.”

“Because he didn’t consult you about the mortgage, you mean?”

Avery nodded. “In retrospect, I understand he wasn’t really asking for my opinion when we discussed our personal finances, but he at least went through the motions. I had the illusion we were making decisions together, even if the reality was otherwise. But Ron never breathed a word about the mortgage on the penthouse. I only found out it existed after he’d disappeared. Why?”

It seemed to Kate that her mother was placing too much emphasis on a relatively trivial part of the myriad deceptions Ron Raven had perpetrated on them both. The penthouse mortgage might be the only financial deception Avery had uncovered to this point. That didn’t mean it was the only deception Ron had engaged in, not by a long shot.

“Perhaps Dad wanted to put extra capital into his business?” she suggested. “Have you talked to Uncle Paul about it? That must be the answer, Mom. Raven Enterprises needed an infusion of cash for some reason, and Dad raised the money by taking out a mortgage on the penthouse.”

“I’ve talked to my brother about the mortgage several times and he insists there was no three-million-dollar infusion of cash into Raven Enterprises. Besides, he says the business was in great shape, although the legal difficulties since Ron’s disappearance have created problems for Paul going forward, which is why he hasn’t been able to give me any cash from the business while we’re waiting for the wills to be probated. The lawyers are controlling everything. However, according to Paul, at the time Ron disappeared there would have been no reason at all for your father to seek extra business capital.”

“So how does Uncle Paul explain the mortgage on your home?”

“Well, he doesn’t, of course. But you know my brother. He’s a Southern gentleman of the old school and he’s secretly convinced I’ll get brain fever and go into a decline if he discusses money and finance with me. Paul insists the penthouse was always mortgaged and Ron simply refinanced at a better rate. He claims the documents I found weren’t a new mortgage. They were refinancing papers that just happened to be signed a couple of months before your father disappeared.”

“If Uncle Paul says there was no three-million-dollar payment into Raven Enterprises, then he must be right,” Kate said. “He was Dad’s business partner, after all. But that doesn’t mean you’re wrong about the mortgage on the penthouse. It just suggests Dad invested the three million elsewhere.”

She needed to have a come-to-Jesus talk with her uncle, Kate reflected. Paul had been wise to protect his sister from unnecessary worries about finances in the immediate turmoil following Ron’s disappearance and the discovery of his bigamy. However, six months had passed and it wasn’t sensible for Paul to continue shielding her mother from every harsh reality. God knew, with all the details of their private lives that had been blazoned across the nation’s TV screens, it was almost comic for her uncle to adhere to the quaint, 1950s custom of protecting the womenfolk from a clear understanding of their own financial situation.

“You’re right,” Avery said. “Ron must have invested the money elsewhere, because I’m sure there was no mortgage on the penthouse until very recently. But arguing with your uncle is so exhausting I just gave up.” She looked chagrined by the admission, as well as the implicit criticism of her elder brother, mild as it was. “I’d have to search through boxes and boxes of papers to confirm my belief, and there’s always seemed so many other, more useful ways to employ my time….”

“You’re right. There were. There’s no reason to sound guilty, Mom. Dad’s financial affairs are one giant mess. Trying to pick apart one tiny thread of the muddle makes no sense. Between us and the family in Wyoming, we have what seems like a thousand lawyers and accountants already poking around in Dad’s finances. You’re smart to leave them to it and get on with your life.”

“Maybe, except that once I’d talked with Luke this morning, it began to seem as if I might have been right to suspect the mortgage on the penthouse was significant.”

“I’m not following, Mom. Why does it matter? Except that you’re potentially three million dollars worse off, of course. But even if the penthouse had been free of all mortgages, wouldn’t the proceeds from the sale have gone into probate, anyway?”

“I expect so, since nobody can decide which of Ron’s wills is valid, if any. But if your father isn’t dead…if he’s alive…doesn’t it strike you that there might be a connection between the sudden three-million-dollar mortgage on our penthouse and his disappearance?”

