Praise for

SUZANNE FORSTER

“No one combines steamy suspense and breathless thrills like Suzanne Forster!”

—Susan Elizabeth Phillips

“Crackling sexual tension, a twisty mystery and some genuinely dastardly villains make this a fast, fun read.”

—BookPage on The Arrangement

“Hatreds and agendas converge with very wily plot twists as Forster brings her story to an unforeseen ending…a very original and clever story.”

—The Romance Reader on The Arrangement

“Only a writer of Forster’s skill could take the reader to the dark places in this story.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews on The Lonely Girls Club

“An electrifying romantic suspense thriller that grips the audience…and never lets up.”

—The Best Reviews on The Lonely Girls Club

“Forster blends nail-biting suspense and steamy sexual tension into a seamless romantic thriller.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Morning After

“[Forster is] a stylist who translates sexual tension into sizzle.”

—Los Angeles Daily News

SUZANNE FORSTER
THE PRIVATE CONCIERGE

Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks must go to Sergeant Podeska of the West Los Angeles Police Station for sharing his insights about crime and punishment in the west L.A. area. Surely our one conversation set records for producing usable information. It was a pleasure—and if there’s an award for demonstrating grace with rapid-fire questions and patience with a few obtuse ones, the sergeant richly deserves it.

Also, my deep gratitude to the ace concierge team at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza, who will forever remain anonymous to ensure their continued employment. With great good humor they endured my quest for information about the concierge field and everything else relating to Century City and its environs. Plus, they answered questions no concierge should ever have to. Their restaurant recommendations and directions were great, too.

Finally, to reference librarians everywhere, and in particular to the Amazing William of the Los Angeles Public Library, for help above and beyond. And while I’m at it, I can’t forget the entire reference staff at the Newport Beach Public Library, my hometown branch and personal hangout.

Thank you all!

Prologue

Cox, Lucy: juvenile unit, prostitution

Case File: COX022378 15 lapd.juv.dtb

Closed: March 3, 1993

Sealed by Court Order: April 10, 1993

H e removed the legal-size folder from the file cabinet and gave the label a moment of reflection before opening it. Fifteen years ago, he’d stashed copies of the contents of the original case file in this locked cabinet in his home office. It was enough security for his purposes, although he would bring serious suspicion on himself if the file was ever discovered. The case was closed and had been sealed at the request of the juvenile offender, and the L.A. County Courthouse had the only official copy.

But he didn’t work for the law anymore. He worked for himself.

He sat down at his desk, opened the folder and looked at the last entry he’d made in the file: February 23, 1993: She walks free today, her eighteenth birthday. God help the weak of will and the feeble of mind, especially if they’re male.

He almost smiled, remembering his supervisor’s reaction. He’d taken some flack for this case, enough to end his law enforcement career. But he could also remember a time when he’d been more concerned about her, Lucy Cox, than about any unwary man who might cross her path.

Not anymore. He reached for a black-ink ballpoint, the kind he’d preferred for making case notes when he’d been a vice cop in the downtown L.A. bureau. He considered assigning the case a new number, but decided to stay with the original, based in part on his theory that people, like lab rats, didn’t change, they just learned new strategies for getting what they needed. Cynical, maybe, but he had more reason than most men to be that way.

He clicked the push-button pen and began writing the first new entry in fifteen years. It was about her, who she was today and why she hadn’t changed, either. And it was in his own words, his own unfiltered thoughts, because he had every intention of destroying these notes when he’d done what he had to do. No one would ever read this file but him.

Case Notes: Wednesday, October 9, 11:00 p.m.

Her real name is Lucia Cox. She changed it to avoid any association with her criminal past. But she hasn’t left her past behind. She’s still selling what everybody wants. She’s just found a way to make it legal.

He paused, aware of his quickening pulse. This was getting to him, getting too personal. And that was the problem. It was personal. He set down the pen, unable to write as fast as his thoughts were coming. She’d had the power at fifteen when he put her in jail. She was thirty now. She’d been free and on her own since eighteen, and it wasn’t hard to imagine that she’d planned her steps carefully, including choosing the perfect profession. She had some of the country’s highest-profile people in her care.

It should have been a match made in heaven for all concerned, except that Lucy’s clients were dropping like flies, being brought down by scandal, innuendo, and now, death. And no one seemed to get the connection but him. Her clients moved in the special spheres of power and privilege, isolated from the real world and its rules, and from anyone who would dare to tell them the truth. When you were that isolated, who really knew you better than your hairstylist, your personal trainer…or your private concierge?

1

Saturday, October 5

Four days earlier

Ned Talbert hit the brakes so hard his Alfa Romeo Spider snorted and its wheels dug into the gravel like a pawing bull. The back end lifted as if the sports car was about to do a somersault, and Ned’s knees knocked against the dash.

Geysering pebbles splattered the windshield.

He heaved himself back, grunting as the steering wheel disengaged from his ribs. Amazing the air bags hadn’t inflated. He’d barely missed colliding head-on with the entrance gate to Rick Bayless’s cabin in the San Gabriel Mountains.

The gate wasn’t just closed, it was padlocked. Even in the falling light, Ned spotted the shiny new lock as he struggled to get out of the Spider. His legs were jelly. Padlocked? Rick never padlocked the gate—and it wasn’t even 5:00 p.m., too early to close up the place for the night.

Ned broke into a run and didn’t stop. He could see he wasn’t going to get the gate open so he coiled and vaulted the chain-link mesh, leaving a strip of his pant leg on the scrollwork, leaving the door hanging open to his obscenely expensive new car, leaving it all behind, and running like a madman up the road to the darkened mountain cabin a thousand feet away.

Bayless had to be in there.

Ned could have been running the bases at Dodger Stadium. He could have been in the heat of a playoff game, that’s how adrenalized he was. But he wasn’t going to make it to home plate this time. Not without his friend’s help.

It was getting dark, but no light glowed in the cabin windows. Rick’s Jeep Commander sat in the driveway. Maybe he was taking a nap. Ned took all three porch steps in one leap and pounded on the creaky wooden door. No answer. He kept hammering, using his fist and making the door buckle with each blow. How could anyone sleep through this noise? He wondered about the odds of Rick having a girl in there. Ned had never known him to do that, but the way Ned’s luck was going, this would be the time. He hated the thought of interrupting them, but he had no choice. His life was in crisis.

“Rick, you in there?” he bellowed.

Ned hit the door with his shoulder and realized it was bolted. He was going to have to kick it in. Two blows shattered the wood enough that he could reach inside and open the bolt. The interior was dark, but light from the doorway revealed the lower torso of a man sitting in a straight-back chair by the far wall. Ned could see his denim jeans and his bare feet, but little else. His face and shoulders were masked by shadows. It looked like an interrogation scene, except that no one else was in the room.

Ned didn’t notice the gun until he saw Rick’s hands. They were in his lap, cradling a Colt .357 Python. Rick was a former vice cop. He’d carried a gun as long as Ned could remember.

Ned’s legs were jelly again. His whole body was limp.

“Rick, what the hell.” It wasn’t a question. It was a howl of despair. Ned knew what the hell was going on. He knew why Rick had a gun in his hands, and what he intended to do with it—and he couldn’t, by any stretch of good conscience, try to stop his friend, or even change his mind.

Ned knew the whole wretched story. It made no sense that Rick Bayless should be dealing with this. He was young, forty-two years old and in his physical prime. Ned had been jealous of Rick all his life, even though Ned was the star athlete. Hell, women swooned, or whatever it was women did around men who made their eyes lose focus and their minds swim with thoughts of drowning sex. They loved the dude, but only from a distance. No one really got close to Rick Bayless, not even Ned, and they had been friends since…forever.

“Buddy, are you sure? This is it? There aren’t any do overs.”

Ned’s voice broke, and Rick looked up. Ned couldn’t see his friend’s face, but he could see the movement of his head in the shadows. Rick’s gaze could burn paper, and those incinerating rays were now fixed on him. But his voice was tuned low, almost surprised.

“Ned, what are you doing here?”

Ned thought about whether he should tell him the truth, but then blurted it out. “I’ve got a problem, man. It’s bad. I’ve been looking for you everywhere, down at your place in Manhattan Beach, at Duke’s on the pier. I even checked out the old orange grove where you go to walk and think.”

Rick said nothing, which was significant because nothing wasn’t “Get out of here.” It wasn’t “Take care of your own damn problems for a change.”

Ned felt hope slam through him. It nearly knocked him over. Maybe he could talk his friend out of it? Rick was a sucker for a hard-luck story, and this one was the God’s truth.

“I’m being blackmailed. I’m getting anonymous calls from some crazy dude who thinks I’m into hard-core sexual sadism—whips and chains and leaving burn marks on my girlfriend’s genitals. It’s sick, man. He faxed me a picture that I swear isn’t me and Holly, but it looks like us. He’s threatening to fax the tabloids unless I throw the next game.”

Ned’s throat was so dry he couldn’t swallow. It sounded like he was strangling, and the pain was peppery hot. It radiated up his jaw.

He waited for his friend, and finally, Rick shook his head.

“I’m sorry, man,” he said.

“Sorry?”

“I wish I could help.”

Another blow to Ned’s solar plexus. It felt as if his car had hit the gate and flipped this time. Ned wanted to cry. He fucking did. This should not be happening. God shouldn’t do things like this.

“Rick,” he implored, “we go back a long way, all the way. Don’t shut me out now. What can I do to help you?”

“You can leave, Ned. It’s all right. Really, it is.”

Rick’s voice echoed as if it were coming from somewhere else, heaven or another dimension. Ned gaped at the gun. He couldn’t seem to look anywhere else. He was waiting for Rick to say something else, but it didn’t happen.

Rick’s fingers curled possessively around the weapon he held. It was the only thing that mattered to him now, Ned realized, the instrument of his deliverance. He was going to do it.

“You can’t put this off long enough to help a friend who’s in deep trouble?” Ned croaked. “Are you really that determined? Are you really that selfish?”

“Goodbye, buddy.”

Ned nodded, but he couldn’t say anything, not even goodbye. “Yeah” was all he could manage before his throat sealed off.

Somehow he got his shaky legs to the shattered door and closed it behind him, praying that his friend would at least let him get out of earshot. Ned would collapse if he heard that gun go off. If it had been anyone other than Rick, any situation other than this, he would have wrestled the gun away. But there was no way to save Rick. The kindest thing was to let him be. But it was a damn tragedy.

Ned picked his way down the rutted road, knowing he could easily sprain an ankle in one of the deep holes. He had a home game coming up this weekend, and another practice tomorrow.

He almost laughed, but it was the kind of laughter that scorched everything it touched. How crazy was it that he was worried about twisting his ankle when his life was crashing down around him? Everything was on the line, his career, his reputation—

And his best friend was back in that cabin with a gun to his head.

At that moment what Ned recalled most clearly about Rick was the hellishly hard time he’d had teaching the big lug how to swim when they were overgrown sixteen-year-olds. Rick had a morbid fear of water. He’d never told Ned why, but it was crucial that Rick learn to swim, because the two of them had a plan. As soon as they turned seventeen, they were going to quit school, join the army, try out for Delta Force and become bona fide heroes. What better way to escape their drug-infested cesspool of a neighborhood than by fighting the enemies of freedom and democracy? Christ, those were innocent days.

Ned had been a magnet for trouble, and Rick was always bailing him out, but in that one small area, Ned had held the upper hand—Rick’s fear of water. Too bad their plan didn’t work. Even if Rick had learned to swim well enough to make Delta Force, it wouldn’t have mattered. A stomach ailment had kept Ned out, and Rick wouldn’t join without him.

Tears burned his eyes, but what came out of his mouth was helpless laughter. Rick was still scared shitless of water. But no one could deny his courage in cleaning up the streets of downtown L.A. when he’d worked in vice. He’d focused on runaway kids, drugs and street prostitution. The man was a legend. He’d actually busted a city-sponsored youth hostel that was exploiting the kids, and got local businesses to fund a new one, with a rehab staff and vocational classes. Not that he’d ever been officially recognized for it.

He and the brass had butted heads repeatedly, and Rick had finally left the force in a storm of controversy after Rick exposed a sex scandal involving several prominent businessmen. But that was years ago. Now he did private consulting work that couldn’t be discussed, for clients who couldn’t be named.

Ned came to the gate and stopped, wondering how he was going to vault it. He hoped to God his friend was making the right decision. And he hoped he’d just made the right one by leaving. There was nothing left now but to go home and deal with the puke the sky had vomited on his life. It was a filthy, stinking mess, and unless he could find some way to clean it up, baseball stardom as he knew it was over.

“Lead, follow or get the hell out of the way,” Ned said under his breath. It was a Pattonism that he and Rick had barked at each other repeatedly, ad nauseam, when they were kids, sometimes just for fun, but it could be a call to arms, as well. They had grown to adulthood in downtown Los Angeles, an urban jungle, and too often those three options were their only clear choices. Tonight, Ned was getting the hell out of the way.

Sunday, October 6

Three days earlier

Ginger Sue Harvey started every morning at the Midlands’ Gourmet Grocery by straightening the stock on the shelves and cleaning up after customers who moved things around and left them hither and yon. She’d clerked at the store for years, but now, as the newly appointed manager, she took special pride in restoring order and preserving the folksy charm of the converted mountain chalet. And she’d long ago divided her customers into two categories—destroyers and preservers.

No way around it, the ones who messed up her magnificent produce displays or moved merchandise from aisle to aisle were, without a doubt, destroyers. Some even left open boxes of cookies and chomped-on apples lying around. They made her want to call the police. There should be a special cell for people who filched produce and abandoned it, half-eaten and usually already rotting before Ginger Sue found it. The arrogance, the unmitigated arrogance. Really.

But since she couldn’t be calling the cops every day, she punished the destroyers by withholding new product samples. They would have none of the rich black olive butter and Seminole flour crackers she would lay out later today. Now, the preservers, they would be heaped with her gratitude and generosity. She might even make up little gift baskets for them to take home. It was Ginger Sue’s own special brand of behavior modification.

As she straightened the candy bars, gum and other impulse items on her countertop, she saw him through the window. He was putting change in the newspaper box. Her heart kicked into a higher gear, embarrassing her. Apparently she’d been hoping Rick Bayless would show up, even though he was one of the destroyers. He’d been especially bad yesterday when he stopped in for some things on the way up to his cabin.

He’d bought a padlock and two bolt locks and a stack of bath towels, but even more odd was what he didn’t buy. No food or drinks, nothing at all like the overflowing cart he usually brought to her checkout stand. You wouldn’t think a man buying locks could do much damage, but he’d knocked over her magazine stand like he was in a trance. She’d forgiven him that because she could see something was wrong. His expression was bleak, a man under siege. His clenched jaw was the dam against whatever emotion threatened.

She’d asked if he was all right. Of course, he’d said yes. He never talked much, but when you had this man’s unmistakable military bearing, close-cropped sandy hair and pale green eyes, you didn’t need to. Women were happy to fill in the blanks.

Ginger Sue hadn’t stopped filling in blanks since she’d met him, maybe two years ago when he’d bought his mountain cabin for cash on the barrelhead, or so the rumor went. She wouldn’t have thought twice about calling him handsome, despite the scar on his cheek and the notch on his upper lip, maybe even the kind of guy who broke hearts. But she figured it might be just the opposite. Woman trouble could explain his quiet manner and his way of looking at you from an angle, like he was guarding something.

Ginger Sue liked Rick Bayless, although she wasn’t sure why. She was also rather fond of his friend, the baseball player, who sometimes came up to the cabin with a girl in tow. He was polite and respectful, and he struck her as a kind soul, but Ginger Sue couldn’t say she approved of his taste in women. The one he’d had with him lately was a little on the flashy side, with her brightly painted nails and her ankle bracelet. She even wore a ring with a tiny precious gem on her second toe. Ginger Sue called that tacky—and she’d pegged the woman right away as the gold-digger type.

She gave her countertop another swipe with the disinfectant rag as the bell over the door jingled. In Bayless came, paper tucked under his arm. It wasn’t even nine, so he’d probably come down the mountain for some coffee, as he often did when he was in residence. Her store was in the village about twenty minutes’ walk from his place.

As he came closer, she saw that he was unshaven and bleary-eyed, as if he’d been on an all-night toot. It struck her that he might be grieving some loss, although that was probably a silly romantic notion. Keep it simple, sweetie. It’s just a hangover.

“Morning, Mr. Bayless. Anything I can help you with?” she asked.

“Just getting some coffee from the bar, thanks.”

Ginger Sue watched to see if his hand was unsteady as he held his plastic cup under the spigot. “You want a cinnamon bun?” she asked. “That’d go good with your coffee.” She’d heard cinnamon was some kind of sexual turn-on for men. Who knew? It might make him feel better.

