Lucy radioed the tower, and the same controller answered her.

“Requesting your supervisor’s phone number,” Lucy said.

He gave it to her because he had no choice. FAA regs. She wrote it down on her kneeboard. Let him worry. Let him sweat. She radioed the FBO and asked to have her car brought out and her helicopter towed into the hangar. She wondered if her next unpleasant surprise was going to be damage to her Ferrari. Maybe the controller had seen to that, too. She cut the throttle and silenced the warning horn one last time. She took off her headset, hung it on a hook.

“I’m getting out,” Berger said inside the dark, stinking cockpit. “You don’t need to pick a fight with anyone.”

Lucy reached up for the rotor brake, pulled it down. “Hold on until I stop the blades. Remember, we’re on the dolly, not the ground. Don’t forget that when you step down. Just a few more seconds.”

Berger unfastened her four-point harness as Lucy finished the shutdown. Making sure the NG was zero, she flipped off the battery switch. They climbed out, Lucy grabbing their bags and locking up. Berger didn’t wait, headed to the FBO, walking fast between aircraft, stepping around tie-downs and dodging a fuel truck, her slender figure in her long mink coat receding and gone. Lucy knew the routine. Berger would dash into the ladies’ room, gulp down four Advil or a Zomig, and splash her face with cold water. Under different circumstances, she wouldn’t get into the car right now but would give herself a chance to recover, walk around for a while in the fresh air. But there wasn’t time.

If they weren’t back in Lucy’s loft by two a.m., Hap Judd would get spooked, would leave and never contact Berger again. He wasn’t the type to tolerate excuses of any sort, would assume an excuse was a ruse. He was being set up, the paparazzi were around the corner, that’s exactly what he would think, because he was paranoid as hell and guilty as hell. He’d blow them off. He’d get himself a lawyer, and even the dumbest lawyer would tell him not to talk, and the most promising lead would be lost. Hannah Starr wouldn’t be found, soon or ever, and she deserved to be found, for the sake of truth and justice-not her justice. She didn’t deserve something she’d denied everybody else. What a joke. The public had no hint. The whole fucking world felt sorry for her.

Lucy never had felt sorry for her but hadn’t realized until three weeks ago exactly what she did feel for her. By the time Hannah was reported missing, Lucy was keenly aware of the damage the woman could do and in fact had done, just hadn’t recognized it was deliberate. Chalked it up to bad luck, the market, the collapsing economy, and a superficial person’s superficial advice, a favor that got punished but nothing premeditated and malevolent. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Hannah Starr was diabolical; she was evil. If only Lucy had given more weight to her instincts, because the gut feeling she’d gotten the first time she and Hannah had met alone in Florida wasn’t good, wasn’t close to good, she realized that now. While Hannah was polite and nice, almost flirting, there was something else. Lucy realized that now because she hadn’t wanted to realize it then. Maybe it was the way Hannah kept looking at the high-performance boats going by, obnoxiously loud below her glitzy North Miami Beach apartment balcony, so loud Lucy could barely hear herself talk. Greed, unabashed greed. And competitiveness.

“Bet you have one of those tucked away somewhere.” Hannah’s voice, husky, lusty as a 46 Rider XP, triple-stepped hull, inboards at least nine-fifty HP each, headed out to sea, sounding like a Harley full-throttle if your head was next to the Screamin’ Eagle pipes.

“I’m not into go-fast boats.” Lucy hated them, truth be told.

“No way. You and all your machines? I remember the way you used to drool all over my father’s cars. You were the only one he ever let drive his Enzo. I couldn’t believe it. You were just a kid. I should think a cigarette boat would be right up your alley.”

“Not at all.”

“And I thought I knew you.”

“They wouldn’t get me anywhere I need to go unless I have a secret life of running drugs or errands for the Russian Mafia.”

“Secret life? Do tell,” Hannah had said.

“I don’t have one.”

“God, look at it go.” Another one leaving a wide swath of lacy white wake, thundering into the inlet from the Intracoastal, under the causeway, toward the Atlantic. “Yet one more of my ambitions. To have one someday. Not a secret life but a boat like that.”

“If you have one, better not let me find out. I’m not talking about boats.”

“Not me, hon. My life’s an open book.” Hannah’s art deco diamond ring flashed in the sunlight when she placed her hands on the balcony rail, gazing at the aqua water and the powder-blue sky and the long strip of bone-colored beach scattered with furled umbrellas that looked like candy swizzle sticks and feathery palms that were yellowing at the edges of their fronds.

Lucy remembered thinking Hannah could have stepped out of an ad for a five-star resort in her ready-to-wear silk Ungaro, beautiful and blond, with just enough weight to be sexy and just enough years to be credible as a high-level financier. Forty and perfect, one of those precious people untouched by commonness, by hardship, by anything ugly, someone Lucy always avoided at the lavish dinners and parties hosted by Rupe Starr, her father. Hannah had seemed incapable of crime, if for no other reason than she didn’t need to bother with anything as untidy as living a lie and stealing people blind. Lucy had misread Hannah’s open book, all right, misread it enough to incur incalculable damage. She’d taken a nine-figure hit because of Hannah’s little favor. One lie leads to another, and now Lucy was living one, although she had her own definition of lying. It wasn’t literally a lie if the end result was truth.

She paused halfway across the ramp, tried Marino on her BlackBerry. Right about now he should be doing surveillance, checking on Hap Judd’s whereabouts, making sure he hadn’t decided to boogie after his bullshit tap dance about meeting during the wee hours of the morning because he didn’t want to be recognized. Didn’t want anything ending up on Page Six of the Post or all over the Internet. Maybe he should have thought about that before he’d blown off the likes of Jaime Berger the first time she tried to reach him three weeks ago. Maybe he should have thought, period, before running his mouth to a stranger who, what do you know, happened to be a friend of Lucy’s, a snitch.

“That you?” Marino’s voice in her wireless jawbone. “Was getting worried you’d decided to visit John Denver.”

Lucy didn’t laugh, not even a smile. She never joked about people who’d been killed in crashes. Planes, helicopters, motorcycles, cars, the space shuttle. Not funny.

“I e-mailed you a MapQuest,” Marino said as she resumed walking across the tarmac, hauling luggage over her shoulders. “I know that race car of yours ain’t got a GPS.”

“Why the hell would I need a GPS to find my way home?”

“Roads being shut down, traffic diverted, because of a little situation that I didn’t want to get into while you were flying that death trap of yours. Plus, you got the package with you.” He meant Berger, his boss. “You get lost or hung up and are late for your two a.m., guess who gets blamed? She’s already going to be pissed when I’m a no-show.”

“A no-show? Even better,” Lucy said.

All she’d asked was for him to take his time, be maybe thirty or forty minutes late so she could have her chance with Hap Judd. If Marino was sitting there from the get-go, she wouldn’t be able to maneuver the interview the way she wanted, and what she wanted was a deconstruction. Lucy had a special talent for interrogation, and she intended to find out what she needed to know so she could take care of things.