The meaning of Avery’s comment hit Kate with the force of a physical blow. “Are you suggesting…” She needed to swallow before she could finish her question. “Are you suggesting that Dad mortgaged the penthouse so that he would have money to finance his disappearance?”

“Well, it certainly seems a possibility, wouldn’t you say? I’ve…wondered about that over the past few months.”

“If he’s alive, I guess it’s a possibility.” Kate’s mouth felt dry and her stomach tightened in a sickly knot. “I just don’t see any reason to believe he’s alive.”

“Luke saw him. Isn’t that a reason?”

“Luke thinks he saw him,” Kate corrected.

Avery’s scrubbing intensified as if she wanted to erase her own suspicions. She’d scrubbed so hard the shelves were beginning to show evidence of having once been white. “There’s another thing about the money. Do you remember that your father also took out a three-million-dollar loan with Adam’s bank, using Ellie’s ranch in Wyoming as collateral?”

“Yes, I knew about that.” Kate nodded. “It was the need to find out what had happened to the missing money that brought Adam and Megan together in the first place, and then sent them chasing off to Mexico in pursuit of the missing millions. Adam and I have talked quite a bit about the way Dad double-crossed him, of course.”

The pursuit of the money, and the complicated reasons behind its disappearance, had interested Kate less than the fact that her mother’s youngest brother had ended up marrying Megan Raven. Adam was her second favorite relative in the world after her mother and she’d wondered many times in the past few weeks how her father would react to the news that the daughter of his first wife had married the younger brother of his bigamous second wife. Kate saw a definite hint of ironic retribution tucked away in the fact of Adam and Megan’s marriage.

Her mother turned around, her scrubbing brush dripping soapsuds. She spoke with careful lack of inflection. “Doesn’t it strike you as oddly symmetrical that both Ron’s so-called wives ended up three million dollars poorer than they might have expected? And in both cases because of loans that Ron took out using our homes as collateral?”

Kate felt a tiny shiver run down her spine. “Mom, you’re seeing patterns that don’t exist.”

“The pattern exists,” Avery said tartly, dumping her scrubbing brush into the pail of hot water with a decisive splash. “The only question for discussion is whether the pattern is a coincidence or deliberately planned.”

Kate’s heart started to thump uncomfortably fast. “The loan on the ranch in Wyoming was taken out a couple of years before Dad disappeared, not a couple of months.”

“I’m well aware of that. It makes you wonder how long your father was planning his disappearance, doesn’t it?”

Her mother’s sarcasm was unprecedented. Kate pressed her hands against her stomach and drew in a long, deep breath. “Mom, let’s get back to the earlier question. The important one. Forget the mortgages on the penthouse and the Wyoming ranch for a moment. Are you telling me that you think Luke might be right? That Dad really was eating dinner in a Washington, D.C., restaurant, and Luke saw him?”

Avery used a clean rag to mop up the soapy water pooled on the shelves. “All I can say is that Luke definitely believes he saw Ron. And Luke always struck me as a man with both feet planted firmly in the real world. You know him better than I do, of course. Does he strike you as a man given to fantasizing about dead people?”

“No.” It was a measure of her turmoil that Kate didn’t even think something rude about Luke, much less say it out loud. “If Luke is right, shouldn’t somebody notify the police about what he saw?”

“Luke tried calling the police in Miami and here in Chicago, too. That was before he contacted me. He said they had no interest in taking his report.”

Kate felt a surge of relief. “Well, Mom, doesn’t that tell you something?”

“Yes,” Avery said, the bite of uncharacteristic sarcasm still in her voice. “It tells me that police departments tend to be overworked and that since they have a suspect in Ron’s death who is a convicted felon, they have no interest whatsoever in spending a lot of time revising their theory of the case.”

Kate hesitated for a moment, but the question needed to be asked. “Okay, given that the police aren’t likely to do much, if anything, do you want to reopen the case, Mom?”

