“But it’s not possible for you to work as a reporter at the moment. You can’t be doing stories when you are a story.”

“I asked Brian if I could take all the vacation that’s owed to me.”

She nodded. “That’s a good idea. Of course, do that.”

“I have to ask you something else, and I need an honest answer,” I said.

She waited.

“Did you go into my emails, find one from a source offering to tell me about Star Spangled payoffs to council members, and pass it on to Elmont Sebastian?”

She held my stare for several seconds. “No,” she said. “And, when and if you get back to work, if you get something on him or anyone whose votes he’s allegedly buying, I’ll see that it makes the front page. I don’t like that man. He frightens me, and I don’t want to do business with him.”

I got up and left.

When I walked into Natalie Bondurant’s office and she came around from behind her desk, I was expecting her to shake hands with me. But instead, she reached for a remote and turned on the television that was recessed into the far wall.

“Hang on,” she said. “I just had it cued up here a second ago. Okay, here we go.”

She hit the play button and suddenly there I was, making my way through a small media scrum, denying that there was any need for me to take a lie detector test.

She hit pause, threw the remote onto a chair, and turned on me.

“My God, you really want to go to jail, don’t you?”

The thing was, Jan didn’t know whether she could pull off the role of a murderer. You needed some real acting chops for that. The motivation for most of her performances had been coping, or blending in. Biding time.

But killing? Not so much.

If an opportunity did present itself where she could take off with Dwayne’s half of the loot from the diamonds, she’d take it. No question. She’d pulled off a vanishing act on David and she could do it with Dwayne, too. But was she prepared to kill him to do it?

To put a bullet in his brain or a knife in his heart?

She’d never actually killed anyone, at least not on purpose.

But she wasn’t stupid. She knew the law would already see her as a murderer. Even though she hadn’t been the one who clamped a hand over Leanne Kowalski’s mouth and nose and kept it there until she stopped flailing about, she didn’t exactly do anything to stop it, either. Jan watched it happen. Jan knew it had to be done. And it was her idea to take Leanne’s body back up to Lake George-a way to tighten the noose on David, who police would know had already been up in that neck of the woods with her-and bury it in that shallow grave in plain view, using a shovel in the back of Dwayne’s brother’s pickup. Any jury would see that they hung for that one together.

And she knew it was only luck-or divine intervention, if you believed in that kind of thing-that Oscar Fine hadn’t died when she cut off his hand to steal the briefcase he had cuffed to his wrist.

That had been-let’s face it-a pretty desperate moment. They thought he’d have a key on him. Or a combination to the briefcase. And the chain that linked the case to his cuff was some high-tensile steel that the tools they’d brought along wouldn’t cut. But at least they could go through flesh and bone.

The bastard hadn’t left them much in the way of options.

So, once he was out cold-and that hadn’t taken long after Dwayne shot the dart into him-she did it. If you’d asked her the day before whether she had it in her to cut off a man’s hand, she’d have said no way. Not a chance. Not in a million years. But then there you are, in a limo parked in a Boston vacant lot, not knowing whether someone’s going to come by at any moment, and suddenly you’re doing things you’d have never thought yourself capable of. Of course, millions in diamonds was a great motivator.

Wasn’t that what it was all about? Knowing your motivation? So she got into the role. She became the kind of woman who could do this, who could cut off a man’s hand. She played the part long enough to get the job done.

Too bad he got that one long look at her face before passing out. Even tarted up with enough lipstick and eye shadow to paint a powder room, she never stopped worrying that he might remember her. Would have been a lot better-truth be told-if the son of a bitch had bled to death. Then she wouldn’t have had to put her life on hold for five years, marry a guy, have a kid, work at a goddamn heating and cooling business, for Christ’s sake, live a lie-

Focus, she told herself.

Let’s just take this a step at a time. We have all the diamonds. Now we just have to convert them to cash. Let’s see how things play out.

They’d driven south out of Boston, and already Jan was feeling slightly more at ease. She knew the odds of running into Oscar Fine in a city as big as Boston were remote, but it didn’t make her feel any less nervous. Now that they were out of downtown, she felt she could breathe a little. They had to find this Banura-of-Braintree dude, find out what the jewels were worth, negotiate a price, get their cash, start their new life together.

Start her new life. One way or another, Dwayne was going to be history.

Not that he didn’t have his merits. He had a fabulously taut, sinewy body, and if he could stop fucking like he was expecting the warden to walk in at any moment, he might have some actual potential in that department. And he’d been the perfect one to help her out when she got wind of the diamond courier. He had the guts-or lack of sense, depending on how you looked at it-to help her set it up, get the dart gun, drive the limo. So maybe she was the only one with the balls to cut the guy’s hand off. You couldn’t have everything.

But she’d needed him to get into the safe-deposit boxes. And she needed him now to connect with Banura.

But after that, well, Dwayne really wasn’t what Jan was looking for in a man. The only man she wanted to see in her future was the one delivering her drink to her cabana.

One thing you had to give David, he was a hell of a lot smarter than Dwayne. There was no denying that. Smart enough to be working at a paper better than the Promise Falls Standard. He’d had that one offer, a couple of years back, to go to Toronto to work for the largest-circulation paper in the country, but Jan was nervous about moving to Canada. Her phony credentials were rock solid, but the idea of crossing a border when she wasn’t who she said she was, that gave her pause. Jan had told David she didn’t think it was a good idea to move so far away from his parents, and he had come around to her way of thinking.

Once she had her money, she’d start this identity thing all over again and invest in some foolproof passports-real high-class stuff-and then get the hell out of the States. Maybe this Banura guy could put her onto someone who did good work. Then, off to Thailand, or the Philippines. Someplace where the money would last forever. Shit, it might be enough money to last right here in the good ol’ US of A, but you’d always be looking over your shoulder, never able to relax.

David, you poor bastard.

The guy thought he was some hotshot reporter, but how hotshot could you be at the Standard? Not exactly a risk taker. Always played it safe. Made sure there were new batteries in the smoke detectors, a fresh filter in the furnace. Paid the bills on time. When a shingle came loose, he got up there on the roof-or got his dad up there with him-and nailed it down. He remembered anniversaries and Valentine’s Day and brought home flowers some days for no reason at all.

The guy was goddamn perfect.

Perfect husband.

Perfect father.

Don’t go there.

Dwayne, driving south on Washington and peering through the windshield at street signs, shifted in his seat and ripped off a fart.