Faroe almost smiled. “I like the kid already.”

“Ted had been saying that I was spoiling Lane. Maybe he was right. But someone had to make up for Ted’s indifference to-” She stopped, got a better grip on her emotions, and said, “I knew that something had to be done about Lane. He loves me, but he wasn’t listening to me or anyone else.”

“He’s a teenage boy. It’s called age-appropriate behavior.”

“Is that what you did, kick back at anyone in authority?”

“Pretty much,” Faroe said.

“I feel sorry for your mother.”

“She was dead before I was fourteen.”

“Something else we have in common,” Grace said.

“What?”

“My mother died when I was thirteen. So did my brother and my father. I was babysitting a few blocks away or I’d be dead too.”

Faroe felt a sympathy he didn’t want and Grace didn’t need. “Car wreck?”

“My father was an undercover cop working drugs in Santa Ana. One of the drug dealers found out. He shot everyone and fled to Tijuana. By the time I got home…” She shrugged.

“You found them?” Faroe asked, horrified at the thought of a thirteen-year-old Grace walking in on a slaughterhouse.

“Yes.”

“Jesus.”

“That was the moment I dedicated myself to the law. Law was everything the gutter wasn’t. Law was all that separated humanity from violence and horror. I wanted to do everything I could to make certain that no more thirteen-year-olds walked into a house of blood and death.” Grace looked down at her hands, clenched again. She released her fingers. “Sorry. I don’t know where that came from. It was a long time ago.”

“You’re telling me why the law is your religion, and there’s no way you’d sell it out for a handful of silver.”

Her eyes widened, revealing both clarity and darkness. “You always saw parts of me better than I saw them myself. It intrigued me almost as much as it frightened me.”

“And you saw me. Scared the hell out of me. We’re alike in that, at least. Long ago, far away, and nothing to do with today.”

“You’re right.” And you’re so very wrong. “I went with Ted to see All Saints School. It was, and is, very impressive. A beautiful campus on the beach north of Ensenada, run by the Catholic Church. The teachers are excellent. Until yesterday, I’ve been able to come and go freely, to see him at least once a week. I could talk to him on his cell phone, until it broke. He used the school computer to e-mail me all the time, until three weeks ago.”

“What happened?”

“Something technical about the uplink.” She shrugged. “I use computers, but I don’t understand them.”

Faroe stood up, grabbed a pair of binoculars from a drawer, and went to the porthole. “Where’s Ted now?”

“I haven’t seen him in three weeks.”

Faroe looked over his shoulder at her. “Is that unusual?”

“No. We haven’t been close in years.”

“You always looked so good on the society pages, the happy and dynamic power couple, out to run the world together.”

“Don’t tell me you believe everything you read in newspapers,” she said coolly.

“Touche. So you and Ted haven’t done the nasty recently?”

Grace came to her feet and got right in Faroe’s face. “My sex life is none of your business.”

“Ease up. I was just trying to figure out whether Ted was the jealous type.”

“Why do you care?”

Faroe stepped back from the porthole and told himself he couldn’t smell the woman-scent of her.

His body told him he was lying.

“If Ted was jealous, I’d have a good explanation for the dude up on the dock.” Faroe gave Grace the binoculars. “He’s got a pair just like these and he’s been trying for the last ten minutes to figure out what we’re doing down here.”

“He’s spying on us?” She stepped swiftly away from the porthole.

“Yeah. Now all we have to do is make sure it’s you he’s after, not me.”

OCEANSIDE

SUNDAY, 10:15 A.M.

GRACE JUST STARED AT Faroe. “You think somebody might be following me?”

“Use the binoculars,” Faroe said impatiently. “Do you recognize him?”

Reluctantly she went to the porthole again. He made room for her by moving aside. It wasn’t enough. She could sense the heat of his body and smell the coffee on his breath. She wanted to tell him to back up, to get out of her space, but she didn’t want him to know how much he affected her physically.

Silently she looked through the porthole toward the gangway that led up to the marina parking lot.

“I don’t see anyone,” she said after a few moments.

“He’s smarter than your average mutt,” Faroe said, his voice very close to her ear. “He’s using the phone booth as a blind.”

With her naked eye, she just made out the figure of a person inside the telephone booth at the head of the gangway. When she lifted the field glasses, she came face-to-face with a dark-haired man who was staring at her through his own binoculars.

Startled, heart racing, she jerked away from the porthole. Her back slammed against Faroe’s chest. She smelled his skin, yeasty, warm, familiar.

That hadn’t changed.

“Easy,” Faroe said. “He can’t see you behind the porthole glass.”

Grace drew a deep breath and inched forward until she could see the gangway again. When she lifted the binoculars, they felt like they weighed ten pounds. Her palms were sweaty. Grimly she focused on the man in the phone booth.

“I don’t know him,” she said. “And you can’t be sure he followed me. Given your line of work, you must have made a lot of enemies.”

“This isn’t a courtroom, Your Honor. This is the real world, the one that lives beneath the nice legal world of reasonable doubts. The first thing you learn down here is to go with your best guess.”

“You think he’s after me.”

“The only person stepping on my shadow right now is Steele. So, yeah, I think this bogey is yours.” Faroe leaned over slightly, just enough to get a good whiff of her hair. It smelled clean and expensive and sexy. “Which means that he followed you here, which means that you’ve been under surveillance for an unknown amount of time. Not good, amada.”

Darling.

Grace caught her breath. Maybe he called all his women amada, but Faroe was the only man who had ever used the endearment with her.

And he was too close.

She could feel his breath stirring her hair when he spoke. She lowered the glasses and tried to turn toward him, to force him out of her space.

He didn’t move. He stood there with a faint, irritating half smile on his face.

He knew.

She stepped sideways and held the glasses like a barrier between their bodies. “Why is it bad that I’m being followed?”

“Because now he knows there’s a connection between us.”

“He’s wrong,” she said instantly.

Faroe laughed. “He knows that you’re down here with me. That means we know each other. That’s all the string he needs. He pulls on that, runs the registration on my boat. That leads him to an overseas corporation in Aruba.”

Grace stood very still.

“Then, if he’s any good,” Faroe said, “the dude finds somebody in Aruba to bribe. He gets the background of that Aruba corporation. That leads him to the lawyer I used to set up the firewall between me and the world. If the lawyer is as crooked as I think he is, he’ll sell my name the instant the price is right.”

“But-”

Faroe kept talking. “Before you can say ‘shuckey darn,’ the dude on the dock knows you’re talking out of school and hiring a pricey international troubleshooter to help you break your son out of his cozy prison.”

Horrified, Grace stared at Faroe. She wanted to argue, to say it couldn’t be that way.

She couldn’t have signed her son’s death warrant.

But the truth was there in Faroe’s eyes, Lane’s eyes accusing her, her heart beating too fast, her ears ringing, reality a tunnel of light closing down in front of her and darkness roaring around her.