“I don’t know. I think so. I’m not sure.” Avery tried to smile at her own hopeless indecision. She couldn’t hold the smile. “What if Ron has lost his memory? What if he desperately wants to come home and doesn’t know how to find us?” She leaned against the damp bookshelves, her face whiter than the shelves behind her. The pallor was less shocking to Kate than the fact that Avery still hadn’t found a tissue and wiped the dust and dried tears from her cheeks. Even in the immediate aftermath of Ron’s disappearance, when Avery had been battered by the news that her husband was a bigamist and their twenty-eight-year marriage didn’t legally exist, she had never lost her composure this completely.

Her heart aching on her mother’s behalf, Kate forced herself to speak gently. “Didn’t you tell me the man in the restaurant ran away as soon as he saw Luke?”

Avery nodded. “Luke chased Ron…the man…into the parking lot, but he drove off before Luke could speak to him.” Her voice became wistful. “I wish Luke had managed to catch up with…whoever it was.”

From Kate’s perspective, it was hard to imagine any way that her mother’s happiness would be increased by tracking down the man who’d already seduced her, gotten her pregnant, deceived her through twenty-eight years of bigamous marriage, and now might be perpetrating the ultimate deception by pretending to be dead. A fresh surge of anger swept over her. Dammit, Luke shouldn’t have gone to her mother and presented her with this terrible news! Kate recognized that she was angry with Luke because that was a whole lot easier than being angry with her maybe-not-dead father, but that didn’t alter the facts. Luke should have come to her with his stupid theories instead of destroying her mother’s hard-won peace of mind.

Unfortunately, the genie was out of the bottle and there was no point trying to stuff him—or Ron—back inside again. She and her mother needed to decide what to do next. She saw only two viable choices: she could talk to Luke in the hope that he had sufficient information to enable a private detective to track down the man in the restaurant. Or they could ignore what they’d heard and carry on as if they’d never learned there was a possibility Ron Raven might be alive.

It wasn’t in the least difficult to decide which option she preferred. If her father was alive and hiding from his families, as far as Kate was concerned he could stay lost forever. And that was before she contemplated the horror of having to meet with Luke Savarini again, an activity that ranked right up there with the joys of having a limb amputated without benefit of anesthesia.

Sadly, Avery’s attitude made it clear that her choice would be to look for Ron and attempt to confirm whether her bigamous husband was alive or dead. It was a measure of just how much she loved her mother that Kate made the offer.

“Would you like me to talk to Luke and find out if there’s any information he has that might help us to track down the man he saw in the restaurant?”

“Would you?” Avery’s face lit up. “You wouldn’t mind?”

“Not at all.” She hoped her smile didn’t look as sickly as it felt.

“Thank you so much, Katie.” Avery sighed with visible relief. “I was so overwhelmed this morning that I really didn’t ask many sensible questions at all. It might be impossible to trace the man Luke saw, but it would be nice to know that for certain, wouldn’t it?”

“I guess so.”

This might be a time of emotional confusion for Avery, but she was a sensitive woman and she wasn’t self-absorbed enough to ignore Kate’s lack of enthusiasm. “I’m being silly,” she said quickly. “There’s no reason in the world for you to question Luke if meeting him again makes you uncomfortable. Good heavens, I’m more than capable of asking him if he has any other snippets of information that he didn’t share with me this morning.”

Avery sounded determinedly brave and cheerful and Kate castigated herself for being a mean, selfish daughter. She knew how excruciatingly hard her mother found it to discuss Ron’s multiple deceptions and criminal acts with anyone, much less someone she knew only as her daughter’s discarded boyfriend. For goodness’ sake, how tough could it be to have a brief, businesslike meeting with Luke?

“There’s no need for you to talk with him, Mom. I’ll track him down in one of his restaurants tonight and find out what other information he has, if anything.”

“So soon?” Avery’s face lit up. “Oh, that would be great.”