When he came over to pay he set down the coffee and dug a money clip from the pocket of his jeans. He let the paper slip from under his arm and it fell open on the counter. As he laid down a five, Ginger Sue turned the paper around and skimmed the headline: Star Outfielder Dies in Murder-Suicide. The color picture of a crime investigation and the insert of a familiar male face caught her eye next.

Ned Talbert? Was that his friend, the baseball star? “Mr. Bayless, did you see this?”

She turned the paper around so he could view it. He’d just taken a sip of his coffee, and he let out a strange, strangled sound. Clearly he hadn’t seen the headline until that moment. Black coffee exploded from his cup as it hit the counter.

“Oh!” Ginger Sue ducked behind the counter, shielding her face with her arms. By the time she came back up, he was gone, flying out the door like a crazy man. The bell rang madly as the door crashed shut behind him.

She grabbed her rag and mopped quickly, but there was no way to stem the steaming morass. He’d scared her half to death, and look at the mess he’d made of her countertop. The coffee had already soaked a stack of TV Guide magazines and some credit-card receipts she hadn’t yet filed. That kind of behavior was enough to get a customer banned from her store, but right now, she just wanted to know what was going on.

2

Rick felt dread bloom in the pit of his stomach, cold and wet, like clammy flesh. He was only a few minutes from Ned’s place in Pacific Palisades, and Rick knew what he would find there, a crime scene in progress. He’d seen a million of them, but this wouldn’t look like anything he recognized. The corpse would not be a lifeless shell to be pitied, lamented and then analyzed down to the last gruesome detail. This was his friend, someone Rick knew only as warm, vital and human. Ned was a living, breathing part of him. And, worse, instead of wearing a badge that would give Rick jurisdiction over the nightmare, instead of taking charge and righting wrongs, he would be helpless to do anything.

His knuckles were blood-white against the steering wheel. He’d made the drive from the mountains to the beach in record time, despite having to ditch a cop in the foothills. The dread had been living inside him since he read the newspaper, but it hadn’t had a chance against his abject disbelief. Not Ned. No way. He couldn’t be dead. He was all that was left of their goofy boyhood dreams. He was supposed to carry the torch, be the man.

Rick had spaced out, driving without a thought to the consequences. But at some point, he’d noticed the vibration in his hands that had nothing to do with his grip on the steering wheel—and the explicable had dawned on him. His friend was dead, and Rick was probably to blame. If he’d listened last night instead of swimming in his own private pool of despair, he might have prevented this. He was guilty and friendless. He had nothing left and nowhere to go, yet his hands were vibrating, and he felt more alive than he had in weeks.

That wasn’t right. It was totally twisted. But there was no time to analyze it now. He’d been mired in self-analysis for days, weeks, and that wasn’t his style at all. Maybe anything that could drag him out of that muck would have sparked some life. But, God, why did it have to be this?

Ned Talbert’s turreted Moorish-style home was on a street that sloped toward the sea. It sat like a crown jewel in a neighborhood where selling prices ran into the millions, and the terraced bluffs below the house featured one palatial property after another.

Rick pulled in down the street from the house, giving himself time to scope things out. Yellow crime scene tape roped off the area, but other than that there was no sign of a CSI team or an active investigation. The deaths had occurred last night, according to the newspaper, some time before 11:00 p.m. Apparently Ned’s housekeeper had stopped by to drop off something she’d forgotten, found the bodies and called the police.

The way it looked now, the forensic guys must have done their work last night, packed up and gone. And so had the media, it seemed. Even a sports star’s lurid death couldn’t command attention for more than a few hours in celebrity-soaked L.A. There was money to be made on the living.

A lone police officer, young enough to be a rookie, sat in his car, clicking away on his cell, probably texting or playing games when he should have been standing guard at the door. Sloppy security, but not unusual with murder-suicides, where in theory the case was already solved before the cops got there. The victim and killer were all wrapped up in one neat bundle, a real timesaver. It was more than some overworked and underappreciated homicide investigators could resist, especially if all the evidence was there, including a suicide note.

But Ned would not have left a suicide note. Writing wasn’t his thing. He couldn’t even sign a birthday card without it sounding lame.

Rick could tell when a crime scene had been body-bagged and zipped up right along with the dead, and this one had, even before the lab results came in. Were the investigators already that certain about what had gone down, or were they more interested in getting rid of this case?

A cover-up? That was jumping the gun, but Rick’s mind was going there anyway. On the way down from the mountain, he had realized what the police could have found in Ned’s house. He was fairly certain the brass would want to keep it under wraps because of the scandal potential, even though the information was old news—very old—which was also why they wouldn’t connect it with the murder-suicide. But Rick could not get his mind around the idea that this was a murder-suicide, which only left one other possibility. Someone wanted Ned and his girlfriend dead.

Rick’s original plan had been to talk his way in. He’d worked with most of the guys at the West Side station at one point or another during his time at LAPD, and knew them well. Some of them had even gone to Ned’s games with him. Cops were a fraternity, as tightly bonded as the military, and they bent the rules for each other. All he wanted was to be escorted inside long enough to have a look around. Shouldn’t be a problem, except that he didn’t recognize the officer in the car, and his gut was telling him this wasn’t like every other crime scene.

Sweat dampened the close-cropped hair on Rick’s scalp. He needed to make his move now, while junior was still otherwise engaged. He slipped on his mirrored aviators, let himself out of the car and started for the house at a lope. With Ned’s front-door key clutched in his hand, he ducked down and swept past the black and white from behind and made it all the way to the porch before he heard the guy shout.

“Police! Stop where you are!”

Rick halted, but made no attempt to turn until he was told.

“Drop what you’re holding. Drop it!”

The house key clinked on the slate walk, dancing end over end until it hit the rise of the porch step.

“Put your hands up and turn around,” the officer barked. “Slowly.”

Rick turned, aware of the officer’s hand hovering over his hip holster. “The guy who lives here is my closest friend,” Rick said. “I just heard what happened. Please, I need to see him.”

The officer blinked, his sole expression of regret, if that’s what it was. “He’s not here. The bodies have been taken to the coroner’s office on Mission Boulevard. If a member of his family can’t be located, you may have to ID him.”

Rick wanted to slam the unfeeling words right down the guy’s throat. He would love to have decked him, but he understood that for some of these guys, lack of empathy was protection—if they bled over every victim, or even one, they wouldn’t be able to do their jobs—so Rick was going to give this SOB the benefit of the doubt.

Rick had never managed that kind of detachment on his watch. He’d been involved up to his neck, and look where that had landed him—on the sidewalk and looking for a job. He’d quit under fire, and probably just before they could fire him. He’d had the audacity to question policy decisions, but he didn’t regret any of it. Nor did he miss the politics and the red tape.

The officer peered at Rick, his brow furrowing. “You look familiar.”

Rick wondered if he’d made a mistake. He was pretty good when it came to names and faces, but he couldn’t place this guy. He just shrugged and left his glasses on. “I doubt it.”

The rookie should have asked to see ID and Rick’s car registration, but he let it go, maybe out of respect for the situation.

“Look, go over to the West L.A. station and tell them who you are. Maybe they’ll give you some information,” he suggested. “If you want, you can drop back tomorrow. The tape should be down by then.”

Rick pretended to be surprised. “They’ve already determined it was murder-suicide, like the newspaper said? What about burglary, a home invasion or some other kind of foul play? What if someone wanted it to look like murder-suicide? A jealous boyfriend? Or another ballplayer, trying to eliminate the competition? A rival team owner?”

The officer’s expression said Ned Talbert wasn’t that good an outfielder. “It was murder-suicide. Trust me, you don’t want to know what happened in there.”

The dread turned soft and queasy in Rick’s stomach. Something fetid coated the back of his throat. He would have said it was the tide, but the onshores rarely carried the sea smells this far. Most of the time, this area existed in a velvet-draped moneyed hush.

Rick didn’t want to know what had happened inside, but he had to find out. Ned wasn’t violent. He was a big chicken—not a coward, just a good-hearted, easygoing guy, who could leap like a ballet dancer to snag a fly and slam a ball into the next county. He would have made a terrible member of Delta Force. He didn’t like guns, and Rick had often kidded him about that, just the way Ned had dissed him about his fear of water. But even if Ned had that kind of violence in him, why kill himself and his girlfriend instead of the blackmailer?

Rick should have listened. He had nothing to go on, not even the most rudimentary details of the blackmail attempts. He didn’t know when, how often or why. But there was another reason Rick needed access to Ned’s house. Years ago, he’d given Ned a package for safekeeping. The police may have found the eight-by-eleven bubble pack in Ned’s safe, and Rick had to get it back, if it was still there. A part of him hoped this investigation was as cut-and-dried as the officer had suggested. It was why Rick hadn’t mentioned Ned’s concerns about blackmail, and wouldn’t.

3

Lane Chandler was doing four things at once, which was about two less than she normally did. She’d pulled up Gotcha.com, a tabloid Web site, on her computer screen, praying not to see any of her clients featured there. She was also mentally updating her to-do list, a never-ending task, and she was undressing…all while chatting with her favorite client on her cell-phone headset.

“She wants gangsta rappers for her sweet-sixteen party?” Lane draped her suit jacket over the back of her office chair and then perched on the edge of her desk, easing the pain of her obscenely overpriced new high heels. She turned enough to continue searching the Gotcha home page, but so far no clients in jail or rehab—and no mention of the one she was specifically looking for.

“Thank you, God,” she said, mouthing the words. She felt lighter, but it was too soon to relax. She had yet to check Jack the Giant Killer’s column.

“Jerry,” she implored her headset, “say no! Someday your daughter will thank you for refusing to book the Gutter Punk Bone Dawgs for her special day.”

“Say no to my Felicity? I’d stand a better chance against the Bone Dawgs.”

Jerry’s loud snort of laughter made Lane wince. She turned away from the computer screen to give her shoes a dark look. The way her day had gone, if her high-profile clients didn’t kill her the Manolo Blahniks would. Fortunately, she had Jerry on the phone rather than in her office, so he couldn’t see her torturing the side slit of her skirt as she bent over and pulled off the exotic footwear that was cutting her insteps to ribbons.

She sighed with relief as she sank her feet into the plush office carpet. Who invented these stilts, the Marquis de Sade? A woman in high heels was supposed to be a sexual thing, creating an inviting tilt to the pelvis and a sensual swivel when she walked. But only a guy into serious S&M could love the pain on this woman’s face.

“Lane, is that heavy breathing?”

“That’s me, in ecstasy. I took off my shoes, and I’m warning you, the Spanx are next.”

Silence. She couldn’t have shocked him. Not Jerry. He wasn’t shockable, and they often bantered. It was all in good fun. He was a big sweet bear of a man with a thick head of brown hair and a matching beard. He ran one of the largest discount chains in the country and he was among her top five clients, if you ranked by sheer business clout, but he was also her mentor and someone she could let down her hair with, which she was about to do right now, before the tightly embedded hair clip gave her a migraine.

She reached into the back of her upswept do and freed the claws that held the heavy mahogany waves off her neck.

“Spanx are panty hose, Jerry.”

“I know,” he chided. “I have a daughter. But you should know by now that I don’t have a thing for feet. Now, if you’d said earrings, that would be different. A woman’s naked lobes make the back of my neck sweat.”

“Earrings next, my love.”

“You tease.”

She laughed and was suddenly glad he’d called, even though she’d been trying desperately to close up shop and go home. She ran a private concierge service that had been growing like topsy up until very recently. But this had been another day from hell in a week of days from hell. She couldn’t believe anyone could make her laugh, but Jerry had. He always did, which was why she’d taken his call at this late hour instead of letting the service put him through to Zoe, his own private concierge.

Jerry was one of forty-five top-tier clients, who paid up to fifty thousand dollars a year for Lane’s Premiere Plan. They each had a private concierge devoted solely to their needs, who oversaw no less than six rotating concierges with different specialties, who were also at their beck and call around the clock. But Jerry wouldn’t necessarily be able to talk freely with Zoe about his very spoiled daughter—and Lane owed him so much anyway. He really was more than a mentor, much more, but not in a romantic way. They flirted a bit, but he’d never even come close to making a pass at her. Sometimes she wondered why not.

She slipped off her clip earrings and shook her head, aware of the caress of her hair, cool against her burning face. It had been a hard day, a terrible day, possibly the worst of her career. Normally she would have been frustrated at having to deal with a sweet-sixteen party when it felt as if everything she’d struggled and sacrificed for was imploding. She would have done it, though, because that was her job description. She took care of all her clients, and Jerry was a vital one.

But right now, maybe she needed one client she could actually help.

“Seriously, Jerry, you should consider saying no to Felicity.” She spoke softly, pleadingly, as she worked her kirt up, hooked her thumbs into the waistline of her ultra-stretchy Spanx and dragged them down. “I know how much you love her,” she went on, making her case as she peeled off the panty hose, “but the Bone Dawgs have a criminal record, and more important, if you don’t draw the line somewhere, Felicity will never learn to respect her limits—or others’.”

“Lane, when did you turn into Mother Superior?”

“Actually, I was trying for Dr. Phil.” So much for reasoning with Jerry. She stepped out of the Spanx and wanted to moan it felt so good. Her flesh was celebrating. Why was everything so tight? If stress caused water retention, then she was a dam about to burst. “How many are coming to this party?”

“Felicity hasn’t given me the final count, but I’m estimating half her class at St. Mary’s, which is a hundred, another twenty-five from her church group and that many again from company friends, my various clubs, colleagues and vendors.”

Lane began to calculate, adding up numbers and aware that the amounts her clients were willing to spend on lavish parties could still shock her, especially with the country’s struggling economy. Still, she had a job to do and a payroll to meet for her own employees, who now numbered several hundred around the country.

“Okay,” she said, “let’s say two hundred guests to allow for long-lost cousins, last-minute invites and party crashers. Kids love to crash these things. That’s half the fun. Does she still want the Avalon ballroom in Catalina? That means a charter cruise ship for transportation—and the talent will have to be flown in and flown out the same night, or put up at the island’s luxury condos. The guests are staying over, aren’t they?”

“Some will, I’m sure. As you said, whatever they prefer.”

She undid the button of her skirt and tugged at the silk camisole. “We’ll get a count when they RSVP. It’s good of you to be this involved, Jerry.” He could have had a personal assistant do it, or hired a party planner to work with his daughter. Most single dads with his bank account would have.

“It’s for Felicity.”

Anything less wasn’t an option. His voice said that, unequivocally. Lane could hear rap music playing on his end and smiled. At times like now, she worried how far he would go to make Felicity happy, and whether he was trying too hard to compensate for what had happened when Felicity was twelve. Her mother, Jerry’s ex-wife, had become despondent during their custody battle, knowing she was almost certain to lose custody of her child because of her drug use, and she had taken an overdose that proved fatal.

“This is going to be a great party, Jerry.” Lane walked across the carpet, bare of foot and shoulder, aware of her image flickering from the glass doors of her bookcases to the office’s wraparound windows. Her thoughts turned inward as the party unfolded in her mind. She could see revolving glitter balls, servers dressed like Bonnie and Clyde, drinks in crystal bathtub-shaped punch bowls, maybe even a fabulous antique car or two on display. It would be a twenties gangster theme, featuring a rapper band with no priors.

This was her forte, organizing and strategizing to create the client’s vision. She pulled gently on the tattered green rubber band she wore on her left wrist, calming as she took in her surroundings. She loved this office. Despite the frenetic activity during the day, at night it was an oasis of calm and monastic order. Her burlwood desk was so highly varnished the gloss could have been liquid, and the room’s muted lighting allowed her to see the bright twinkling lights of Century City, receding toward the Pacific coast.

“I’m thinking gangster theme, Jerry, but from the twenties.”

Reaching up to unbutton her blouse, she continued to ask questions and make mental notes of Jerry’s answers. It was oddly freeing walking around barefoot and taking off her clothes. She should do it more often…just strip down to nothing. She shivered as the silk blouse slid down her arms.

“Maybe a mix of past and present?” he suggested.

“Even better.”

“Lane, are you all right? You sound breathless.”

“Yes, fine. I’m changing clothes.”

“In that case, put on the videophone.”

“It’s not that exciting, Jerry, believe me. I’m changing into my sweats. I’m going to get one of my concierge staff to drive my car home, and I’m going to walk.”

“One of those days? Must have been a doozy if you’re walking home.”

“You have no idea. This day was spawned in the lowest level of hell and flung at me by the devil’s henchmen on thundering steeds.” She couldn’t give him the details. It would breach client confidentiality, but she needed to vent. She was gut-level terrified—and she rarely allowed herself to feel anything resembling fear. She controlled it with a game she’d played all her life, a silly game that worked.

