Once over the fence, “Muerte Liquida” moved swiftly across the grass and slipped between the bushes at the side of the house. A thick row of camellias now shielded him from anyone who might be wandering in the yard or near the wrought-iron fence behind him.

He moved through the shadows toward the back of the house and climbed the steps two at a time. Halfway up he stopped. He reached out with a gloved hand and felt the deep, almost rutted, grain of the smooth fiberglass surface on what appeared to be the wooden handrail of the stairs. The entire exterior of the house, from the siding to the railings, every detail, was made of exquisitely fashioned fiberglass, all of it molded and shaped by artists who knew their craft. Whoever had done the finish probably worked at one of the Hollywood studios. It was all designed for illusion.

He climbed to the top of the steps. Once on the deck at the back of the house, he could see the broken balustrade. It completed the false impression of disrepair. The gap in the railing at the edge of the deck was covered by a clear sheet of acrylic, forming a solid barrier for safety. Unless the acrylic caught the glint of the sun or you were within a few feet, you would never see it.

It took him less than thirty seconds using a set of picks from his pocket to work the pins in the cylinder of the dead bolt at the back door. Using a tiny tension wrench and a pick, he aligned the pins along the sheer point inside the lock, and turned the cylinder until the dead bolt snapped open. In less than a minute he was inside and into the darkened pantry.

Liquida knew the routine. The owner was a bachelor. The maid and the cook came and went, neither of them lived in. The maid came three days a week and always left by four in the afternoon. The cook was there each day, from just before breakfast until just after dinner. Without exception she was always gone by seven thirty in the evening.

It was now just after ten at night, which meant that only the owner and his single houseguest were at home. The woman was part of his contract, but only because she was at the house with the old man. He knew about her from the photographs taken with a telephoto lens.

The presence of the woman complicated things, but only slightly. They had to be taken separately, without a sound and in different rooms. Otherwise, he ran the risk that one of them might get to a phone or a door, or worse, a loaded gun. No one had told him to expect firearms, but he had to assume there might be one, perhaps more. It went with the turf, the nature of the old man’s business.

He stood stone still, listening for sounds, the hum of a motor in the kitchen, and something else, maybe a fan, an exhaust vent somewhere. In the distance he could hear voices, faint, almost muted. He couldn’t be sure, but they sounded as if they were coming from somewhere upstairs.

He glanced around the corner of the door into the kitchen. There was no one there, but there were two dirty dishes on the counter, small dessert plates, forks, and coffee cups. They must have had a late-night snack. The motor he’d heard from the pantry was the dishwasher. It was chugging away.

Even though the nearest house was a hundred yards away, Liquida moved in a crouch, low, beneath the line of windows over the sink. He saw what he needed on the countertop of the island in the center of the kitchen. It was a hard wooden block with slots and the handles of eight knives were sticking out of it. He had his own, a folding survival knife with a razor-sharp blade. But he loved to use what was at hand, to make it look as if the murders were the result of a botched burglary.

Down on one knee he reached up over the top of the counter and with a gloved hand sampled the cutlery. He pulled one out and then an other until he finally settled on a ten-inch chef’s knife. It had a needle-sharp point and a solid wooden handle that matched all the others. When the cops found it they would know where it came from. He could tell by the swirls in the metal that the blade was high-carbon steel. He tested it with his gloved finger. The cook, no doubt, kept the edge honed to a sharp finish.

He moved away from the bright lights of the kitchen and down the dark hallway toward the living room and the front of the house. He knew from the floor plan that the stairs were to his left. The voices upstairs were now growing louder. He could make out a few words. They were arguing over something. The woman wasn’t shouting, but there was a definite edge of anger in her tone.

Liquida strained to listen, trying to pick up the threads of the conversation on the second floor. Perhaps it was for this reason that he didn’t see the maid until he rounded the corner and faced the foot of the stairs. At first sighting, his eyes opened like saucers. She wasn’t supposed to be here. She had her back to him and was walking the other way, down the hall toward the dining room. Liquida froze in place, then tried to lean back into the shadows of the hall. At the last second, before he could retreat, the maid turned and saw him. She must have sensed the motion behind her.

For a split second she stood there, a quizzical expression on her face, wondering who he was, or, perhaps more to the point, what he was.

Liquida’s appearance often had this effect, for he wore a hooded lightweight neoprene wet suit to easily rinse the blood off. He closed the distance in an instant, and before breath could carry sound from her body, his gloved left hand was over her mouth.

A stream of warm blood ran like a river from her abdomen down over the handle of the knife and the neoprene diving glove on his right hand. From the vigorous pulsing he knew it had severed a main artery. He kept his hand to her mouth until her knees buckled, her body convulsing.

“Woman, what are you doing here at this hour?” he whispered in her ear. Liquida did not kill from wanton disregard. It was his business. He harvested people in the way a farmer harvests crops, because he was paid to do it. When fate placed a life under his knife because of the vagaries of chance, there was always regret. The fate of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The maid had stumbled into death in a cosmic collision between time and space.

She went limp in his arms. He looked straight into her eyes, her pupils open like the lens of a camera. Her full weight was now completely supported by the handle of the knife wedged in her body. He eased her to the floor and slid out the knife.

At this moment Katia had but a single thought as she looked at Emerson across the green felt inlay of his desk. It was strewn with more than two dozen gold coins of different sizes and shapes. Some of them were clearly hammered and stamped by hand. There were gold escudos from the old Inca mines of Peru and double eagles from the SS Central America that had sunk off the East Coast of the U.S. in 1857. They glinted in the muted light of the large study.

In the morning he would go a few miles away to La Jolla to see his client. He would take Katia with him and make her sit in the car and wait. He had done this before. If she was lucky he might give her a few dollars and tell her to go shopping. But the cash he gave her was never enough to go far.

He had already loaded most of the coins he would take tomorrow into a small sample case on the floor near the desk. They were valuable just for their gold content. They were worth much more to collectors. She had heard Emerson talk about this. Other coins encased in two plastic sheets lay scattered, off to the side of the desk, near the phone and the needle-sharp letter opener that some might have mistaken for a replica of a Byzantine dagger. Katia knew better, because he had told her. The dagger was real, fashioned from the finest Damascus steel and dating to the fall of Constantinople in the fifteenth century. Emerson Pike had paid more than forty thousand dollars for the piece at a Christie’s auction three years ago. This was supposed to mean something to her, but it didn’t, other than the fact that Emerson Pike had more money than he could use.