“I’m grateful for the excuse to stop cleaning,” Kate lied. “You’re such a slave-driver, you’ll have me working until midnight unless I take this chance to escape.”

Avery shot her daughter a grateful glance, the only sign she gave of seeing through Kate’s cheery facade. “I’ll treat you to dinner first,” she said, stripping off her rubber gloves. “We’ve both been working long enough. You get to pick the restaurant.”

The way Kate’s stomach was churning right now, cream of wheat struck her as about as daring a meal as she should risk. “Actually, Mom, if you don’t mind, I’ll skip dinner. Given the way Luke runs between restaurants, it might take me the rest of the evening to track him down. If I do manage to reach him, I’ll get back to you tomorrow morning, okay?”

“That’s fine. I suppose there’s no real rush.” Avery’s voice became acerbic again. “Ron’s been missing for six months. I daresay I can wait a few more hours to discover whether he’s dead or moved on to greener pastures and a younger woman.” She ruined the effect of her breezy indifference by walking out of the room at high speed.

Her mother was crying again, Kate reflected grimly. Damn Luke! And double damn Ron Raven. Her confusion finally gelled into certitude. She hoped her father was alive, she realized. That way she could have the pleasure of killing him as soon as she found him. Maybe she could build a bonfire and tie her loser ex-boyfriend and her loser father to opposite stakes. The way she felt about them right now, that would make a definite two-for-one bargain.

Six

It was late that night before Kate caught up with Luke at Luciano’s II, his restaurant in Winnetka. Walking into the once-familiar surroundings, she was impressed all over again by the subtle welcome offered by the clever layout and the classic Tuscan decor. The damp October night turned the log fire burning in the brick fireplace into a cheery focal point. The ocher of the rough plaster walls blended soothingly with the rusty-coral table linens, and an inviting aroma of herbs and simmering sauces seeped out from the kitchen. Cilantro and garlic, Kate thought, and red wine. If her stomach hadn’t been giving such an excellent imitation of a butter churn in full operation, she might actually have felt a spark of appetite.

The dining room was full, and the hum of conversation was loud enough to suggest everyone was having a good time without being intrusive. Luke had been working to upgrade the acoustics of the room at the time their relationship ended, and his investment had apparently paid off.

She hadn’t called to let Luke know she was coming. Talking to him on the phone would be difficult in any circumstances, given the way their relationship had ended. She’d decided it would be impossible with Ron Raven as the subject of their conversation. Now that she was here, though, she wondered if a phone call might not have been smarter after all. At the best of times, thinking about her father tended to provoke the urge to scream with rage or sob inconsolably, and meeting with Luke Savarini was light years away from the best of times. Kate broke into a sweat just imagining the horror of bursting into tears when she was around him.

By a significant effort of will, she brought her feelings under control. She was cool, she was calm, and there was no reason to suppose she’d embarrass herself. Provided she didn’t allow her fears about her father and her worries about her mother to bleed over into what should be a brief, polite conversation, all would be well. God knew, Luke was likely to be as anxious to end the discussion as she was. Neither of them had any interest in reigniting a flame that had caused burns of life-threatening severity without providing either warmth or light.

The hostess waiting by the door was new, which was a relief. Kate spoke her carefully rehearsed piece before her courage ran away and died. “Hi, I understand from the executive sous-chef at Luciano’s on Chestnut that Luke Savarini is working here this evening. Would you tell him that Kate Fairfax would like to speak with him? I realize this is a busy time and I can come back later if that would be more convenient.”

“Kate Fairfax, did you say?” The hostess smiled, giving no hint that she’d ever heard Kate’s name before. The TV coverage had been so blistering when her father disappeared that Kate still half expected to be recognized everywhere she went. The gradual return of anonymity was a blessing she appreciated every day.

“Yes, that’s right. Luke and I are old friends.” A slight misrepresentation, but she could hardly announce she was a former lover who, in normal circumstances, would prefer being locked in a small cage with a large crocodile rather than spend time with him.