“Lane, I know what’s happened to Simon Shan and Captain Crusader, if that’s what you’re talking about, and I don’t know what to say. It’s tragic. There’s been little else on the news the last couple of weeks. I have a call in to Burt, but he hasn’t returned it.”

Jerry also knew the two men were her clients because he’d referred them both, Burton Carr, the activist U.S. congressman, whom he’d affectionately referred to as Captain Crusader, and Shan more recently. Simon Shan was currently the hottest ticket in town, even considering the mess he was in. Everyone had expected the next Martha Stewart to be a woman, but Shan, a London-based fashion designer of Chinese descent, had stolen her spotlight while no one was looking. He did everything with a focus, precision and freshness that made all the other lifestyle gurus look like amateurs.

He’d gotten his start by designing and creating his own unique casual look for women. His first full line was a smash, and he’d gone from there into makeup and accessories. Eventually he’d partnered with an upscale discount chain, the Goldstar Collection, and branched into furniture, linens, decor, parties, gardening, everything. He was also tall, lean and singularly attractive, creating great speculation about his sexual preferences—and an instant mystique. No one had counted on the next lifestyle icon being male, Asian and very possibly straight.

His downfall was drugs, but not just any old drugs. Opium. He admitted to having tried it once as a boy in Taiwan, where he grew up an only child to a doting mother and an authoritarian father. The opium use was little more than teenage curiosity, but his father had been outraged. He’d sent Shan away to a boarding school in London, not realizing it would change the boy’s life forever.

Shan swore that was the extent of his own drug use. But several pounds of it were found in the trunk of his Bentley, and because he imported most of his furniture, textiles and other goods from Asia, he was also charged with smuggling the opium into the country. The charges had forced him to step back from his role as Goldstar’s spokesperson. But at least he’d had enough money to hire the best legal help, and he was out on bail, awaiting arraignment.

The congressman’s downfall had shocked Lane to her core. The feds had found child pornography on his computer in his D.C. office. Lane still couldn’t fathom it. Even if Burton Carr was a pedophile, which she didn’t believe for a second, why would he view child porn on his office computer? He’d always supported the fight for legislation to protect children, including the now-famous Amber Alert. He clearly cared deeply about people in general. On the national level, he’d worked doggedly to pass a bill compelling the large discount chains to offer benefits to workers, including heath care—and he’d cited Jerry Blair as one of the country’s most progressive CEOs, and his company, TopCo, as an example of how a discount chain could—and should—be run.

Carr was one of her heroes. Actually, both men were.

“Lane?”

“Jerry, can we shelve the party discussion for tonight? There’s plenty of time to iron out the details, and I’m really beat.”

“Sure, but do me a favor, don’t walk home. It’s not safe.”

“I’ve done it before, Jerry. The path I take is lit up like a movie premiere, and I don’t live that far—”

“Lane, humor me, okay?”

“Okay, no walking tonight.”

“I mean forever, Lane. Don’t walk home—not tonight, not ever again.”

“Well, geez, Jerry. I am thirty years old, and there are some decisions I feel qualified to make—”

“Yes, you are, but this is not a good one, Lane.”

She was nodding to herself as he spoke. This was why Jerry Blair was a good CEO. He took care of people. He was one of the few people who’d ever taken care of her, and she loved him for it. She stopped short of telling him that, but with the words balling up in her throat, she said, “Uncle.”

They said their goodbyes and as she hung up the phone, she felt the pain twist into sharpness. It nearly took her breath away, but she never had understood why her heart turned into a cutting tool at times. Loneliness, maybe. There wasn’t time to analyze it. There never was.

Ignoring the ache in her chest, she went back to the gossip site and clicked on Jack the Giant Killer’s byline. She had no choice. The paparazzo stalker was becoming famous for bringing down the infamous, especially since he limited his targets to those who abused their power and position. And he didn’t stick to celebs, either. Jack had outed Burton Carr—and listed Carr as one of The Private Concierge’s clients on the Gotcha site. And now Lane was terrified that Jack might have done it again with another client, someone she just signed yesterday.

Jerry Blair knew about the Carr and Shan scandals, but he didn’t know about Lane’s new client, and she hadn’t told him. She wasn’t sure she could—or should—tell anyone, including the police. Ned Talbert had signed his contract yesterday morning and late last night he’d killed his girlfriend, then killed himself. Lane had been struggling with disbelief all day.

She’d had three clients involved in felonies or capital crimes in just three weeks’ time. And then there was Judge Love earlier this year. Love had presided over a popular television-courtroom show and was known for her toughness until her lurid private life became public, all of this thanks to JGK, as the Giant Killer had become known. Lane had found herself right in the middle of that scandal because one of her key people had decided to confront the Gotcha people personally. The site’s owner swore that JGK operated under total anonymity, e-mailing or dropping his material at various specified locations. No one knew who JGK was, but Gotcha took pains to verify everything he gave them, including the raunchy Judge Love video.

Right now, Lane was terrified that her service would look like a hotbed of criminal activity. No one would come near her.

She clicked off the Web site and shut down her computer.

Everywhere she looked she could see herself, only she didn’t look liberated in her undone skirt and flimsy camisole top. She looked exposed. She was heartsick about what had happened to her clients, including Ned. She knew them all as good men who couldn’t have done what they were accused of, but sadly there didn’t seem to be anything she could do to protect them. The problems were escalating, and Lane had to think of herself, as well. A concierge service was its clients. If the clients went down, the service went down with them.

She opened the drawer of her desk and pulled out Ned’s application. She hadn’t given it to anyone yet to process, and she’d handled the credit-card transaction herself. Her receptionist and assistant, Mary, had been out on a break, and Lane had been watching the desk. So, no one knew about Ned Talbert but her. And no one could know.

4

Rick prowled the darkened house using only a penlight. He wore latex gloves and slipcovers over his shoes the way evidence technicians did to avoid contamination. He was familiar enough with the place to find his way around in the dark, but didn’t want to chance disturbing the crime scene evidence and signaling that someone had been here.

Not that anyone would notice, he suspected. It was just after midnight, and the guard had changed. The rookie had been replaced by a retiree. Sound asleep in a chair by the house’s front entrance, the night-shift guy was doing a good imitation of a rusty buzz saw.

Rick had parked on a side street, walked over and let himself in through the back way, using a customized attachment on his pocketknife to jimmy the lock, rather than touch the knob, which should have been dusted for prints but didn’t appear to have been. He was here to check out the crime scene, but he was also looking for the package he’d passed off to Ned all those years ago for safekeeping. And maybe the darkness would help him focus on his mission, instead of the countless reminders of his friend.

He’d identified the body at the morgue today. It was Ned without question. Rick saw the faded scar on his friend’s chin even before he saw the bullet hole. When they were kids, he and Ned had believed they could do anything—jump off roofs and fly, walk on water—and they had the scars to prove it. Nothing daunted them, even when Ned missed a branch playing Tarzan, fell to the earth and split open his chin. They’d been eight at the time.

Rick turned off the light and stopped, needing a moment to deal with all of it, to breathe against the suffocating weight in his chest. He’d gone numb after his visit to the morgue, and he wished to hell he could stay that way. Scarred or not, the face he’d seen on the concrete slab wasn’t his friend. It was a death mask with Ned’s features. The body that had housed his larger-than-life spirit was an empty shell. He was gone.

Rick didn’t believe in heaven and hell. He couldn’t console himself with the belief that he would ever see his friend again. The Ned who’d been like a part of him had vanished, leaving Rick feeling as empty as the body in the morgue. He couldn’t even hold a clear picture of Ned in his mind without having it replaced by a corpse with a bullet through its brain. There was no comfort to be found, even in his memories. That was why he had to find out what had happened. At least then he wouldn’t be haunted by questions.

When he left the morgue, he’d driven straight over to the West L.A. station to talk with his buddy, Don Cooper, in homicide, who wasn’t on the case but had confirmed that it was being handled by the big guns of the elite Robbery Homicide Division. Coop had heard unofficially that Ned’s celebrity status in the sports world warranted the high-level involvement, not because they believed it was anything other than a murder-suicide. Coop also confirmed that a suicide note had been found at the scene, but the contents had not been revealed.

And then, for some reason, he’d volunteered the kind of gun Ned had used. None of this information should have been shared with an outsider, which was why Rick had come to Coop. He was a talker. One of these days Coop was going to talk himself right out of a job, Rick imagined.

Rick beamed the light over the leather chair where Ned had been sitting when he pressed the barrel of a full-size 9 mm Glock to his right temple and pulled the trigger. The chalked outline showed him knocked to the left by the force of the discharge and slumped over the arm of the chair.

Jesus, what had made him do that?

Rick’s head swam with questions that were almost unbearable. Did Ned get that idea from him? Had the scene at the cabin triggered something in his friend? They’d done everything together as kids, and Rick had almost always been the leader, the instigator.

But Rick couldn’t let himself believe that, despite the lacerating guilt he felt. Ned was an adult, his own man. He wouldn’t have copycatted a suicide. Rick needed to start thinking like an investigator. What was Ned doing with a Glock? He didn’t own a gun and had no use for them. He’d always said he could do more damage with a baseball bat. Rick wondered if anyone had checked to see if Ned had bought a gun recently or had a permit to carry the gun that was used. Or dusted the empty shell casings for prints.

Rick flashed the beam from the chalked outline of Ned’s body to the woman’s on the floor at the foot of his chair. According to Coop, she’d died in a sexually degrading position while partially naked and restrained. The cause of death was suffocation. She’d had a cheap grocery-store plastic bag tied around her head.

Rick had asked Coop if burn marks were found on her genitals. He’d looked at Rick funny but hadn’t asked any questions. He’d said he didn’t know, but she probably hadn’t died quickly. The condition of the plastic bag, plus the way the vessels in her eyes had hemorrhaged indicated the suffocation might have been interrupted several times, perhaps intentionally.

Rick breathed a curse word. This was all wrong. He knew it to the depths of his being. This wasn’t a hero’s death. Suffocating a bound woman and then shooting yourself was cowardly. Ned wouldn’t have wanted to go out this way, or take her with him. He was trying to save Holly, not kill her.

Ned was drawn to self-destructive women, probably because of his mother. Her heroin habit had driven her to extremes, including hooking to get money for drugs. She’d died of an overdose when Ned was really young, and like a lot of kids with parents who screw up, he’d felt responsible. He’d been picking questionable women ever since, maybe thinking he could fix whatever was wrong. Or maybe they’d picked him. Nice guys like Ned were easy targets.

Rick looked from one chalked form to the other, trying to get a sense of the dominant emotion involved. Every crime scene had clues; the trick was to read them correctly. Murder was usually driven by fear or rage, but he didn’t pick up either here. There was a methodical feel to these crimes—and that wasn’t Ned. He’d said he was being blackmailed because of his sex practices, but he’d also said it was all lies. This crime scene said he was the liar. Only blind rage could have driven him to this. And why take his rage out on Holly? Unless he was being blackmailed by her.

Rick had no answers as he slowly flashed the beam around the rest of the room. The blood and spatter patterns were typical of self-inflicted gunshot wounds, and according to Coop, there’d been no sign of forced entry. Rick saw nothing else that stood out, and with every passing second the risk of being discovered increased. But there was one last thing that had to be done.

He moved silently to the hallway that led to the master bedroom. He passed a writing desk on the way, and the beam of his penlight struck something small and shiny. The desk drawer was partially open and a high-gloss business card was stuck in the sliding mechanism on the side. Rick could imagine a technician opening the drawer and finding the card, along with other things to be bagged as evidence, then unknowingly dropping the card while closing the drawer. Or it might have been something else entirely. Someone may have been in a great hurry to cover his tracks and grabbed for the card but dropped it. The killer perhaps?

Rick fished the card out and held it under the light. The initials TPC were elegantly scrolled down the left side in gold leaf. Laddered across the card just as elegantly were the words The Private Concierge. On the bottom right was a woman’s name, a phone number and an e-mail address. Lane Chandler.

The name was familiar, but Rick couldn’t place it. He turned the card over and found a one-word question scrawled in what looked like Ned’s handwriting: Extortion?

Was Ned accusing The Private Concierge of extortion or had he been looking for a surface to write on, grabbed the card and then tossed it in the desk drawer without realizing it had fallen down the side? And why hadn’t homicide or the crime scene guys noticed it? Rick had spotted it in the dark.

Rick was running out of time. He continued down the hall to the bedroom and went straight to the maple armoire. The largest drawer had a secret compartment with a safe in the back, but Rick found it unlocked—and empty. Either Ned had moved the package, which he wouldn’t have done without telling Rick, or the police had found it and taken it as evidence. And Rick couldn’t avoid the other possibility—that certain people still had a vested interest in the contents of the package, and one of them had been here. But if that was the case, what connection did it have to last night’s carnage?

Rick heard a scraping sound, metal chair legs against concrete. The officer was awake, maybe shifting position or getting up. He checked his pocket to make sure the business card was there, clicked off the penlight and headed for the back door. He’d watched Ned put the package in the compartment, but it was gone. And he couldn’t risk taking any more time to search for it.

Monday, October 7

Two days earlier

Lane Chandler? Rick stared hard at the business card, aware that his eyes were tired and stinging. He rubbed them, massaging the sockets with his thumbs to relieve the pressure. It was six in the morning, and he’d been up and down all night. His mind wouldn’t let him sleep for any length of time. There were too many questions, and primary among them was why her name had struck a chord.

He wasn’t familiar with the concierge service, and he didn’t know anyone named Lane Chandler, personally or otherwise. He’d heard the name somewhere, but he was exhausted and emotionally spent. He just couldn’t seem to place it. He thought back, mentally sorting through the names of his clients over the years. He could check the actual files, but something kept him stuck in the chair in his cubbyhole of a home office, playing alphabet games. It didn’t sound real. Who had a name like Lane Chandler? A movie star, maybe.

L.C. What other women’s name began with L? Not that many: Linda, Lydia, Lilly, Laurie, Leigh, Lucille, Lucy. Lucy?

Oh, Jesus. He rocked up from the chair and left it teetering. He didn’t know any women, but he knew a girl named Lane Chandler. Or had known one. He’d arrested the little brat fifteen years ago. She’d assumed the name of a B-movie star when she ran away from home. She’d told Rick’s partner, Mimi, that she’d picked some bit player from the old celluloid westerns with the stage name Lane Chandler. She liked the name, but not because the initials were L.C. That had been a coincidence. Taking on a man’s name had made her feel stronger and tougher, like she could handle herself on the mean streets of L.A.

And then what had she done but trash herself on those streets?

Rick paced the room, feeling like he was in a cage, but maybe he needed the confinement right now. Where would he go if he wasn’t hemmed in by these L-shaped walls? He might head south and never stop. South to the border. Run, don’t walk. Go, Rick, go. Get the holy hell out of here. Have some semblance of a life while you can. Meet a woman, fall in love for ten minutes. Give your heart away. It’s the only thing you have left of any worth.

Lane Chandler.

He slowed up and let his thoughts roll back a decade and a half. She was Lucy Cox. What a dangerously precocious kid that one had been, a real handful, the Jodi Foster of her time. Rick had picked her up for street prostitution—an open-and-shut case, given that she’d propositioned him. Blue-eyed and bold, she’d actually made him wish she was fifteen years older—and that had never happened before.

He’d been working juvenile vice since he’d signed on with the force, and dealing with drugged-out street urchins was enough to make any normal man want to put them in a straitjacket so they couldn’t hurt themselves or someone else. They were sad, angry and desperate. Too often they ended up dead. But she wasn’t one of them. She was something else, an underage madonna, luminous enough to light up skid row. The courts had put her in juvie, and Rick had helped make sure she didn’t get out until she was legal, eighteen.

Rick walked to the window and stood there, shirtless, in the rising beam of light, letting it warm him. Jeans were all he’d bothered with this morning. There wasn’t a woman around to complain about his bare chest—or appreciate it, for that matter. Hadn’t been for quite a while. His last long-term relationship, and only marriage, ended ten years ago, for the same reason most law enforcement marriages ended. Criminal neglect. It wasn’t that he didn’t love her. He just didn’t have the time or energy to love her the way she needed it. Couldn’t blame her for that. He shouldn’t have married in the first place, but he’d been young—and probably just selfish enough to want someone around on those interminable nights of soul-searching, someone to ease the loneliness.

The slam of a neighboring door brought his attention back to the view. His cubby was a converted storage room, and its only window looked out on the alley behind his house, exposing the back sides of a half block of badly weathered beach houses. The alley had little to recommend it, except bower after bower of glorious red and orange bougainvillea. Rick loved the stuff. It festooned the courtyard out front, too, and as far as he was concerned, it made his beach cottage look like a small palazzo.

