The man next to her, on the aisle, rattles his open newspaper and makes a grouchy sound. Elena ignores him.

Kay stops, glances back, spots her and looks relieved. “Elena! Hi.”

“I thought you might miss the flight.”

“So did I.” Again, she looks over her shoulder.

“Don’t worry,” Elena tells her. “You made it. They’re not going to kick you off now.”

“No, I know, it’s just . . .”

“Your luggage!” she exclaims, realizing Kay has only a purse over her shoulder. “You didn’t do carry-on like I told you?”

“I thought it would be easier to check it.”

No doubt because she made Kay fret about all the security procedures.

“It’s not a good idea to check bags when you have a connection,” she says. “It’s really tight because you were late—I bet your bag didn’t make it on.”

Kay looks even more distressed.

Elena backpedals: “Don’t worry. I’m sure they’ll get it on the next flight. No big deal. You need to relax. You look like you’re going to keel over again. Your luggage will be—”

“No, it’s not that. I just thought I saw . . . never mind.”

“What?”

The man beside Elena clears his throat and turns a page of his newspaper.

Yeah, yeah. I get it. We’re pissing you off, sir. I don’t really care.

“What did you think you saw?” Elena persists.

“Ma’am, please take your seat so that we can make an on time departure!” the flight attendant calls from up front.

In response, Kay moves toward the only open seat on the plane: a middle seat against the back wall of the passenger’s cabin, across from the bathroom. Elena is well aware that the passengers in her own row—either the grouchy man on the aisle or the morbidly obese woman by the window—will not make a last minute switch and sit in Kay’s seat instead, so that she can sit up here. And chances are, the people sharing Kay’s row would prefer their window and aisle seats to a middle seat a few rows ahead. Particularly with an open newspaper taking up a good portion of Elena’s seat on one side, and the oversized woman’s flesh spilling into it on the other.

Unable to wait until they land for Kay to explain, Elena says to her retreating back, “What did you think you saw?”

Kay turns just briefly, allowing Elena to connect with the disturbed look in her eyes. “You know. Her. In the airport. Just now.”

“Her . . . who?”

“J . . . C,” is the chilling reply, before Kay hurries back to take her seat.

Hollywood, Crystal Burns has come to realize, is more efficient at keeping secrets than the FBI and CIA combined.

All week, she and Frank have been trying to track down Jenna Coeur; all week, they’ve been coming up with dead ends.

An online search revealed that plenty of people have reported sighting her since her acquittal—mainly in New York City and Los Angeles, as you’d expect. Most seem legitimate. Other sightings, as you’d expect, are clearly bogus.

One nut job believes that she was an alien queen who has since shape-shifted herself into the secretary of state. Another—some loser on a porn message board—claims that Jenna Coeur has resurfaced in a film called Schlong Island Getaway.

Naturally, Frank volunteered to check out that one, just to be sure.

“It’s not her,” he reported, “but you wouldn’t believe what she does in the final scene. She—”

“I don’t want to hear it, thank you very much. And I can’t believe you watched the whole thing.”

“I fast-forwarded most of it.”

“Terrific, Frank.”

Now, on a sunny Saturday morning, Frank is busy attending his youngest’s kindergarten graduation ceremony, with Crystal’s wholehearted blessing.

And here she sits, sifting and resifting her way through the mountain of information she’s collected about Jenna Coeur and Jaycee the blogger—one and the same person, as far as she’s concerned.

That theory was cemented by the fact that Jaycee is clearly no ordinary blogger. The cyber crimes unit is involved in the investigation now, backtracking through every trace she left online, but so far they’ve turned up no hard evidence. A lot of people are careful, trying to preserve their online anonymity, but she’s taken great pains to cover her tracks on the Internet.

Crystal checked out of the Los Angeles hotel where Jaycee placed last Wednesday’s call to Landry Wells. No one recalls having seen Jenna Coeur there; the room connected to the outgoing call to Landry’s number was occupied by a walk-in guest who registered as Jane Johnson and paid in cash. Naturally, in Hollywood, that kind of thing doesn’t raise an eyebrow. The hotel’s lobby security camera footage shows a slender woman in a large hat and sunglasses who seemed to keep her face deliberately turned away from the cameras. She could very well be Jenna Coeur—or any white-hot starlet seeking to be incognito.

Then there’s Wasabi Express on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The fact that Jaycee rattled off the number, according to Landry Wells, would seem to indicate that it’s one she knows by heart. But no one who works at the restaurant recalls ever having seen, let alone ever even having heard of, Jenna Coeur. Not surprising. It’s a busy counter place; all of their business is either takeout or delivery to various high rises. She could have used any alias and left the money for her order with her doorman; chances are the delivery kid never had any contact with her, not unusual in that well-heeled neighborhood.

There are hundreds, thousands, of residential buildings on the Upper East Side. Canvassing all those doormen is a daunting task that looms high on Crystal’s agenda, along with countless others. It’s conceivable that Jenna Coeur has been living in one of them, safely tucked away in a tower and unnoticed, for years now. After all, she had money. Tens of millions, even after paying for her legal defense team.

And there you have it: the core difference between Jenna Coeur and Diaphanous Jones, now serving life in prison for the murder of her own child.

Money.

It can’t buy everything, but the acquitted actress seems to have proven that it can sure as hell buy freedom—and a safe place to hide, where no one would ever find you.

No one but me.

Staring at the frozen image on her computer screen, showing a beautiful woman with huge, haunted eyes, Crystal shakes her head.

Look out, because I swear to God that I will track you down before you hurt anyone else. This time, you’ll get away with murder over my dead body.

“And what would you like to order, sir?” Beck asks her nephew Jordan, seated at the kitchen table with his legs dangling from the chair.

“I’ll have the bugs with a side order of . . . um . . . more bugs!”

“Yes, sir.” She scribbles on the pad in her hand, the same one her mother used when she pretended to be a waitress. She located it in a kitchen drawer after Jordan asked her if they were going to play restaurant like Grammy always did.

“Of course we are,” she assured him, and found the pad, along with a box of pancake mix and half a bag of mini chocolate chips in the cupboard.

She gladly said yes last night when her brother Teddy called to ask if she’d keep an eye on Jordan for a while this morning. He was driving down to help Dad deal with some insurance paperwork, and wanted to leave his pregnant wife alone at home to get some rest.

Beck had been planning to drive home this morning to deal with her life and was glad for an excuse to put that off until tomorrow. When she called Keith to tell him she wouldn’t be back until Sunday, he, too, seemed relieved. Their daily conversations have been perfunctory, cementing her realization that the marriage has run its course.

“All right, sir,” she looks at her nephew over the pad of paper, pencil poised, “you say you’d like the bugs with a side of bugs. Would you like the bug sauce on that?”