“I’ll let him know you’re here.”

“Thanks so much.”

The hostess headed toward the kitchens and Kate gratefully stopped smiling. She picked up one of the heavy, leather-bound menus to check what was new since her last visit. She soon realized she was only pretending to read and put the menu down again. Her stomach continued to whirl. She strove to ignore it. For the past several months, it sometimes seemed that denial had become her default state of being.

The hostess returned. “Luke says he’ll be right out. He asked me to bring you a glass of wine from the bar while you’re waiting. Our house white is a Garofoli and the house red is a Valpolicella—”

“I appreciate the offer, but I’m fine, thanks.” Sipping a glass of wine struck Kate as an invitation to disaster. She’d changed into dress pants, a cream silk blouse and a cropped, brass-buttoned black jacket before coming in search of Luke, and she hoped she looked reasonably put together. Sadly, the aura of a woman in charge of her life was sheer illusion. Unlike her mother, who had clearly been a princess in a previous incarnation, Kate often felt that her social graces were no more than a paper-thin layer stretched over a seething swamp of klutziness.

She heard a slight stir in the dining room and looked up. Luke had come out from the kitchen and was walking toward her, leaving little ripples of interested conversation in his wake. The seven months since she’d last seen him had clearly done nothing to dim his charisma. Kate accepted, almost with resignation, that her skin pricked and her nipples tingled in automatic response to his approach. Even her stomach stopped whirling long enough to clench with sexual tension.

She supposed she shouldn’t be surprised by the instant tug of desire. Somehow, though, she’d managed to forget the power of Luke’s sexual magnetism. Still, they hadn’t broken up because they’d fallen out of lust, she reminded herself. Lust had worked well for them, right up to the end.

What the two of them had lost was mutual respect and any vestige of trust. Which made for a pretty comprehensive indictment of their relationship, she thought wryly. Her own final act of betrayal had simply been an exclamation point to punctuate the end of a relationship that had already died.

Luke was wearing the traditional starched white chef’s jacket and black cotton pants. The jacket was pristine, presumably because he’d changed before leaving the kitchen. He’d discarded the mandatory head gear and his short-cropped hair stood up in a thick, dark crest above his tanned complexion and smoke-gray eyes. Despite spending twelve-hour working days inside various kitchens, Luke looked as if he made his living outdoors. She knew he started each morning, almost regardless of the weather, with a five-mile run along the lakeshore, which partly explained the permanent tan and the impressive physique. She admired his self-discipline, but even when they first started dating and the gloss was still pretty blinding, she’d wished he could be a little less perfect.

They’d needed to break up before Kate was willing to admit the extent to which she’d been intimidated by Luke’s assets. He had so darn many, aside from self-made wealth and good looks: his warmth, his friendliness, his easy sense of humor and his ability to roll with the punches while still working at a fiendish pace.

Then there was his storybook Italian family. She’d loved hearing tales about his brothers and sisters, not to mention his ever-expanding crop of nieces and nephews. She’d envied him the casual camaraderie of his five siblings and the general aura of controlled chaos surrounding his family life, although toward the end of their relationship she’d begun to wonder why she’d never met any of his relatives face-to-face. She knew Luke well enough to realize that any girlfriend he was serious about would be required to get along with his family.

Even more than his family, she’d envied the ease with which Luke showed his emotions. If he was happy, he laughed. When he cooked for her, he hummed as he worked, completely indifferent to the fact that he was always off-key. When they made love, his passion was all-consuming, his attention totally devoted to her. If he was angry, he yelled. And when the anger passed, it was forgotten, with no lingering bitterness or need to prove he’d been right all along.