Lane Chandler. God, he didn’t want to go back there. It wasn’t going to help anyone to dredge up that muck, least of all Ned. And there were so many other reasons not to pursue this investigation. A case like this could take months, years, even for a seasoned homicide detective, which Rick wasn’t. You needed the right resources, computer databases, labs and technicians to investigate a murder. He had access to none of that, and he was running out of time. Everything pointed to murder-suicide. The police had already written it off.

But foremost among the reasons to let this investigation go was her, Lucy Cox, all grown up and running her own concierge service. Why didn’t that surprise him?

He walked back to his desk, swept up her card, crushed it in his fist and dropped it in the trash. And then he left the room.

He got as far as the living room, as far as the doors to his beloved courtyard, before a realization stopped him. Like a bomb it hit him. What were the odds of so many seemingly disparate things converging on that one night at Ned’s place? Rick had found Ned and his girlfriend dead, the package missing and Lane Chandler’s card stuck to Ned’s desk, all within the same time frame. Or what appeared to be the same time frame. The package could have been missing awhile, but Rick didn’t think so. Ned would have mentioned it. And Rick suspected the card was recent, too. Ned wouldn’t have let that slip, either. But maybe that was what Ned had been trying to say the night he showed up at the cabin.

What Ned didn’t know, what no one knew except Rick, was that Lucy Cox was connected to that missing package. She was the catalyst for what had happened fifteen years ago—and the reason Rick had left the force.

If she really was Lane Chandler now, Rick questioned whether it was a coincidence that Ned had come across her somewhere. Had she approached him because she wanted the package herself? Why? He could think of people who might want to get their hands on it, but why her? Blackmail, most likely. And how did she know that Ned had it?

He turned and slammed back through the house, swearing to himself. He nearly took the door off the hinges as he entered his office, and the first thing he did was pick up the trash can. Now, where the hell was that card?

5

Priscilla Brandt hesitated at the bottom of the grand stairway and visually swept her living room with the acuity of a young, hungry bird of prey, missing nothing. The house was perfection, even to her critical eye. Fresh-cut irises stood in tall crystal vases, satin pillows were plumped and the Brazilian-cherry floors gleamed. Just the faintest whiff of lavender oil pleasantly stimulated her senses, along with the rippling piano runs of Mozart’s Adagio in H Minor.

If you want your guests to think well of you, treat them well. If you want them forever in your debt, spoil them rotten and send them home with expensive gifts. If you have no money, cook exquisitely.

It was one of the many bits of wisdom in her sassy new etiquette book, currently at the top of the New York Times nonfiction list. Quite the coup for a former hash-slinger from the San Fernando Valley. Of course, the hash-slinging was how she’d put herself through college, but still, she had no real pedigree like the other mavens of manners, and at twenty-six she was a mere upstart compared to icons like Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt.

Lineage matters only if you have nothing else of interest to offer.

She plucked an imaginary speck from the sleeve of her cashmere twinset and walked to the mirror over the fireplace to check her long chestnut waves for fullness and vitality, all signs of a healthy female libido, which was crucial in today’s market, no matter what you were selling. She couldn’t very well be outwardly sexy in her profession. She had to leave that impression in other ways, such as the slim, side-slit skirt and the snug fit of her sweater set, all belying the propriety of her cultured pearls. This was a lady, yes, but a tramp, as well, to anyone lucky enough to know her that well.

Feminine wiles are all about promise, ladies. Delivery is an altogether different matter.

Another of Priscilla’s pointers. And within the hour she would be sharing more of her advice on national television. Another coup for the poor relation. The TV crew would be here soon to set up in the garden where she would be having tea with none other than national morning-show anchor Leanne Sanders, and Priscilla had made sure the grounds of her leased home in the Santa Monica hills were as perfect as the interior.

The trick was to be perfect without being perfectly boring. She had to be just witty enough, just tarty enough, to catch and hold the interest of a fickle public. But with impeccable manners, of course.

For Priscilla the payoff was more than book sales. She was in discussions for her own afternoon talk show, and it was with the very network about to interview her. So far the only stumbling block was the snot-nosed executive producer, who couldn’t have been more than twelve, if his acne was any indication. Right in front of the network brass, he’d said he just wasn’t “feeling” an etiquette show in the era of shock jocks and reality TV. Her material wouldn’t be edgy or opinionated enough. The only thing he hadn’t done was yawn. Pris would have had a breath mint ready to cram down his throat if he did.

She walked to the living room windows, pride swelling as she anticipated the beauty of the wisteria-covered arbor. The smile died on her red-matte lips as she looked out. “What the fuck?”

The crazy squatter was back and he’d turned her beautiful garden into a tent city! His crude cardboard shelter blighted the wisteria arbor where she’d created the perfect English garden for her outdoor tea. He’d been sneaking onto her property for weeks now, and she’d made the mistake of giving him money to get rid of him. Well, no more payola. She was going to kick his grungy butt off the property herself, not that she had much choice. She didn’t trust the hired help not to rat her out to the tabloids.

She grabbed her cell phone from the writing desk in the hall and marched to the front door at a military clip. Someone had been giving the tabloids information about her, and she was going to put a stop to that, too. The rags had labeled her Ms. Pris, but now they were questioning whether it should have been Ms. Hissy Fit, simply because she’d taught a reckless teenage tailgater a lesson by letting him pile into the back of her new Mercedes. She’d publicly assailed him for riding her ass all the way to Burbank, and a gathering crowd had cheered her on, which seemed vindication enough. But there’d been no applause the following week when she’d made a waitress cry for serving cold food.

Okay, Ms. Pris had a temper. She was working on it. But this squatter was different, a clear violation of her rights. The porous greenbelt that ran from the house’s car park to the garden forced her to walk on the tiptoes of her shoes to keep the high heels from sinking in. When she was done with this guy, she would go change into flats and freshen up again. She had time, twenty minutes—and she had another tip for her next book. Never wear high heels at lawn parties!

As she neared the cardboard tent, she saw a pair of grubby bare feet poking out the bottom and a pile of beer cans and trash next to them. She also saw something that made her blood boil. He’d been using her beautiful lawn for a toilet.

Another F-bomb rolled off her tongue. “Pack up your things and get out of here,” she demanded.

He didn’t respond and she kicked at the refrigerator box with the pointed toe of her heels. “Did you hear me?”

The box lifted off him and as the man roused and rolled toward her, Priscilla saw that he wasn’t the transient she’d been paying off. He was much younger and fitter, with bright blue eyes shining through his shaggy brown hair—and he might not be so easily handled.

“This is private property.” She brandished the cell phone. “You have two minutes to get your things and leave, or I’ll call 911.”

“Fuck off,” he muttered, grabbing the box and giving it a shake, as if she’d soiled it. He turned his back to her and collapsed under his cardboard canopy, apparently intending to sleep off the rest of what was probably a liquid breakfast.

Somewhere in the base of Priscilla’s brain, two wires touched, white hot. A circuit shorted out, sparks erupted and she began to tremble. There was no chance to curb the impulse. It was swift and lethal, animal rage. Her fists clenched, and her upper lip curled back, baring small, sharp incisors. Delicate nostrils flared, and a snarl rattled in her throat, as savage as anything heard in the jungle.

How dare he turn his mangy freeloading back on her! Counting to ten wasn’t an option when some asshole was about to destroy the opportunity of a lifetime. Her lifetime. She dropped the phone and picked up a sculpture of an iron crane from the garden bed, her only thought to wale on this guy. She didn’t even care if the crew arrived and saw her. He needed to be taught a lesson.

That snot-nose executive producer wanted edgy? Ha!

But as she raised the sculpture over her head like a club, a tiny voice of sanity—or maybe it was opportunity—intruded. There might still be some way to salvage this. If she could hit him just hard enough to knock him out, she could roll him onto the cardboard box and drag him out of here, an Indian carry. That way he couldn’t fight her.

The horrible crunch of iron against skull bone made her wince, and just as quickly as rage had flared, it was gone. Fear flooded her, dropping her to her knees. Whenever she had these insane episodes, she was devastated afterward, shaken, afraid and deeply humiliated at what she’d done. This had to be her worst outburst ever. Had she killed him?

She pulled off the cardboard to find him slumped and unresponsive but still breathing. He was out cold. If she could get him onto the cardboard, she might still be able to drag him into the bushes where he couldn’t be seen, but she had so little time left.

Moments later, bent over him and struggling to catch her breath, she realized it was no use. She couldn’t even roll him over. He weighed as much as ten men. She sank onto the ground next to him, sobbing and furious. She should have killed him. Look at what he’d reduced her to.

Desperate, she searched for the cell and found it in the grass. She speed-dialed her manager, but got voice mail. Her publicist didn’t pick up, either. Didn’t these people ever answer their damn phones? Why the hell was she paying them twenty percent of her hard-earned money?

Seconds later, she had Lane Chandler on the line, and the sound of her soft, melodious voice worked miracles. It calmed Priscilla like a dip in cool lake water.

“Priscilla, are you all right?” Lane asked. “How can I help you?”

Priscilla begged Lane to call the segment producer for the morning show and reschedule the taping. “Please,” she implored, “do it now. Tell them I’ve had an accident.”

“What kind of accident?”

Priscilla assured her it wasn’t serious, just horribly embarrassing.

“I’ll take care of it,” Lane said. “Now, please, take a deep breath and calm down. Are you sure you’re all right? I could call one of our concierge doctors if you need medical care. It’s completely private.”

“No! No doctors. I’ll be fine. Just call the segment producer and get the taping rescheduled. No one else needs to know about any of this, all right?”

She clicked off and dropped the phone in horror, unable to believe what had just happened. Everything had been so perfect. It had felt like fate, the stars aligned. She’d never felt more poised or ready for anything. This was supposed to have been her shining moment. And he’d ruined it. This was all his fault.

She began to sob and swear and beat on the unconscious man, oblivious to the video camera trained on her. It was held by a silent, shrouded figure who was concealed by the same thicket of bushes where she’d been planning to drag the body. Priscilla may have dodged one bullet this morning, but there was another gun aimed straight at her.

6

Darwin LeMaster couldn’t remember how to answer his cell phone. It was his own damn phone, too, the one he’d designed, patented and turned into a revolutionary new communications system, according to technology reporters. It came with one-touch concierge access, a GPS system, biometric fingerprint recognition and the ability to make not only secure, but untraceable, calls. The Darwin phone had made him a twenty-eight-year-old man of means and a phenom, whatever that meant, in the field of electronic networking.

BFD. He still couldn’t answer it.

Right now, it was playing “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath at high volume, the equivalent of getting kicked in the head by a donkey, which was what it took to get Darwin’s attention most of the time. But this was no ordinary call. From the moment he’d seen the incoming number in the digital display—her number—his brain had vapor-locked. What good was an IQ at the genius level if you couldn’t take a phone call from a steaming-hot woman?

The noise stopped, and he breathed a sigh of relief. The call had gone to voice mail. But he also felt a body slam of recrimination. What kind of man was he? Sometimes he wondered if he even had a penis.

All around him in the cavernous, cluttered office that his coworkers called Command and Control Center 1, electronic equipment whirred, interrupted by mysterious intermittent beeping. The aroma of stale coffee sullied the air, wafting from the dozen forgotten plastic cups that were stranded wherever he’d set them when an idea hit. This morning’s breakfast, a glazed doughnut with one bite out of it, had been abandoned to a napkin on the file cabinet next to his desk. Mostly he forgot to eat, but even when he remembered, he couldn’t seem to gain weight.

He picked up the doughnut and bit a hunk out of it, chewing absently. Women worried about men who couldn’t gain weight. It brought out the mother in them—and while his boss and longtime friend, Lane Chandler, didn’t openly bug him about putting on poundage, she’d brought the doughnuts by this morning.

She had openly bugged him about sprucing up the command center, said it was the nexus of the entire concierge service and a selling point for prospective clients. She’d suggested professional organizers and decorators, but he’d been putting her off.

He rose and stretched, imagining a cat as he rippled the vertebrae of his spine. This was his lair, and he didn’t feel like conducting tours. He’d been chided for being reclusive and secretive with his pet projects, and maybe his critics had a point. He had actually boarded up the office windows, preferring the eerie phosphers of LCD screens to natural light.

He could run the world from here. On the wall opposite his desk, several large GPS grids, glowing with red dots and streaming arrows, covered the most populous areas of the country. The electronic maps meant Darwin could locate any of their forty-five members with a Premiere Plan and a fully featured Darwin cell, as long as they were within range and their phone was on.

He had also designed the circuitry necessary to scramble signals. If a Premiere member called in and requested a secure line, Darwin could hook them up with a couple clicks of his mouse, at which point the call could not be intercepted or recorded. Well, except by Darwin, of course. Any system was only as secure as the person who created it.

But no one worried about Darwin. He didn’t have a penis.

He kicked a box of old circuit boards out of the way and dropped to the floor. “Give me twenty, you pussy,” he grunted.

The homophobic drill sergeant who rented space in Darwin’s brain got exactly seven military-style push-ups before Darwin collapsed. While he was lying there on the floor, surrounded by boxes of high-tech detritus and thinking about all the ways he needed to overhaul his life, the revolutionary cell phone sounded again. Sharp staccato bursts, each one more imperative than the last. The hotline.

He rolled over and stared at the ceiling. Thank God, a crisis. He didn’t have to face the terrifying prospect of inviting a woman—make that the ultimate sexual-fantasy woman of the new millennium—to dinner and then maybe to his place, and then maybe to something approaching the sexual realm, like his bed?

A one-man Pluto shot would have been more realistic.

“Darwin, you have voice mail,” said a come-hither female voice.

The phone was giving him a reminder, just as he’d programmed it to. If it had had legs, it would have jumped off the desk and strolled over to him. He would have to work on that feature.

He pushed to his feet, grimacing as he limped over to the desk, grabbed the phone and thumbed the Talk button. “What is it, Lucy?” That was her name from the old days when they lived together on the streets.

“Please, Dar, call me Lane,” she said. “I need you. Can you come to my office right away?”

Lane unbuttoned her suit jacket and flapped the lapels to create a breeze. She liked to think that she’d come by her reputation as a cool customer deservedly, although right now she was anything but. Her face was flushed and her cleavage damp. Why did women always perspire there first? She really should plan for that when she was deodorizing in the mornings.

At any rate, she’d just run a crazed segment producer off at the pass and narrowly averted some kind of crisis. She didn’t know what kind because Priscilla Brandt had hung up on her before Lane could ask. But at least Ms. Pris would get another shot at success.

Congressman Carr and Simon Shan might not.

Ned Talbert certainly would not.

“Hey, what’s going on?”

Lane looked up to see Darwin shambling into her office, tall and floppy as an Olympic pole-vaulter, his mop of dark curls bouncing, and his baggy, worn jeans hanging on his narrow hips. He was nearly thirty, but he really hadn’t changed all that much in the fifteen years she’d known him, except that he was a millionaire now instead of a juvenile delinquent—and so was she.

“Shut the door, Dar. Lock it, too.”

His dense, expressive eyebrows lifted. “We have a receptionist out there,” he said. “Why don’t I tell the gray angel that we don’t want to be disturbed.”

The gray angel was their vibrant seventy-year-old receptionist, Mary O’Dell, who could have stalled a tactical squad of marines, she was so good. But TPC had an open-door policy, and anyone really determined to see Lane was unlikely to be stopped for long.

“I don’t want Val barging in on us,” Lane explained.

Darwin shut the door and locked it. Val Drummond had started in the mailroom and his fortunes had risen with the company’s. He ran the administrative arm, but he was also handling concierge operations now that Lane was busy with the company’s new expansion plan. But Val’s promotion hadn’t eased the tension between him and Darwin. Val was like the solid and steady but less gifted younger brother with a bad case of sibling rivalry. He was competitive with Darwin for Lane’s time, and he seemed to resent that she and Darwin were much more than just the creative spark behind TPC. They were close friends with a bond that almost defied explanation, even to them…although, oddly, Darwin himself had been cutting ties with Lane lately.

But maybe it wasn’t odd at all, Lane allowed. He had his eye on a sweet young thing he’d met at a comic-book convention. Seems they’d been friendly for a while, but now they were getting closer, and as much as Lane missed Dar’s company, she knew it was good for a recluse like him to have someone in his life besides her.

Lane slipped off the jacket to her pantsuit and undid a button at the neckline of her blouse, still too warm to relax. It was time to tell him. This business was Dar’s life, too, but it went beyond that. She trusted and confided in him as she did no one else.

“Well?” he said, perching on the arm of the high-back leather guest chair. “Are we going to end the suspense any time soon?”

She held him off a little longer, taking a detour behind her desk to the console that smelled of freshly quartered limes. She always had some there in a crystal bowl, as much for their tart essence as for the drinks. She poured a glass of ice water and held up the pitcher, offering him some, too. He shook his head, and she pressed the glass, cool and moist, to her check, aware that he seemed perplexed by his normally unflappable partner.