She’d been with Luke the night he learned that his maternal grandfather had died from complications after supposedly routine surgery, and he’d cried as he heard the news. Apparently he’d never received the memo informing him that macho men were required to keep a stiff upper lip at all times. Kate’s grandparents, Southern aristocrats who believed that gentlemen and ladies should avoid behaving like men and women whenever possible, would have been appalled by Luke’s emotionalism. She had simply loved him more for his lack of inhibitions.

Luke’s ability to grieve openly had haunted her in the aftermath of her father’s disappearance. He had seemed to know instinctively how to integrate death and mourning into the natural order of his life. Kate, by contrast, had floundered. Her father’s death brought nothing but unanswered questions and the hurt of issues left permanently unresolved. Her sadness at his loss seemed too complicated to grasp, let alone to express in something as mundane as tears.

Kate instructed herself to stop wallowing in the past and focus on coping with the present. Luke had paused to chat at several tables as he crossed the dining room, but now he was only steps away from the hostess station. Steps away from her. Kate wished she could greet him with a casual smile and a throwaway comment about…something. Unfortunately, when your last encounter involved the sort of brutal betrayal that left you internally bleeding, it was a bit difficult to come up with anything that didn’t sound either snide or demented.

Luke halted a couple of feet away and simply stood there, saying nothing. She pretended to look at him but was actually careful to avoid meeting his gaze. Her brain was a blank, but eventually she managed to manipulate her mouth into a smile. At least, she hoped it was a smile and not a grimace.

She held out her hand. “Luke, thank you for meeting with me on such short notice.”

He ignored her hand. “You’re welcome.” His icy tone belied the polite words. “I assume you’re here to talk about your father.”

“Yes, if we could.” She let her hand drop to her side, her voice chilling to match his. If she’d expected the passage of seven months to heal the wounds of their parting, she had obviously been delusional.

“Let’s go to my office.” He turned without waiting for her to respond, not bothering to check if she was following as he wove a swift path to the tiny room set aside for him to make phone calls, pay bills and meet with vendors. Unlike the colorful dining rooms, or the shiny stainless steel of the spacious kitchens, his offices in all three restaurants were tiny, white-walled cubes. Small enough to be oppressive, and cold enough to form a suitably icy background for their conversation, Kate thought bleakly.

“I hope your mother wasn’t upset by what we discussed this morning.” Luke stood behind his desk and didn’t suggest that either of them should sit down. If body language was anything to go by, his attitude to this meeting was several degrees less enthusiastic than her own.

“Of course my mother is upset.” Kate bit back the urge to suggest he should refrain from making ridiculous statements. “Six months ago she found out that the man she’d loved for twenty-eight years was a bigamous, cheating liar. Then she was informed he’d been murdered. The next cheery little revelation was that her supposed husband had left far less money than anyone would have thought possible. What funds did exist went straight to probate, where the lawyers are having a grand time charging huge sums of money to unravel a quarter century of my father’s carefully manufactured deceptions. In the meantime, my mother’s been forced to sell her home of a dozen years and adjust to the fact that at least half her friends weren’t actually friends at all, merely hangers-on, out for what they could get. Now you summon her to your presence so that you can pass on the news that—big surprise!—maybe Ron Raven is alive after all.” She let out an exasperated breath. “How in the world do you think she feels?”

Luke’s voice and expression both remained cool. “Right now I imagine she’s teetering somewhere between overwhelmed and devastated.”

“Your imagination is correct. I’m wondering what the upside of your revelation was supposed to be.”

“The fact that Avery might be able to uncover the truth about what really happened to her husband?”

Kate made an impatient sound. “Where my father is concerned, truth is likely to remain unavailable however much we scrabble in the dust he left behind.”

“It’s clear you disapprove of my decision to tell your mother what I saw.”

“Yes, of course I disapprove. In effect you told her that Ron Raven cared so little about her that he was willing to fake his own death to avoid ever seeing her again. Thanks so much for your comforting words!”

He winced at her sarcasm. For a moment, his guarded expression broke down, revealing unmistakable self-doubt. “I felt I owed your mother the truth precisely because Ron lied to her for so many years.”