“You’re going to say I’m crazy, but hear me out,” she said at last. “I think we could be in trouble.”

“You and I?”

“No, the service, TPC. Dar—” She was actually hoping he would laugh at her. “Do you think someone might be trying to damage this company, even to bring it down?”

He frowned. “You are crazy.”

“Yeah, probably. I hope so.” She took a drink, swallowing some ice chips with the water. The cold streaming into her chest cavity was almost painful. Maybe she was overreacting, but the planned expansion into two more major cities had her spooked. She’d borrowed a small fortune to finance the move, and everything depended on being able to capitalize on the service’s growing reputation. It had been relatively smooth sailing until recently.

Quickly, she brought Dar up to speed on what had happened. He already knew about Shan and the congressman, but he didn’t know that Ned Talbert had signed on the dotted line the day he committed what was being called first-degree murder and suicide.

By the time she was done, Dar had fallen into the guest chair, apparently in surprise. “So, Ned Talbert was a client?” he said. “Wow, what is that now—three of our top clients?”

“Three in three weeks, and one of them is dead. It’s surreal, a nightmare. But, listen to me now. I did something, well, rash. No one knew that Ned Talbert had signed, so I shredded his application.” She hung her head at Darwin’s disbelief. “Don’t look at me like that. I panicked. I handled his credit-card transaction myself because Mary was out of the office—and then I forgot to give Talbert his copy of the contract, so I had all the paperwork.”

She sighed and looked up, beseeching him to understand. “I didn’t know what else to do. When the Burton and Shan stories broke, that sleazy gossip Web site reported that they were our clients. How would it look if they found out about Talbert?”

“Like all our clients are jinxed? Like we’re the kiss of death?”

“Exactly.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before this?”

Thank God, she thought. He understood her impulse to save the company. He was a street kid, too, thinking with his wits, thinking survival. “I didn’t want to believe it. I told myself I was being paranoid. Am I being paranoid, Dar? Two clients, maybe, but three? Can that be a coincidence?”

It raised a question that Lane didn’t want to ask. Who would be next? She hadn’t told him about Priscilla, but she was hoping that would turn out to be nothing. She was hoping it all would turn out to be nothing, just a figment of her overwrought imagination.

She walked to the windows that looked out on Century City and beyond that, the Pacific coastline, continuing to cool herself with the frosty glass and the sharp scent of lime. It was a bright fall morning with a hint of crispness in the air, but the weather wouldn’t get chilly for another month, and at least half the people on the streets below wore shorts. This was southern California, land of perpetual flip-flops.

Darwin spoke over her thoughts. “Considering everything, you’re one of the least paranoid people I know,” he said, “and if anybody had a right to be, it’s you, given where you’ve been and what you’ve done.”

“Yeah, thanks for reminding me.” He was trying to say she’d come a long way, baby, all the way from her distant, sordid past. She and Darwin had been runaways on the street when they met, both of them cold, hungry and sick. Darwin had needed medical attention. As his condition worsened, Lane had been forced to make some desperate choices. Although now she wondered if there was a choice when someone’s life was at stake. The only people who knew about that time in her life were Darwin and the cops who put her in jail and threw away the key.

Darwin propelled his long frame out of the creaking chair and walked over to her, quietly relieving her of the ice water. She relinquished the glass without a word.

“Maybe it’s bad luck and bad timing,” he suggested. “Most celebs have a self-destruct mechanism that gets triggered just seconds after they hit it big. We’ve seen that happen.”

She nodded, wanting him to be right. He wasn’t as driven as she was—and didn’t even want the expansion. It was Val who was pushing her to grow the company. She and Val were alike in that way, hungry, if that was the right word. But it was Darwin who had her heart, and her allegiance.

She fought the urge to brush doughnut crumbs from his T-shirt—and lost. He dodged her questing fingers. “Listen to me,” she said. “Even if everything we’re talking about is coincidental, we have to be on our toes—you and me. I’m not discussing this with anyone else, obviously. But the service’s reputation is at stake.”

He held the glass against his cheek as she had, apparently curious about the sensation. “Why would anyone want to bring this company down? And why would they go to such extremes to do it?”

“That I don’t know, but we are a concierge service, and we take care of our clients. That includes protecting their privacy and their safety, if it comes to that. We can’t ignore anything that could put them at risk.”

“True, but it doesn’t make sense. A competitor wouldn’t want to hurt our clients. They’d want to steal them.”

She shrugged. “So, maybe it’s the paparazzi. Jack the Giant Killer. He’s the one breaking all the stories—and no one seems to have a clue who he is. Why hasn’t someone exposed him by now?”

Lane was angry about that. So far JGK had operated in total anonymity. Even Seth Black, the owner of Gotcha.com, swore he didn’t know who JGK was, but despite that, Seth had been willing to give Jack his own byline and publish his exposés. Everything was done electronically, of course, to protect Jack’s anonymity.

Dar seemed to be considering Lane’s idea. “I suppose it could be some kind of payback, especially since Val and Seth Black tangled earlier this year over Judge Love. But even if Black and his henchmen are targeting us, how much damage can they do? What are the odds that our clients are going to keep screwing up on a grand scale?”

Again, Lane hoped he was right. But Trudy Love was another TPC client—and a perfect example of screwing up on a grand scale. She was an ex-judge who’d officiated over a divorce-court TV show and had made her name excoriating cheating spouses. Lane could do nothing to save her career once she herself had been caught double-dipping, a phrase Trudy had made a household word.

“Jack destroyed Judge Love’s career with those pictures of her and that burly, tattooed biker who wasn’t her husband,” Lane reminded Darwin. She cocked her head. “And then Val tried to scare off Seth Black with a bunch of empty legal threats.”

Darwin snickered. “So, Black is bringing down Val by destroying our clients one by one? Maybe even setting them up for the fall and then breaking the story? I hate to be the one to break it to you, Lane, but our clients are burying themselves. Do you really think Seth Black is capable of framing Ned Talbert for a murder-suicide?”

That was a stretch, she had to admit. Black was a vicious snitch, not a hit man, and Lane could prove nothing. It was just a gut feeling that her company had a bull’s-eye on its back, but it was a strong one.

There were no more crumbs on Dar’s shirt. She brushed at it anyway. “Just say you’re with me, okay? We have to stay on top of this.”

“Of course I’m with you. I’ll do a background check on Seth Black and scour his site—and I’ll check out JGK, too. If I can’t find out who he is, maybe I can figure out who he’s going after next.”

She thought about hugging him, but he was saved by his cell phone. It was buzzing, as if he was getting some kind of alert. Darwin’s personal phone was truly a one-man band. He hit some buttons and began to read the display screen.

“What is it?” she asked, alarmed at how pale he was.

“Video feed from the Associated Press.”

“Feed about what?”

Darwin looked up. “Jack the Giant Killer just saved me some research. Here’s his current victim.” He flipped the cell phone so that Lane could see the screen.

It was hard for her to watch the stark news footage of Priscilla Brandt beating up a homeless person. Lane sat down on the console behind her, jiggling the water pitcher. Shock seemed to take hold, causing her to shudder and go numb at the same time. The acidity from the limes burned her nostrils.

“That’s number four,” she said under her breath. Priscilla had said the situation was embarrassing, not violent. It looked like assault with a deadly weapon. She could wind up in prison. Priscilla hadn’t been with TPC six months, but Lane knew her background, and she’d sensed a desperation in Priscilla to succeed. Lane could relate to that to some extent. She’d fought her way out of the gutter, too, and maybe she’d done some questionable things along the way, but she’d never tried to kill anyone.

Lane went to her computer and pulled up the Gotcha.com Web site. Jack the Giant Killer’s byline dominated the opening page. Ms. Pris is Pissed! screamed the headline.

“Listen to this,” Lane said. “‘Ms. Pris had a manners meltdown. This morning, Priscilla Brandt, author of a bestselling book on etiquette, viciously assaulted a homeless man. Apparently he camped out on her lawn, impeding her tea-garden interview with morning-show anchor Leanne Sanders, so Brandt knocked him cold with an iron statue, but couldn’t drag him off her property. She shrieked obscenities and beat the homeless man with her fists. She then called Lane Chandler, her private concierge, for help.’”

Lane stopped, shaking her head in disbelief. She glanced over at Darwin, who was back in the chair, collapsed like a punctured tire. “Do you believe me now?”

7

She was legit. Her concierge service was first-class all the way. Rick’s Internet search had pulled up countless references to TPC as the crown jewel of the private-concierge field, despite its fairly recent appearance on the scene six years ago. A large infusion of investment capital from an unspecified donor had launched the company, and a reputation for consummate perfectionism had kept it going. TPC was known for its round-the-clock devotion to making the lives of its clientele complete in every way.

Apparently there was nothing a TPC concierge wouldn’t do, as long as it was legal, according to its founder and CEO, Lane Chandler.

She was legit, and successful.

Rick wasn’t sure how he felt about that. It was always easier dealing with people when you had some leverage. In her case, doubled-jointed escorts and masseuses who specialized in happy endings would have been helpful. Of course, he always had her criminal past to fall back on.

Her company Web site described the boggling array of services offered and the different plans available. If you wanted round-the-clock attention with all the extras—and you had unlimited funds—the Premiere Plan was your baby. Rick found more than he needed to know about the company, but no mention of Lane Chandler’s background anywhere, except the usual references to education, work experience, achievements and service awards.

She’d received a BA in business administration from Pepperdine on a full scholarship program. Highest honors, which didn’t surprise him, despite her questionable start. He could still see the hungry glint in her mist-blue eyes. Funny how the soft-focus gaze and butterscotch voice had made her edges seem all the sharper, even at the tender age of fifteen.

A gossip Web site called Gotcha.com had broken stories about the messy scandals with some of TPC’s clients, but Ned hadn’t been mentioned among them. Rick also found references to the service’s expansion plans, and the heavy debt it was carrying. Maybe she needed money. Now, there was a motive to go after the package Ned was holding. She could use the contents to blackmail the VIPs involved in the epic scandal her own arrest had caused. She seemed to be a magnet for scandal, no matter what she did.

But how did she know Ned had the package?

Rick sat back in his chair to think. He rested his feet on the desk next to a carton of take-out Chinese. He’d found it in the fridge, left over from before he went up to the mountain cabin. The rush of hunger he’d felt when he opened the refrigerator door had dizzied him. It had been over thirty-six hours since he’d eaten, and he’d wolfed a forkful of the pork lo mein, but couldn’t get it down. His throat had closed up, and even a basic act like swallowing had been a challenge. He didn’t know if it was grief, stress or…something else.

The pills, he told himself. Maybe he needed to lay off that garbage.

He’d entered into a specialized form of private investigation when he’d left vice years ago. Essentially he did things that law enforcement wouldn’t—or couldn’t—do. It had kept him busy and paid well. But, over the last few weeks, he’d closed all his open cases and informed his clients he was taking some personal-leave time. That was all they needed to know. All anyone needed to know.

Now, here he was, faced with the toughest investigation of his life—and as much as he wanted to walk away from it, he couldn’t. He just couldn’t. He had to do something. The question was, what?

His sigh was resigned. A talk with Ned’s housekeeper might be the way to start. Less complicated than the Lane Chandler situation, which could easily take him places he didn’t want to go. Ned’s funeral arrangements were being taken care of by his attorneys, who were also handling inquiries from the press. The public knew Ned as a star outfielder, not as Rick Bayless’s friend, so Rick had been left out of it, thank God. He could not have dealt with that right now.

Rick hesitated, listening. A loud pop came from somewhere in the house, launching him out of the chair. The carton of lo mein landed on the floor with a splat and Rick kicked it aside, taking care not to slip in the streaming juices. It sounded like a gunshot, and it had come from down the hall. He could see nothing through the open doorway, but someone was definitely in his house.

He slipped out of the small office, his bare feet soundless on the Mexican tiles. He crept down the hallway, his back to the wall, wondering if the intruder had found his gun. It was in the top drawer of the night table next to his bed, but the noise had come from the other side of the house, the kitchen, and he could hear a clicking sound coming from that direction.

Was the intruder reloading? That meant he’d come armed. Rick’s gun was a Colt .357 Python with a cylinder that took six bullets. There would be five left before reloading was necessary.

An odd, breathy squeak made him hesitate. The clicking got louder, urgent. The squeak became a plaintive cry. What the hell? It sounded like a baby or an animal in distress. And suddenly he knew what had happened.

His heart jammed into high gear as he spidered up to the arch that opened onto his kitchen. He craned to look inside—and saw exactly what he’d hoped. Yesssssssss. The mousetrap he’d baited and set days ago had been sprung. Unfortunately, the mangy little creature pinned by the bar was still alive. He was caught by the leg instead of by his skinny neck, but at least he’d been caught.

Rick Bayless had won the war. He’d finally caught the cunning sneak thief that had been raiding his garbage and springing his mousetraps for months. The reign of the devil mouse was over.

Like most bachelors, Rick had never kept what you’d call a tidy kitchen. He routinely left the dinner dishes unscraped and unwashed until the next day or whenever he got around to them. Sometimes they waited until his housekeeper made her weekly visit. It was when she’d found the usually crusty dishes nearly spotless in the sink, and asked Rick if he’d done them himself, that he realized he had an ugly, hairy little dishwasher on his hands—and the war had begun.

He hated mice. He didn’t like snakes, either, but at least most snakes ate insects, which justified their existence to some extent. Mice were scavengers and disease carriers. Can you spell bubonic plague? If Walt Disney hadn’t turned them into saucer-eared heroes, no one would like mice.

But Rick’s enthusiasm waned as he watched his nemesis roll and flail, trying to get his leg free of the spring-loaded bar. Amazing that he had a leg left. The bar would have broken his neck if he’d gone for the cheese first, instead of trying to spring the trap.

Not so clever this time.

Now Rick had to figure out how to quickly end this. The mouse’s shrieks had become heartrending, and trapped animals had been known to chew off their limbs to escape. From the drying rack on the counter, he grabbed a large stainless-steel colander to contain the struggling mouse.

A gunshot was the quickest way to end an animal’s misery, but that would be overkill for a mouse, literally. Drowning it was too much like torture and a cerebral concussion too brutish, but Rick had little choice. The concussion would be quick and painless. He should have invested in one of those live traps, but somehow this had turned into an epic war of wits, with the mouse trouncing him repeatedly, which had probably made him want the wretched little thing to suffer. Obviously, now he was getting soft.

He got a wooden mallet from the kitchen drawer where he kept his tools. But when he flipped the colander over, he found the mouse unconscious—or possibly dead. It didn’t appear to be breathing, and there was no response when he nudged it with the mallet.

He pulled a pair of latex gloves from his jeans’ pocket and settled on his haunches. He’d been carrying gloves with him since his vice days, as religiously as some guys carried condoms. You never knew when you were going to need the protection of latex.

He quickly had the mouse free of the trap, but it still showed no signs of life, and its leg was clearly broken. Funny how it didn’t look so diabolically clever anymore. More like a defenseless creature that was caught up in the universal fight to survive, like everyone else. Food was survival. Cheese was food. It was simply trying to eat without dying.

Rick’s thoughts took a grimly ironic turn. Maybe the mouse wasn’t such a zero after all. It had cleaned up the place. Rick Bayless was the slob who’d left the dirty dishes. Besides, having somebody set a trap for you was no way to die. It just seemed wrong to be tempted with what you wanted most—and then killed for wanting it. Was that how Ned had died? Was he lured into a death trap?

His gut clenched at the thought. He shook off the questions. He had no answers. What he had was a dead mouse that needed to be disposed of. He left it where it was and headed down the hall to his bedroom to get a shoe box. Maybe he’d even give the devil mouse a proper burial.

By the time he got back, the mouse was gone. The trap was where he’d left it, and he could see a faint blood trail leading toward the refrigerator, but no sign of the mouse. It had regained consciousness and made a break for freedom, dragging itself across the floor. Or it had been faking the entire time.

Score one—or twenty—for Mickey. Rick had lost count.

8

Simon Shan walked over to the display of ancient ceremonial swords on his bedroom wall and removed a nineteenth-century jade-handled dagger. Other than a rare ivory mah-jongg set that had belonged to his grandmother, these weapons were the only heirlooms of value in the Shan family. They’d been passed down from father to eldest son for generations, and his father had told him that this dagger’s blade was sharp enough to cut floating silk.

Simon ran the pad of his index finger over the edge, watching the blood rise to the surface and bubble. Amazing. He hadn’t felt a thing.