Kate wasn’t ready to acknowledge that Luke might have found himself in an almost impossible position. “You should have talked to me,” she said tersely. “Not my mother.”

Luke’s smile was wintry. “Maybe, but I was never into masochism, Katie. Having my balls cut off and shoved down my throat comes way down on my list of ways I want to spend the morning.”

Goose bumps erupted all over her arms when he called her Katie, even though the endearment was tucked inside a major insult. She reminded herself that her body was simply responding to ingrained sexual cues after months without sex. In her current celibate state, she could probably watch Patrick Dempsey making out with a TV lover and her hormones would provide the same knee-jerk response. And, watching Patrick, she’d get the sexual buzz without the added insult.

“For some reason, my mother believes your story about seeing Ron Raven might actually be true.” She hadn’t intended to sound so hostile, but Luke’s presence suffocated her, destroying her good intentions. She struggled to moderate her tone. “My mother asked me to find out if you had any additional information we might be able to hand over to a private investigator in the hope that he would be able to track down the man you saw in Washington, D.C.”

“Do you believe I saw your father?” Luke asked. His voice was unexpectedly quiet and the question seemed less of an attack, more of a genuine request for her opinion.

Kate hadn’t yet summoned the courage to examine that question. She’d focused on her mother’s state of mind and Luke’s transgressions mostly because it let her off the hook in terms of her own reaction to the eerie possibility that her father was alive.

“I’m sure you believe you saw him,” she said finally. Even when she’d first heard the news, she’d never doubted Luke’s sincerity.

“That’s not what I asked.”

She shrugged. “You knew my father quite well. I’m assuming the lighting was adequate and you saw him reasonably close up?”

“Yes.” Luke’s hesitation was almost imperceptible. “I heard him laugh before I looked at him. I was talking to my sister when I heard this familiar sound and I thought, My God, that sounds just like Ron Raven. I glanced up, not expecting to see him, of course, despite the laughter. But there he was. Eating dinner with an attractive, dark-haired woman and looking as if he was enjoying himself. For a couple of seconds, I was literally too shocked to move.”

The sickness in Kate’s stomach returned with renewed intensity. Hearing Luke describe the incident gave her father’s possible reappearance a reality it had previously lacked. An unwelcome reality, she realized. “There doesn’t sound as if there’s a whole lot of room for you to have made a mistake.”

“No. Still, I never exchanged a single word with the man and never heard him speak to anyone else. Everybody’s supposed to have a double somewhere in the world. Perhaps I saw Ron’s.”

She wished she could believe that, but her ability to ignore inconvenient facts wasn’t quite up to the task. “My mother said the man ran away when you tried to approach him.”

Luke nodded. “He was sitting right next to the door, and I was across the room, tucked into an alcove, with at least half a dozen tables between me and the exit. I chased him into the parking lot, but there was no way to stop him driving off once he made it into his car. I discovered it’s a lot more difficult to catch somebody than it looks in the movies.”

“I guess you didn’t manage to get the license number of his car as he drove away?”

“Actually, I did.”

“You did?” She glanced up, startled. “Could we trace it, then?”

“I already had a private investigator track it down before I contacted your mother. The car was a brand-new Mercedes, and it was registered to a man called Stewart M. Jones.”

For a second, Kate was puzzled. Then she realized that—of course—if her father wanted to avoid being discovered he couldn’t go around calling himself Ron Raven. “If you have those vehicle registration details, my mother and I should be able to track the car’s owner back to an address, shouldn’t we? I assume you have to give an address when you register a car in Virginia?”

“Apparently, yes. But my investigator reported that Stewart Jones sold the vehicle the day after I chased him into the parking lot. What’s more, the address given on the accompanying paperwork isn’t valid.”

“He gave a fake address?” Kate realized her surprise was misplaced. “Well, of course he would have to, I guess, since he was trying to stop you tracking him down.”