Holed up in his spacious bedroom, he’d been considering the remains of his brilliant career. The media had made quite a fuss over his Eurasian features when he became a celebrity two years ago, calling them both exotic and patrician. Possibly that was why his face had graced the covers of five popular magazines this month alone.

The magazines were fanned out like a huge tiara across the cushioned bench at the foot of his bed where his former assistant had arranged them. He’d also been on countless talk shows and news programs, answering questions about his new gig as spokesperson and designer for the Goldstar Collection, one of the country’s largest discount chains.

He’d been labeled the male heir to Martha Stewart and the next bona fide lifestyle icon. But that was then. Yesterday. Today he was a drug dealer. Two weeks ago, DEA agents had found half a million dollars’ worth of opium in the trunk of his sports car. He’d been charged with dealing, possession, and with using his import-export company to smuggle in the contraband.

Today he was an exploding sun, a blindingly bright has-been.

He walked the length of his blue-and-green Olympic pool of a bedroom to one of the room’s three bubble windows. He slipped the curved blade behind a light-blocking blind, moving it enough to look out at a typical Monday morning in Santa Monica. The sun was rising over the ocean, but he didn’t dare press any of the remote buttons that would open his condo’s custom blinds. Fifteen stories down, the paparazzi waited on the busy street with their zoom lenses. He could see them on the roofs of nearby buildings, as well.

They were probably hoping for a shot of him dirty, disheveled and strung out on his own alleged stash of drugs, which was why he’d taken extra care with his grooming, slicking his hair back from the widow’s peak on his forehead and dressing in the black silk-blend turtleneck and unpleated gray slacks that were his signature look. If someone showed up at his door disguised as a deliveryman, or crawled through the air-conditioning ducts, Simon Shan would be ready.

He checked his left index finger. The blood had already dried in a perfectly precise line, and still he felt no pain. The skin didn’t know it had been breached, and to his way of thinking that was more humane than a gaping, disfiguring bullet hole. He preferred Chinese martial arts and direct contact with his opponents, but if weapons were necessary, only daggers and swords should be allowed in civilized warfare. They required coordination, precision and courage. Guns were for cowards. Any idiot could pull a trigger, and too many did.

In motion, move like a thundering wave. When still, be like a mountain. The first two tenets of the Twelve Descriptions of ability came back to him. Ability was the literal meaning of kung fu in English, but Simon hadn’t had to think about his martial-arts training in years. It would feel good to get physical with some slimy photog who stole pieces of a man’s soul and auctioned them off to the highest bidder. It would definitely break the monotony.

The walls of his penthouse condo were closing in. He kept the televisions and computers dark to avoid the almost continuous coverage of his case, and the phone had stopped ringing, except for the press. For his part, he’d been avoiding all contact with the outside world. He’d chosen to isolate himself, and at first it had felt right, like protective custody. But now, the silence was deep and lonely. Painful. Today, he was going to break that pattern.

He opened the bedroom’s double doors and walked down the long slate hallway to the kitchen, the dagger at his side. If the bedroom had always reminded him of a swimming pool, this hallway was a lap pool. The floor was flowing slabs of blue stone, cut and set so tightly that no seam could be seen, and the Oriental art on the walls featured black swans.

Recessed lighting haloed the brushed-steel and green granite kitchen. He’d had the oversize room designed to accommodate a cooking show, should he ever want to shoot out of his home. He’d envisioned parties featuring fusion cuisine, paired with the best California wines.

He attacked the pile of mail he’d been avoiding on the kitchen countertop, knowing it would be one rejection after another, some polite, some not. Events he was scheduled to host were being rescheduled, but with someone else at the podium. Parties in his honor were being postponed, forever. Even some interviews had been canceled, but most were being rethought along the lines of an exposé. Would he talk about the drug charges? About his guilt or innocence? About the disastrous impact on his future?

He wanted to talk about who had framed him—and how they could possibly have known where he was going to be that day, and when he was going to be there. But that would put him in the position of doing what all criminals did: swearing that they were innocent, crying that they’d been set up.

One reporter had done enough research on his past to ask probing questions about Shan’s drug use when he was a teenager. He’d admitted to some experimentation and to getting caught, but he’d seethed inwardly at the insinuations that it had been more. He’d been educated in London, but most of his family still lived in Taiwan. They were people of honor, and this latest incident had brought them deep shame. Worse, his father seemed to believe the charges. The proud old man had stopped taking Shan’s calls.

He slit open one envelope after another, skimming the contents, which were exactly what he expected. He was being uninvited from his own life, shunned. He had stopped reading the return addresses. He just wanted to get through all of it. Right now a clean counter would feel like a small victory.

He picked up another letter-size envelope, slit the top, turned it upside down and shook it. Money floated out like confetti, hundred-dollar bills. He didn’t count them. It was several thousand dollars—and he knew immediately who’d sent it.

His father had returned the money Simon had sent him. He’d been sending checks since he graduated from Oxford and got a job as a waiter to help pay his way through Cordon Bleu, the famous French cooking school. Now he was able to send a great deal more in the monthly envelopes, but this was his father’s way of saying that his help wasn’t welcome anymore. They would starve first.

Misery fizzed up into Simon’s throat. It tasted brackish, and he fought the urge to be sick. He had to be strong. There was only one way to restore his family’s name and their dignity. He either had to prove his innocence—or take his own life. There was no other way to stop the nightmare he’d brought down on them. When he was gone they could hold their heads up again. He knew his way of thinking would be alien to anyone not raised as he was. It was part of his culture.

Strong. Proud. Brave. He was a warrior.

“Simon…voice mail.”

Simon looked around, confused. It sounded as if someone had whispered his name. A woman. Lane Chandler? A tiny flashing blue light caught his eye, and he realized he’d left his Darwin cell phone here in the kitchen. In his rush to shut off the phone, he must have hit the volume control rather than the End button.

“Simon, you have voice mail.”

It was his cell, and whether or not the programmed voice was Lane’s he didn’t know, but it had always reminded him of her. Soft and soothing, slightly haunting. The kind of voice a man who liked women automatically responded to, vibrating up and down his spine. And Simon did like women, despite the media’s speculation.

He set down the dagger next to the cell, contemplating both. One was ancient, the other ultramodern. Both had many uses, both were designed as protection, but in today’s modern age, either could destroy a life in an instant. He drew in a breath, knowing the call was going to be ugly. Still, as long as he was cleaning up the mess, he might as well listen to his voice-mail messages, too.

His mailbox was full. He would have to call TPC to get the overflow, but he quickly screened all the calls he had by listening to the caller’s name and the date stamp. There were several from his attorneys, his publicist, his TPC concierge and Lane herself, but right now, the only message that interested him was from Goldstar’s chairman. It had come in two days ago.

“Simon, I apologize for the voice mail, but you haven’t been answering your phone. Listen, my friend, that statement of confidence we discussed about believing in your innocence and standing by you…well, our lawyers and public relations people are advising against it. They’re suggesting we keep a low profile, and that you do the same. The board has voted to put the launch of your products on hold until the outcome of your trial. That way you and your lawyers can concentrate on clearing your name, and we can all put this unfortunate incident behind us. Good luck, Simon. You have friends at Goldstar.”

Simon pressed the End button. He picked up the dagger and touched the blade again. No pain. No pain at all. A second later, he whipped the dagger over his head and with a crack of his wrist, launched it like a missile at the kitchen’s other doorway, the one off the hallway to the front door.

The tip of the blade stuck in the door frame, the handle quivering like the crossbar of an arrow. A strangled gasp came from the shadows of the hallway. Simon flipped on the overhead lights and strode toward the door. He was shaking. “Don’t ever come up on me unannounced.”

The tall, lithe creature he’d caught eyed him with a mix of fear and defiance. The material of her blouse sleeve was pinned by the knife blade, tethering her to the door frame. Simon didn’t free her. He didn’t trust her, either.

“I picked up the things you wanted,” she said, pointing to the magazines that had fallen to the floor. “I thought I could leave them without disturbing you.”

He unstuck the knife, ripping a chunk of lacquered wood from the door frame. His voice was frozen with rage at the world that had turned on him. “Give me another reason to think you’ve betrayed me, and you’ll die by this blade.”

9

“It’s a go, Ashley. Sign the lease.” A squeal on the other end of the line forced Lane to lower the volume of her earpiece. But she couldn’t suppress a grin as she walked briskly down the Avenue of the Stars, toward the Santa Monica Mountains in the distance. She’d just green-lighted the plans to open the TPC branch in Dallas. She’d been putting it off for weeks, and she was as excited as Ashley, who’d been stranded in Dallas, scouting locations. Probably as nervous, too.

“Make sure it’s the entire tenth floor,” Lane said, “and we’re good to go. Next step is getting the place staffed. You’re going to be running the show, so put together your short list of contenders for the key positions and set up the interviews. I can be there this Thursday. That gives you four days.”

“Will do! I’ll have everything ready when you get here, and thank you so much for this opportunity. This is it for me, the ultimate, really. My dream.”

“And your chance to make it come true,” Lane said, congratulating her warmly, even though Ashley was really Val’s choice. But that felt good, too. It was time to let go of the reins and give Val his head. He’d been pushing for the expansion, and he knew the staff better than she did, in terms of their leadership abilities. Besides, Lane was not the maverick that some people thought. She believed in teamwork. She’d played some beach volleyball when she was in college, and she’d admired the way the really good teams worked. One set up the shot, and the other one took it. That’s what she and Val had just done, although he still didn’t know it.

Lane excused herself, gently cutting the conversation short with Ashley. Lane’s next call was to their receptionist, letting Mary know the Dallas move was official and to order champagne. Lane had decided the office needed something to celebrate, given their latest client fiasco—the frightening business that very morning with Priscilla Brandt. But Mary reminded her that Val was holding staff meetings all afternoon, so Lane’s bright idea would have to be postponed.

She dropped her cell in her suit pocket and kept walking, oblivious to the fashion incongruity of white Nike Turbo Plus jogging shoes and a black spandex designer suit with a pencil skirt. She probably should have been a New Yorker. Walking was a requirement for her sanity. And today, she’d had no choice. She’d been stuck for too long, mired in doubt and indecision about the expansion. Walking helped clear her head and give her the perspective she needed to make decisions. It felt like she was moving forward in all ways, not just physically. She was charging, going somewhere.

But Jerry had told her never to venture out at night, so here she was, on her lunch hour, despite the obvious drawbacks of walking in L.A. at noon. Car exhaust, for one. It really wasn’t a good idea to walk in cities where you could see the air you were breathing. Worse, it was the middle of the day, and hot. Her breasts were sweating again. And walking was costing her a fortune, no matter what anyone said about it being the low-cost alternative to health clubs. She was paying dearly just for the privilege of living close enough to walk back and forth to work.

But who’d have thought she would ever have a fortune to pay. Not so terribly long ago she was penniless and homeless. She attended high school classes in juvenile hall and later tackled college on a scholarship, supplemented by multiple part-time jobs, one of which was helping a professor who’d penned a surprise bestseller and desperately needed someone to organize his life. He’d been so thrilled with her efforts he’d referred his entertainment lawyer to her, who’d referred more clients. It had started like that, a chain reaction. And then she’d dragged Darwin, kicking and screaming, into the fold, and he’d invented his crazy “electronic bodyguard” phone, as he called it in those days. Finally, after two years of abject toil, she’d bagged her first really big client, who’d become another source of referrals, and ready cash.

And she hadn’t stopped moving since.

Rick Bayless watched Detective Mimi Parsons take a huge bite of her PB & J on Wonder Bread, give it several distracted chews and then wash everything down with a slug of milk from a quart carton, which she’d probably swiped from the coffee room. She was glued to the tabloid magazine on her desk and hadn’t noticed him standing not six feet away, observing her and the otherwise empty police-station bullpen.

Everyone’s out to lunch, Rick thought, especially her.

At least she wasn’t into health food, like the rest of southern California. She had snack packages of potato chips and chocolate-chip cookies lined up for her second and third courses. Not into highbrow reading material, either. The article was upside down to Rick, but he could make out the title from where he stood by the door, and it had something to do with a transgender female prison inmate giving birth to a fur-bearing baby of questionable species.

Not much has changed, he thought, smiling to himself. Mimi was still a mess. Her desk was stacked high with case files, unfinished reports and research data. Her blazer jacket was wrinkled and too large on her petite frame, not that he was any expert on fashion. Most notably, though, she was completely tuned out to everything but what held her attention at that moment. That’s what had made her a stellar detective when they were partners, her avid, Peeping Tom–like concentration.

Rick had asked for Coop at the desk, but the clerk told him Don Cooper had been loaned out to the Palos Verdes Estates Police Department on a case. Rick figured that was apt punishment for Don’s loquaciousness. Not much to talk about at PVEPD. A big case there involved victims of rabid squirrel attacks on golf courses. Occasionally someone got nailed by a runaway cart.

Rick had done a little more digging with the clerk, found out that Mimi was peripherally involved in the Ned Talbert case, and used all of his considerable stealth to sneak in here and surprise her. He and Mimi had done their thing fifteen years ago, working juvenile vice out of the downtown L.A. bureau. A year or so after he resigned, in part because of remarks he’d made that were critical of the juvenile-hall system, Mimi had called and told him she was switching to homicide. She’d sailed through the requirements, eventually transferred down here to the West Side police station, and she’d been an integral part of their detective division ever since.

Rick had been instrumental in helping her get the job. She’d wanted out of the grinder, and he had pulled a few strings. Mimi actually did owe him for that, not that she’d ever admit it. Theirs had been a love-hate relationship, never romantic, sometimes trying, but always interesting.

He scuffed his feet, and she looked up, eyes narrowing at the sight of him. “What in the H are you doing here, Bayless? I haven’t fired my gun yet this year. You’re going to make me break that record?”

It was her way of saying hi. Rick nodded, unsmiling. His way.

He braved her suspicious, get-out-of-my-space glare and walked to her desk. Conversationally, he said, “I hear you’re working with the Robbery Homicide Division on the Ned Talbert case.”

She slapped down her sandwich, yielding to his rude intrusion. “And Ned was a friend of yours, I know. I’m sorry about that, I really am, but I can’t tell you anything beyond what’s been in the news, and you know it.”

“So, you are working with RHD.” LAPD’s Robbery Homicide Division often took jurisdiction when homicides involved high-profile individuals or special circumstances, even if the crime had happened within the jurisdiction of another bureau. Ned’s home was within the physical boundaries of the West bureau, which made the West L.A. station the occurrence division. So, fortunately for Rick, even if Robbery-Homicide was running the case, the West L.A. people would have been first at the scene, which meant Mimi may have had a near-virgin look at the crime scene.

“If I was working with them, that would be all the more reason I couldn’t help you. Sorry.”

“Who said I wanted help? Maybe I have some things to tell you.”

“Yeah? Like?”

“Like Ned may have joined a private-concierge service just before he died. And like several other high-profile clients of that service have been accused of criminal acts. Big names, major shit, and all of it recent, like within the last month.”

She glanced at the tabloid, which she so clearly preferred over his company. “What kind of criminal acts?”

“International drug smuggling and child pornography, for starters. Mimi, it may not be a coincidence that they all belong to the same service. It could be the link that connects them.”

“Connects them to what, a serial killer? Are they all dead?”

“Not dead. Caught. Snared. They’re all embroiled in career-ending scandals and most are looking at significant prison time if they’re convicted. Maybe Ned wasn’t supposed to die. Maybe he was supposed to have his career ended, too, and something went wrong. Someone should follow up on that. You, for example.”

This was the moment when Rick would have handed her the TPC card with the word Extortion? on the back in Ned’s handwriting, but he didn’t want to have to lie to her about where he got it. And he wasn’t quite ready to talk about the missing package, either.

“Where did you come up with this information? Do you know all these people personally?”

“Ned? Personally? I’ve known him since he was five, and he isn’t into whips and chains. He’s not a killer, and he wasn’t suicidal. He had everything to live for, as the cliché goes.”

“Did Ned tell you about this service? Did he have suspicions?”

Lie, Bayless. She’s never going to get the significance otherwise.

He drew Lane Chandler’s card out of his jacket pocket. “Ned was using this as a marker in a book he loaned me. Take a look at what he wrote on the back.”

She glanced at the question Ned had scribbled on the back, her lips pursing as she turned the card over and continued to scrutinize it. “Not much to go on, Sherlock.”

“Right, but Ned also paid me a visit at my cabin the night before he and his girlfriend were found dead. He said he was in trouble, that someone was trying to blackmail him. I had other things on my mind and sent him away. The next day, well, you know what happened.”

She closed one eye, squinting at him. “So, this is about your guilt?”

“It’s about follow-up, Mimi. Your specialty. You need to check this out—or get one of those RHD hotshots to do it.”

Her expression said gimme a fricking break, but he knew Mimi, and she wouldn’t have cleaned it up that much. “You know how they are, Rick. They’re gods. The stink of the O.J. case will never go away, but they still walk on water. What do you think my chances are of getting them to go along with this? They’ll laugh me off the case and loan me out to Palos Verdes.”

It was a credit to Rick’s years of practice that he didn’t smile.

She held out the card, which he pointedly ignored.

“It ain’t happening, Bayless,” she insisted. “From what I hear, the case is being written up as a murder-suicide, and the lab results aren’t even in yet. That’s how sure they are.”

Rick’s jaw clenched so tightly he could hear a click in his ears. “How sure they are? How could they be sure of anything at this point? Maybe it’s how anxious they are to be rid of this case. Did you ever think to ask yourself why, Mimi? Did it even occur to you that something else might be going on here?”

Mimi sighed. “I know cover-up is a buzz phrase these days, but it’s a little early for that, don’t you think? I was at the crime scene, and it sure as hell looked like a murder-suicide to me.”

That’s what Rick had been waiting to hear from her, but he didn’t want to look too eager. Better to continue his rant a little longer. “And isn’t that convenient for everyone concerned. They’re not even going to bother with the lab reports? Either that came down from above, which raises more questions, or these guys are lazy.”

Mimi shrugged, as if to say probably both. She peered at Rick. “If it were me, I’d write it off as a coincidence. Do you think it might be your history, not to mention animosity, toward the department that’s causing you to look for conspiracies where there are none?”

“My history is exactly why I can’t write it off.” With that, he changed the subject. “Take another look at that card. Do you recognize the name?”

“Lane Chandler?” She shook her head. “Should I?”

“We booked her for prostitution when she was a juvenile living on the streets—fifteen years old, to be exact. She was calling herself Lane Chandler, but her real name was Lucy Cox.”

Mimi rolled back in her chair, stunned. She stared at the card. “Holy shit, this is the kid that set off the firestorm. You might still be working in vice if not for her. Me, too, for that matter.”

“I never shed a tear about leaving vice. The point is, Lane Chandler has a criminal past, even if she was a juvenile at the time—and we need to know what she’s been doing since. Does she have an adult record, anything at all? I’d love to know how she ended up with clients like the CEO of TopCo and a hot commodity like Simon Shan.”

“She represents Simon Shan?”

Mimi’s eyes widened. Apparently Shan was a hot commodity. Rick didn’t keep up with celebrity gossip, but he’d seen enough of it on Gotcha.com to know that Lane’s service had become a lightning rod. The coincidence of so many clients in trouble at one company had not slipped Seth Black’s attention, either. Of the bunch, Shan had been cited as the one with the most to lose.

That was before Ned Talbert died under gruesome circumstances, but Ned wasn’t mentioned as a client of TPC, which meant the list had probably been made up before he joined—and Black had noticed the pattern even before Ned’s death.

Rick added some more names. “U.S. congressman Burton Carr and Priscilla Brandt, who’s hawking a book about manners. It’s quite a list.”

“Ms. Pris?” Mimi seemed impressed. “Still, the case is all but closed, and they’re not going to open it up again because Ned joined a concierge service whose clients are having a string of bad luck. So, what do you think is going on?”

“I don’t know, but I sure as hell wish I’d listened to what Ned was trying to tell me.”

She scribbled down a note on her desk blotter, which was unlikely ever to be found again, given all the doodling already there. “Maybe I could do some checking on Lane Chandler or Lucy Cox, just for old time’s sake and because I’m kind of curious myself. Not that I owe you any favors. Because I sure as hell don’t.”

“Thanks,” he said, deadpan. Better not to let her know that he was breathing easier. He lingered, wondering how to segue to his next concern.

She ripped open a bag of chips, about to wedge a few too many into her open mouth, when she realized he was still intent on something—her. “What? You hungry?”

“I was just wondering about the evidence from the crime scene. No big deal, but I left a package over at Ned’s. I thought one of the techs might have picked it up.”

“Rick, you’re not really asking me to mess with the evidence, are you? Tell me you’re not.”

He shrugged, tilting just enough to grab a couple chips from her bag. He was taking a chance by tying himself with the package, but what the hell. Getting caught with his hand in a fifteen-year-old cookie jar was the least of his worries these days, especially with his gut telling him the package had been lifted before the police ever got there. Mimi might be able to confirm that for him.

“You could tell me if it’s there, couldn’t you?” he coaxed. “It’s an old brown bubble pack, eight by eleven, unmarked but pretty beaten up. I’d like to have it back when the investigation’s over.”

“What’s inside?”

“Personal stuff,” he said, wondering if he could still blush. “It’s a little embarrassing.”

She heaved a sigh and picked up her sandwich, poking a bubble of red jelly back between soggy crusts. “Don’t push it, Rick.”

He nodded. “Right, I’ll leave you to your lunch.” He had a feeling she would check. Yeah, definitely, Mimi was going to check. It was that Peeping Tom thing. Whether she’d tell him was another question.

10

Rumor had it that the King of Rumors was agoraphobic. Seth Black of Gotcha.com had been outed as housebound by rival gossip Web sites. That’s what had given Rick the idea of staking out the man’s surprisingly modest apartment in the Hollywood Hills area. Either online gossip didn’t pay well—which wasn’t likely since the gossip sites were now scooping the mainstream media and forcing the big guys to go to them for entertainment news—or Black was a frugal man. Possibly he was too housebound to relocate. Regardless, he’d broken Ned’s murder-suicide story hours before the mainstream press had, and Rick was curious how the thirty-two-year-old agoraphobic got his information.

Rick bowed his head for a moment and dug his fingers into the aching muscles of his temples. He could feel the fatigue of his nonstop day. He’d been parked down the street from Black’s place for going on two hours, but so far he’d seen no one except a telephone repairman, who got no answer when he knocked on the door of Black’s ground-floor apartment. Rick had tried Black’s number before he drove over, but the phone went right to voice mail. He was beginning to wonder if Black was home, and if this surveillance idea was a good one.

That morning, after Rick had the epiphany about Lane Chandler, he’d tracked down the address of Jenny Shu, Ned’s housekeeper, and he’d gone over to pay her a visit. It didn’t surprise Rick to find Jenny upset, but he hadn’t expected a complete collapse. She’d been with Ned for years and Rick knew her well, so of course, he’d knelt down to hug the tiny Asian woman, and of course, they’d cried. Her sobs had ripped right through him, and Rick, who had been stoic until now, broke. Grief had washed through him until he shook, and Jenny had tried her best to comfort him. Maybe it was as simple as seeing someone else who knew and loved Ned.

Rick was sure his meeting with Jenny was a large part of what had exhausted him so completely. When they’d regained their composure, she’d patted his face and told him how sorry she was. She invited him in for tea, but he’d known he couldn’t take her up on that. Reminiscing about Ned would have killed him. The pain she’d already touched into had almost killed him. He did manage to ask her about the package, but she’d seen nothing that matched his description, and he was satisfied with that. He couldn’t ask her about what she’d witnessed when she arrived at the scene. Neither one of them could have handled that conversation. Maybe another time. Maybe.

After that, Rick had gone home to eat and get some rest. Good intentions, but somehow he’d found himself at the computer for another look at Seth Black’s site. That’s where he’d discovered that Black, with the help of Jack the Giant Killer, was routinely scooping not only the mainstream press, but all the other online sites, and that Black had been the first one to break the news on virtually every TPC client. From there Rick had gone to see Mimi, knowing in the back of his mind that a meeting with Black was inevitable.

Rick figured Black relied on the local paparazzi for pictures and salacious tidbits, but he had to be getting the more personal details from an inside source. A family member, friend or employee were the obvious ways, but given the nature of a concierge service, it only made sense that considerable client information was stored away somewhere, which had Rick wondering if TPC had a mole, someone intent on extortion as Ned’s card had suggested. If clients confided in their private concierges the way they did in their hairstylists, there should be plenty of blackmail material to go around.

Still, drug busts? Child porn? That wasn’t info you confided to anyone.

TPC had branch offices in San Francisco and Las Vegas, and according to the Web site they would soon be expanding across the country, but Rick was only interested in their corporate offices here in L.A. He’d found an employee tree with the names of some of the company’s key players, but rather than run a background check on each of them, which would probably yield nothing, he’d decided to stake out Black’s place to see who showed up. Even if the inside source wasn’t a TPC employee, he was curious, especially about the mysterious Giant Killer. And Rick was betting that some of the really juicy stuff was hand-carried to Black since everyone knew that e-mail was no longer secure for anyone, including the country’s chief executive.

Rick took a swig from a can of Coke that had gone flat. His last serious attempt at eating had been the Chinese takeout that morning, and he hadn’t thought to bring any food with him. Maybe that’s why he was perspiring and dizzy. It was warm outside, and hotter in the car.

He patted the front pocket of his jeans and realized he’d left something behind this morning, a bottle of prescription pills. They were probably sitting on the nightstand at his place. He forgot them half the time anyway, and when he did take them, he felt like shit, worse than before. He ought to flush them down the fricking toilet, but he couldn’t. He was dead without them. Well, dead sooner.

He shook off the morbid thought and focused on Black’s place. There were still no signs of life, so to speak, but Rick had planned for that. He’d brought a five-by-seven envelope, addressed to Black, in case he needed a reason to go to the door himself.

He grabbed it and let himself out of the car.

Whoa, something was wrong. The cracks in the sidewalk appeared to slide back and forth as he approached the four-story apartment building, causing him to weave like a drunk. He stopped to get his bearings, and as he glanced up, he saw the mail slot open on Black’s door. Someone was peeking through it from the other side, Rick realized. The slot was nearly at eye level and large enough to get a glimpse of a man’s face.

Rick rushed over to the stoop. “Mr. Black! Seth! I need to talk to you. It’s urgent.” The slot banged shut and Rick heard the scrape of a sliding bolt, which meant there must be some way to lock it. He pounded on the door, hoping if he made enough noise Black would be forced to answer. He might not want his neighbors calling the cops, especially if he was trying to keep his work location a secret. There were also zoning laws.

Finally, the slot popped open and a gun barrel poked through. “Shut up, you fucking loony, or I’ll shoot you!” Black hissed.

Interesting approach, Rick thought, moving out of Black’s line of fire, which was severely limited, as was his intelligence, apparently. Rick decided to appeal directly to the man’s entrepreneurial instincts, otherwise known as greed.

“I’m willing to pay for information,” Rick said. “Any price you want.”

“Yeah?” The gun barrel disappeared, replaced by eyes as black and beady as the suicidal mouse who’d taken over Rick’s kitchen. “What kind of information?”

“Are you Seth Black? Can I see proof?”

“You aren’t seeing anything until I know who you are and what you want.”

Rick slipped a fake business card through the slot. It identified him as an IRS agent. There was a cell-phone number and an e-mail address, both of which were accounts in the fake name on the card.

“What do you want to know?” Black asked after he’d looked at the card.

“I want whatever information you can get me on a Century City company called The Private Concierge, and I’m particularly interested in its president, Lane Chandler.”

“Is she in some kind of tax trouble?”

“I want to know about Lane Chandler’s dark side and what’s really going on in that concierge service. You call me with that kind of information, and I’ll tell you what kind of trouble she’s in. Share and share alike.”

“You’re crazy, man,” Black grumbled.

“Maybe,” Rick said, “but I pay well.” He drew a hundred-dollar bill from the envelope he carried, which had four more of the same denomination inside. He slipped the bill and the envelope through the slot. It was all part of the cost of doing business.

“Geez,” Black whispered, but with far less irritation in his voice. “Yeah, maybe. We’ll see. If I get something on her, maybe I’ll call.”

“You call, I pay. No maybes.”

The slot closed and locked. Rick smiled. No one wanted trouble with the IRS. It was always easier to cooperate, just in case.

As Rick took a shortcut across the lawn and started back to his SUV, a flicker of movement caught his eye. Through a gate that led to the back of the building, he saw a shrouded figure flit out of his line of sight and disappear down an alley. Rick guessed it was a male by the height, and he’d just come out of the apartment building.

The rusty latch was jammed. Rick forced the gate, butting it hard with his shoulder. It flew open, and he broke into a sprint. When he hit the alley behind the building, he was already laboring. He stopped to scope the area out and catch his breath. Whoever he’d seen had a good head start. If he couldn’t catch him, he might be able to ID his car, get the license-plate number. It was worth a try.

The block had several apartments, and the alley was covered parking with mostly empty stalls. Broken-down cars filled the remaining spaces, and debris from the Dumpsters stuck to Rick’s feet as he ran, searching the shadowy crevices at the same time. A couple of tenants, trying to jump-start a car, turned to see who was coming by this time, and what the rush was.

Tenants or car thieves? Rick didn’t stop to find out. Nor did he ask for directions. He’d learned from his years as a cop that they would almost certainly point him the wrong way.

The alley emptied into a quiet backstreet. Rick had no clue which way to go, and his vision was playing tricks again. He could see a small pack of dogs, probably trailing a female in heat, and some skateboarders on the opposite sidewalk, but there was no sign of a fleeing man in a hooded tunic and dark colors head to toe. Could it be Jack the Giant Killer he was after?

He headed east on a hunch and heard the roar of an engine. As he turned, a gleaming black car careened from out of nowhere and roared straight at him. It jumped the curb and grazed him, knocking him over the bumper before it tossed him to the ground. He hit, tucked and rolled, going with the momentum of the impact. He flipped at least three times, still doubled up to protect his head and his vitals. Jesus, what a day.

He forced himself to get up the second he stopped rolling, but the car was gone. No license number. He wasn’t quick enough for that, but from the chassis it had looked like one of those expensive new luxury hybrid cars. Jack the Giant Killer was environmentally aware? A Jolly Green Giant killer? And wealthy at that.

Ah, life in southern California, Rick thought, groaning as he bent to dust himself off. He would have some bruises, but otherwise, he was okay, relatively speaking.

Lane glanced at her watch. It was 9:00 p.m., and she’d had a carnival ride of a day. Her triumphant walk on the Avenue of the Stars was over the moment she got back to the office. The police were waiting for her in the reception area, and they’d wanted to talk about Simon Shan, specifically his whereabouts at various times. Lane had insisted that TPC’s client information was confidential. They’d finally gone, but she had a horrible feeling they would be back with a court order. Worse, she’d been accosted in front of prospective clients. A husband and wife real-estate-development team had arrived for their appointment while the police were still there, trying to intimidate client information out of Lane.

Little chance she’d see the couple again.

What she really wanted to do now was assume the fetal position and maybe suck her thumb. But she didn’t have time. She had one last task, and it had become a religious ritual, possibly because it gave her a feeling of control, however illusory. Every night before closing up shop she used her cell phone’s voice-activated recorder to review the important events of the day and update her to-do list.

Somehow, she would get through that ritual tonight, but first, she needed to breathe. She found the universal remote hiding under a stack of papers on her desk. The remote coordinated most of the electronic equipment in her office, and she used it to turn up the mood music playing on her sound system. The bluesy songs of heartbreak and loss soothed her for some reason, especially when she was stressed and overworked. But their magic wasn’t working at the moment.

She scooped up her cell, left her desk and fell into the room’s upholstered chaise, exhausted. No matter what she did to block out the whispering voices of doom in her head, she couldn’t escape the fear that her company was under siege. And if it was, who was going next?

There were people who might want to harm her, enemies from her past, but she wasn’t a threat to them now. If she’d meant to name names, she would have done it years ago. Surely they knew that. Now she had too much to lose herself. But the real question was why. If they did want to hurt her, why would they do it this way?

The Priscilla Brandt situation had deteriorated even further this afternoon. Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised Lane that an advice expert wouldn’t take advice from anyone. Lane had urged her to consult an attorney, which had infuriated her. Apparently all of Pris’s advisers had suggested the same thing, and now she wasn’t taking anyone’s calls, including Lane’s. Lane had been trying to reach her all evening.

Some people created their own problems, and Pris might be one of them. Lane heaved a sigh and pressed the microphone icon on her cell phone’s digital display, activating the system. Maybe she’d feel better once the record keeping had been taken care of.

She began to dictate: “Priscilla Brandt wigged out today and attacked a homeless man on her property. I did some short-term damage control by canceling her interview with the morning-show anchor. Long-term, the woman needs anger management, medical intervention and possibly a straitjacket.”

Lane smiled at the thought. She spent so much time stroking egos and smoothing feathers that it actually felt good to say what she really thought. Also libelous, probably. Certainly, contract-breaching.

She jabbed the Replay button to record over the item. “Monday, October 7. Priscilla Brandt had a confrontation with a homeless man on her property….”