“The address wasn’t fake in the sense it didn’t exist. It just wasn’t Mr. Jones’s current place of residence. According to my investigator, somebody calling himself Mr. Jones lived at the address for a few weeks back in the summer. But he moved away from that particular location a couple of months ago.”

She sighed. “In other words, the car is pretty much a dead end in terms of tracking down Mr. Jones.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“You clearly believe that Stewart Jones is simply another name for Ron Raven, and that Ron sold his car rather than risk being traced.”

“Yes, that’s what I think.” Luke shrugged. “But take my opinion for what it’s worth. Not much, according to the cops. They’re convinced Ron is dead and that I’m a crime-scene junkie with delusions of seeing dead people. And they’re the experts, after all.”

She wished she could dismiss his story as the ramblings of a nutcase, Kate thought miserably, but his information was almost more compelling because he was so willing to provide her with reasons not to accept it. Luke was among the more down-to-earth people she knew, and she simply couldn’t picture him disrupting an enjoyable dinner with his sister to conjure up imaginary visions of a dead man.

“I appreciate the effort you put into tracking down the man you saw,” she said finally. “It sounds to me as if it really could be my father, so it’s probably just as well you didn’t manage to catch up with him.” She forgot for a moment to hide her feelings and allowed bitterness to seep into her voice. “I don’t see how it can bring my mother anything but grief to have proof that her lying, cheating husband is alive.”

“Ron left behind three children as well as two wives,” Luke said, his voice still quiet. “What does it say about his relationship with them…with you…if he’s determined not to be found? Don’t let him off the hook, Katie. You deserve better from him. For that matter, so do your half brother and sister.”

The absolute last thing she wanted was for Luke to be kind or sympathetic. Kate could feel her composure fraying by the second, unraveled by his gentleness. This would be an excellent moment to make her escape, she decided. So far she and Luke had managed to avoid inflicting serious bodily harm on each other, which had to be a good thing. Not to mention a precarious thing. It would be smart not to tempt fate.

“You’re right.” She inclined her head in acknowledgment. “If my father is alive, he has a lot to answer for. Except that I’m not sure I care enough to ask the questions. Right now, I feel he doesn’t deserve that much attention from me.”

“What about your half brother and sister?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t found the courage to meet them yet. Fortunately for me, I was in Europe when Adam brought Megan to Chicago after they got married.” She stopped abruptly. This was getting too personal again. “Anyway, thanks for all you’ve done, Luke. Sorry about the earlier hostility. I was worried about my mother and took out my worries on you.”

She dredged up a bright, meaningless smile, just to show that they were both grown-ups, and that this was a business conversation despite the intensely personal nature of the topic. “Would you give me the name of the detective you used to track the vehicle registration tags? If my mother should decide to pursue an investigation, it only makes sense to build on the inquiries you’ve already made.”

She felt Luke’s gaze rest on her face, but she avoided looking up. She was getting the same shaky, desperate feeling that had afflicted her in the weeks immediately after she learned Ron Raven had been murdered. She despised herself for still caring about her father, but she could only hide her emotions, not banish them. Luke had always been able to see through her protective barriers more easily than other men and that was a problem, given how badly she wanted to keep her feelings to herself. With all the evidence they already had of Ron Raven’s deceptions and double dealings, it was humiliating to go to pieces over the fact that her father apparently cared about her even less than she’d previously realized. She didn’t want Luke to know how…abandoned…she felt at this moment.

Thankfully, he made no more personal comments. “The investigator I used is called George Klein,” he said. “George is ethical, efficient and easy to work with and I’m happy to recommend him. If you decide to go ahead with an investigation, let me know. I have a couple of other tips that might help. Or they might be completely useless. To be honest, my guess is that your father has already moved on to a different city. He most likely ditched the Stewart Jones identity at the same time as he sold the Mercedes. He’s a man accustomed to planning ahead, so he would have had another identity already waiting for him to step into.”

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