Lane’s voice lapsed into a monotone as she went through the rest of the day’s events. When she got to the to-do list, she used verbal commands to delete the things she’d done and add several new items. At the top of her list was the itinerary for her Dallas trip later this week. Next was a reminder to check in with clients who weren’t in crisis. She owed Jerry Blair at TopCo a call to go over some ideas for his daughter’s sweet sixteen. He’d finally hired the party planner she’d recommended, but she wanted him to know she was thinking about him and his concerns. She was also tempted to ask him for some advice. And maybe a good lawyer.

Lane had become so engrossed in her thoughts she didn’t notice that someone had taken advantage of the office’s open-door policy. The last of her staff had left an hour ago, and no one who didn’t work in the building could get past the security downstairs. She’d thought she was alone. But she couldn’t have been more wrong. A man stood at the doorway behind her, listening to her every word. He didn’t work in the building, and he’d easily evaded the building’s security. He was about to invade hers.

11

Priscilla Brandt marched from one end of her living room to the other, yanking open the curtains as she went. It was dark and she couldn’t see what manner of monsters lurked outside, hiding in the bushes, but they could see in. So, let them, she’d decided. Let the paparazzi spy on her. Let the police arrest her. She was not going to be trapped in a boarded-up house like a cornered animal. She was not going to hide or cower or pretend to be repentant.

All right, she was glad she hadn’t killed him, but that was all.

She tugged at the last column of drapes, which didn’t want to open. The whole house was computerized, including the window treatments, which were programmed to open and close morning and evening, as well as adjust for daylight saving time. They could also be controlled by remote, but given her mood, yanking was mandatory. She would have yanked the devil’s dick if she’d been able to get her hands on it.

Someone had caught her on tape this morning dealing with that stubborn mule of a homeless man, and then sold the footage to a muckraking gossip Web site. From there, the networks had picked it up, and all day long Priscilla had been forced to watch hideous clips of herself abusing a defenseless, unconscious person.

That made her the monster, of course. She’d been advised by her publicity people to call an attorney, avoid the press and say nothing, but that wasn’t her style. And she’d had to talk to the police. They’d shown up on her doorstep, ready to cart her down to the station to question her. It was only because she’d hyperventilated and had to breathe into a bag that they’d agreed to talk to her in her home.

There was no one she could call. Her parents would have added to the embarrassment. They were free spirits who lived in a ramshackle double-wide on a scrubby patch near the California-Oregon border that technically put them in Oregon and saved them a buttload in state taxes. They didn’t wear shoes and were the impetus for most of the Do Nots in her book. She’d had no time to make friends since she got to L.A., or do anything but focus on her career. Her road to success was the express lane, total and all-consuming.

So, she’d brazened it out alone, telling the police it was self-defense and the man had been harassing her for days, part of which was true. He had been harassing her, and she was defending her dream, damn it, even if this was a different guy. She’d even admitted to giving him money, explaining that she lived alone and was terrified of him.

Thank God, he’d gone away this morning. He’d regained consciousness well before the police arrived, hustled off her property and disappeared. Despite a thorough search of the neighborhood, they hadn’t been able to find him, and no charges had been pressed against her. That was the only bit of luck she’d had.

Priscilla continued yanking curtains, and when she had them all opened, the living room resembled an amphitheater with the audience hidden in the darkness beyond the windows. She poured herself a glass of an excellent French cab, swirled it and held it to her nose, taking in the hints of cherry and licorice. She advised people on how to choose wines. Mostly she was faking it, and any wine expert would have known, but the public didn’t. She’d been elevated to the level of expert on many things, which could be the problem.

She coughed as the wine went down wrong. Maybe it was too much pressure for a pimply-faced kid who’d grown up in a border town and ate fast food with plastic forks. Maybe that’s why she was cracking up, insulting people—and now, assaulting them.

Her Darwin phone rang, and she could tell by the ring tone that it was Lane Chandler, but she’d been fielding calls and advice all day, including from Lane, who’d joined the chorus in advising her to speak with an attorney. Apparently TPC even provided legal consults for its top-tier clients. But Priscilla didn’t trust attorneys. She didn’t even have an assistant, which made life hellishly busy, but she harbored deep fears of being exposed as a fraud and a hick.

Besides, Priscilla Brandt had done just fine on her own.

She left the wineglass on the bar and walked to the window, defiant, hands on her hips. Indignant tears welled. Let them look at her, the assholes. They were lucky she wasn’t naked, wielding a bullhorn and staging a protest for privacy rights. They could try to destroy her, but she would never let it happen. She would even find some way to turn this debacle around and exploit it for the good of her career. But she wasn’t about to do anything as ridiculous as going to rehab or donating time to a homeless shelter. Let the retarded, boozed-up movie starlets do rehab. She was an author.

Possibly she would turn this into a chapter of her next book. Not a catastrophe after all, but a life lesson. Don’t let the turkeys get you down. Shoot them and eat them with prune stuffing for Thanksgiving dinner.

Her phone rang again, startling her. She’d left it on the bar, but she wasn’t taking one more call tonight unless it was from Skip McGinnis, the kid who would be executive producing her talk show, provided he ever got his head out of his ass. If he was looking for excuses to drop the ball, he certainly had one after today’s hot mess. She’d been calling him all afternoon, but kept getting his voice mail with that lying message about how important her call was to him. All she wanted was a chance to explain in her own words.

She rushed to the bar, but the phone’s display said the call was from an unknown caller, probably the press. Damn McGinnis. This was humiliating. Every call that wasn’t him felt like another rejection, and they were piling up. She should have let her manager call him. Let her collect the rejections.

She toyed with the phone, wondering what to do. The last couple of messages she’d left him might have been a bit snappish. She probably shouldn’t have threatened to go over his head and have him fired if he didn’t call back, but he couldn’t have taken that seriously. Surely. Maybe she would try again, something humorous. To make up for the surliness.

She got his voice mail on the first ring, but the message had been changed. His voice was tight and furious. “If this is Priscilla Brandt, your show is as good as dead. And if I had my way your career would be dead, too. Don’t. Call. Back.”

Pris gasped and dropped the phone. How could he do that? Everyone who called him was going to hear that message. She felt her knees buckling and was afraid she would end up on the floor. It was all over. Tomorrow’s papers would have the shots of her collapsing after Skip McGinnis rejected her via voice mail.

She pressed her palms to the counter and hung on. No, she wasn’t going to give him that satisfaction. No way! In an act of symbolic defiance, she upended her wineglass and drained the entire thing. When the wine was gone, she banged the glass on the bar, shaking, but grateful that her nerve was coming back. No one was going to talk to her like that. There was only going to be one career in need of life support when this was over and that was his. Skip McGinnis, that pipsqueak excuse for a talk-show producer, was finished.

Rick Bayless was struck by two things as he listened to the woman who called herself Lane Chandler dictate information about her clients—the moody rhythm-and-blues track playing in the background and the tension crackling in the air. From his vantage point at the door of her office, he had a three-quarter view of her stretched out in the chaise. She was facing away from him, holding what looked like a high-tech cell phone, and he’d made a mental note of the names she mentioned, some of whom he recognized as VIPs of one stripe or another. Her comments were candid, as was her obvious annoyance with certain clients. But it was difficult to concentrate on what she said when his mind kept screening the image of a frighteningly seductive fifteen-year-old, who turned out to be as challenging as any street criminal he’d ever dealt with.

He’d taken her for older, eighteen at least. She’d stared right through him with her chilly azure eyes. They were as blue as jewels, and she was as bold and wary as any professional streetwalker he’d ever come across. She’d promised him his money’s worth, anything he wanted, things he’d never dreamed of, whatever that meant. As he’d moved closer, he’d spotted her lean, wiry frame and gamine features—and realized he was dealing with a kid.

A kid? It had hit him like a bucket of cold water. He’d thought she was legal. And worse, maybe he’d wanted her to be legal because if he was being honest, he’d felt a flash of desire that was almost painful. Jesus, no kid should be out on the street having that effect on grown men. That could be why he’d been a little rough on her when he put her in the cuffs.

When she’d realized she was going to jail, the color had drained from her face. She’d begged him not to take her. She’d even tried to make him believe her sad story about a sick friend. Sad because they all had a sick friend. When she realized she couldn’t talk her way out of it, she’d put up one hell of a fight. Ferocious didn’t cover it, all the time shrieking that her friend was going to die. He used Tasers only to disarm kids with weapons, but he wasn’t sure a Taser would have contained her.

Lane Chandler had grown up, but Rick’s brain had no trouble making that transition. She’d been thirty-five at fifteen. The changes he saw now were all physical. He remembered a lean, starved, ready-to-spring body and a thick mop of dark brown hair that completely covered her face when she looked down. She could have set up housekeeping under that curtain of hair. But when her head came back up and the curtain opened, her gaze had scorched him.

Now, the mop had been brought under control. Sleek and glossy with mahogany hues, it curved toward her face like a whip, but it was still abundant enough that she had to comb it off her face with her fingers.

He wondered what she looked like these days. Still as cold and forbidding as a mountain fjord? Swim at your own risk? Or had the icicles been reserved for him, her persecutor? And what was that music about? “Unchained Melody,” “Go Your Own Way,” “Everybody Hurts” by REM? She didn’t strike him as the type that would be heavily into heartbreak music, but those were the songs playing softly in the background. Did some guy just dump her?

He closed the door on the personal questions, concerned where they were taking him. The only one that mattered was whether or not she could have pulled off the gruesome alleged murder-suicide at Ned’s place and escaped with the package. Rick had been working on a theory of his own about how Ned and Holly had actually died, and he couldn’t imagine a woman like Lane Chandler accomplishing what he had in mind. Too much physical force required, especially in dealing with a man as big as Ned…unless she had an accomplice.

Lane’s chin came up, and she scanned the office windows the way an animal sniffs the air, sensing another presence. He could see her profile, and the beauty that had been nascent then was evident now. The contours of her face had filled out, softening the angles and hiding the raw bones, the desperation. Her lips were parted, glistening. He wanted to think he’d done her a favor by getting her off the streets. That had been part of his goal. But now it forced him to consider another question. What a grim twist of fate it would be if by saving her, he’d somehow allowed her to cross Ned’s path and be the instrument of his destruction. The thought made him ill.

He must have moved because she sprang up from the chaise.

“Who’s there?” She spotted him in the doorway and began stabbing at the buttons on her cell. One of them lit up, flashing.

A panic button, Rick realized. She’d alerted security. The male voice coming from the phone’s mouthpiece confirmed his suspicion.

“Ms. Chandler? Are you all right?”

Rick was on top of her before she could respond. He grabbed the phone out of her hand and fired instructions at her. “Tell the security guard you hit the panic button by mistake. Tell him everything is fine.”

“Fuck off,” she snarled under her breath. “Give me that phone.”

He caught her as she lunged at him, spun her around and put her in an armlock. “Do it,” he warned, applying just enough pressure to make sure she cooperated. “Or I’ll tell him who you really are. I’ll tell everyone, Lucia.”

“What?” She craned around, as if she didn’t know what he was talking about. Apparently, she didn’t recognize him, either. But when he released her, she didn’t hesitate. She took the phone from him and pressed the panic button.

“Sorry,” she told the security guard. “I hit the button by mistake. Everything’s fine.”

“You sure, Ms. Chandler?” the guard said. “We found an exit door ajar down here on the first floor. The alarm didn’t go off, which means there could be a problem with the system. Should I run up there, take a look around?”

She assured him that wasn’t necessary, turned off the phone and tried to slip it into her jacket pocket. Rick took it away from her again, aware of the treasures it must contain.

“Who are you? And why did you call me Lucia?” Haughty and unflinching, she seemed determined to brazen it out. The years had softened her facial features, but little else. Inside, she was probably still as tough as a wire cutter, but that had to be mostly facade. A woman who’d built a successful concierge service from the ground up knew what people needed, inside and out. She played on those needs, had to. She personified the private concierge. Lane’s early clients gushed her praises on the Web site, giving testimonials with the passion of religious converts. Apparently she’d saved them all in one way or another. Rick wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d delivered some babies.

Her eye color seemed different than he remembered. It was still blue, but closer to royal than azure, and not nearly as sharp or crystalline. He wondered if this was part of her identity change, maybe contact lenses. But that could wait. Mimi hadn’t gotten back to him with the Nexus-Lexus results, so Rick had no proof of any adult priors. And this wasn’t the time to confront Lane about the murder-suicide or the package. But she was a woman under a lot of pressure—and he could apply more. Maybe she’d pop.

“Because that’s your name, Lucia—Lucy—Cox. Is your mind racing yet? Just wait. If you’re telling yourself that your juvenile records were sealed and no one could possibly prove what you did back then, don’t be so sure. And in your case, it’s not going to matter, anyway. The rumors will be enough to muddy up your professional reputation.”

She stiffened, caught somewhere between outrage and disbelief. He wondered how long it would take her to figure out that he wasn’t a robber, a rapist or a blackmailer. He was the cop who’d put her in juvie—and made sure she didn’t get out for a very long time.

Lane touched the tattered rubber band on her wrist, knowing that nothing could jump-start her frozen heart. The intruder had her cell phone and it might as well have been a weapon. At first she’d detected something familiar about his brush cut and aviator sunglasses, but it could have been the military thing, which was burned into the American psyche and a staple in plenty of action movies. All the bad guys wore metal-framed glasses, rode motorcycles and looked like RoboCop.

“Who are you?” she asked. “And what do you want?”

He studied the cell’s display. “What kind of car do you drive?”

“I prefer walking.”

“I’m sure the security people know what you drive. Shall I ask them?” He held up the phone.

“It’s a Lexus hybrid.”

“Nice, a social conscience.” He nodded. “Where were you this afternoon at 4:00 p.m.?”

She hesitated, wondering if had something to do with her visit from the police about Simon Shan, but no, that had been earlier, when she got back from lunch. “I was right here, working. Do I need an alibi for something?”

“You might. Tell me about your clients—and start with Ned Talbert.”

Lane had told no one but Darwin about Ned Talbert joining the service. Talbert may have told someone, but she thought it more likely that this man was trying to bluff information out of her. Still, that wasn’t her greatest concern right now. She’d already begun to ask herself if he could be the person behind the assault on her company. There was no way to know what his motive might be, but clearly, he was after her, too.

There was a metal letter opener lying on her desk, but he would probably get there first. “I don’t discuss my clients with anyone,” she informed him. “And if I did, I’d have to have that person killed.”

He tilted his head at her, as if she was a kid he’d caught in a lie. “Good thing your cell can’t talk. You’d have to have it killed. Priscilla Brandt needs a straitjacket and the police are asking questions about Simon Shan. And oh, yes, Jerry Blair of TopCo has a very spoiled daughter about to turn sixteen.”

He stopped, as if to say, “Do you get it, Lane? I heard everything, and I can use it against you. It would be like swatting a fly.”

Heat crept up Lane’s neck. Threats had the unfortunate effect of bringing out the street fighter in her. At the same time, she was aware that she’d put one of her favorite moody CDs in the music system. The Doobie Brothers soared into the chorus of “What a Fool Believes,” and she let the music work on her, soothe her. She’d given up any hope that this man could be easily dealt with. He seemed determined to be her worst nightmare, another action-movie cliché, except that they weren’t in a theater.

“What do you want?” she asked him. “Is it money?”

“I think that’s my line, isn’t it?”

By the disdain in his tone, he must have been talking about sex, but she had no idea why. “Listen, I have a business to run, people to take care of. Just tell me what you want.”

“People, right—all your hotshot clients?”

“No, my staff. I employ hundreds, and they depend on me.”

“Did Ned depend on you?”

Lane flinched as the intruder reached inside his leather jacket. He came straight for her, and she ducked down, ready to fight if she had to. He’d pulled out a wallet-size card, she realized.

“Maybe I’m looking for a private concierge,” he said. He handed her the card, and then returned her cell with a mock-courteous nod. “I’ll be in touch.”

Lane glanced down at what appeared to be his business card. It had a company name and a phone number. She read the name Bayless Extreme Solutions with a slow-dawning sense of recognition, but she wasn’t ready to let herself believe it. This wasn’t possible. He was the part of her past she wanted to expunge, topping the list of people she never wanted to see again. How had he turned up in her life after all these years?

She wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but when she looked up, he was gone. She was wet everywhere, filmed in perspiration. His card was twisted in her fingers, and the dampness at the back of her neck was icy cold.

Never, she thought. Never assume a bad day can’t get worse.

12

Darwin didn’t fear death, dismemberment or even a mild case of herpes. He did fear spitting on Janet Bonofiglio when he kissed her. He tended to do that when he got excited, but only if he was talking, and he and Janet weren’t doing all that much talking right now. She was toying with the hair that had tumbled onto his forehead like a dark dust mop, pulling on the rubber-band curls and murmuring about how smart he was. He was trying not to suffocate from lack of oxygen.

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