After a moment, she groped for his hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I appreciate the fact that you’re interested. I’m probably alive because of it. I just don’t get it. Why is this happening? It’s senseless.”

“Money,” Duncan said.

She looked over at him, blankly. “Huh?”

“Money is why this is happening,” he repeated.

She looked doubtful. “Maybe you haven’t noticed, Duncan, but I don’t have very much of it. Practically none, to be honest.”

He shook his head. “There’s a short list of probable motivations for crimes like this. Insanity, revenge, or money. It doesn’t look like you girls have pissed anyone off that badly—”

“We haven’t,” she cut in. “We’re goody-goody pussycats.”

“And there’s the murdered jeweller and his whole family, too, so I’d strike personal revenge as a motive. We could consider revenge against your mother, but that falls pretty flat, since she’s passed on. Insanity’s a possibility, but there are the references in those letters, to maps, searches, keys, secrets. Whoever this dickhead is, he’s invested time and money watching you, and probably your sisters, too. Whatever Lucia wanted you girls to find? It means big bucks. Very big. And they’re not going to stop till they have it.”

Nell hid her eyes and massaged her temples. “It’s so ironic,” she murmured. “If that’s true. We don’t need this money, wherever it comes from. We don’t give a shit about money. None of us do. All we want is to live our lives in peace. Oh, God. There’s so much to freak out about, I’m in tilt.”

“Don’t think about any of it,” he suggested.

“Slick solution. Neat trick.” There was a smile in her voice. “And just exactly how do you suggest I do that?”

It had been such a weird evening already, he decided one more crazy risk wouldn’t change anything. He lifted her hand, and gave it a long, lingering kiss. “I’ve got a few good ideas,” he said.

She laughed behind her hand, and the vibrations in her shoulders went on for so long, he got scared she was crying again.

“I had no idea I was so damn funny,” he said. “Who knew.”

Her shoulders shook harder. She threw her head back, and wiped her eyes. “It’s not you. I just can’t believe it. I felt safe, in my place, after I put the alarm in. The thing cost a fortune. And the whole while, they were watching me. God, it’s disgusting. How did they get in there?”

“They probably wired the place before you put the alarm in.” He handed her his phone. “Call your sister. If she’s told you where she’s going on that telephone, tell her to change her plans.”

“Oh, God, you’re right,” she whispered. “Vivi.”

She called, and he listened to her garbled, one-sided conversation for the rest of the drive to his Upper West Side condo. The driver pulled over at the lobby entrance. She was still talking as he paid the driver.

“…can’t stay with me there any longer, Viv. Haven’t you been listening? They’ve been watching us all along! We can’t go near the place until we fix this mess. Go to Liam and Nancy’s…Yes, I know, but be a grown-up, Viv. Being a fifth wheel is better than being stuffed into the backseat of a car…. Oh, no, don’t worry about me. I’m staying with a friend.” Her eyes flicked to Duncan. Her voice got defensive. “No, you don’t know him…. Yes, it is a him, okay? And so? What of it?”

Duncan heard a shrill, tinny burst of female verbosity from the telephone, and Nell rolled her eyes and snorted. “If you must know, he’s the one who clobbered the kidnappers for me…. Of course I knew him before! He’s my new boss.” Another impassioned burst from the phone. “Look, Viv, I know it’s crazy, but can we thrash this out another time? Come to the seisìun at Malloy’s tomorrow night with Nancy and Liam, and we’ll talk there, okay?…Of course. You be careful, too.”

She ended the call and handed the phone back. “She’s staying with an old art school friend she met at the fair by chance, so we never discussed it on the bugged phone. Thank God. The Fiend has no line on her there.”

“Could you folks work this out once you’re outside the vehicle?” the driver asked, his voice plaintive. “I got another call. I gotta go.”

Duncan led her into his building, dragging her huge trolley behind him into the elevator. Up thirty-five floors, and he closed the door after her, engaged the chain, the dead bolts, the alarms.

He let out a long, relieved breath. Finally. He had her right where he wanted her.

Chapter

6

Nell looked around, impressed. His apartment was huge, almost empty. Austere to the point of chilliness. Blond wood on the wide expanse of gleaming floor. Three gray couches, grouped in a square around a low table with a vast plasma TV and entertainment console. A big, shadowy kitchen, back in a distant corner. Picture windows with stunning, brilliant cityscapes on two sides. A big terrace. A scattering of black-and-white photographs hung on otherwise blank walls.

“Wow,” she murmured. “Is this place, uh, yours?”

He nodded.

Um. This apartment answered any questions a person might have about how lucrative the business of intelligent data analysis program design had been for him. It beat academia and poetry writing all to hell. Not that it mattered. She hadn’t chosen to be a scholar for money.

He disappeared into the kitchen. Lights flipped on. She heard water running, clattering and clinking. When he came back out, he was holding out a big glass of wine, so densely red it was almost black.

“This stuff will knock you out on an empty stomach, so sip it slowly,” he said. “I’ve got some water on to boil for some artichoke ravioli, and some red sauce. That work for you?”

She laid the flowers down on a table and accepted the glass gratefully. “That sounds like heaven.”

She savored the complex, aromatic wine as she gazed at the photographs. They were stark, dynamic, full of high contrasts. One showed a young man diving off a cliff into a lake. He was still upright, his body starting to jackknife, his face a grimace of concentration.

She peered more closely and realized that it was Duncan’s brother, Bruce.

She took a closer look at all of them. There was a young girl, curled up asleep, her mouth open. The same girl again, older, laughing, swinging on a rope swing, hair flying like a banner. She was pretty, with the same narrow face and uptilting eyebrows as Duncan. Then a photograph of a handsome older woman in profile, staring off a porch, smoking a cigarette. She looked like Bruce. Mother. Family.

There were landscapes, too. Deserts and mountains, barren and stark. Cruelly sharp contrasts of light and shadow made them almost like moonscapes. They were lonely, strange, aching. Very personal.

She called back to the kitchen. “Did you take the pictures?”

“Yeah.”

“They’re beautiful,” she said. “Is there one of your father here?”

He came out of the kitchen and leaned against the entryway, sipping his wine. “No. He’s long gone. Haven’t seen him in years. Off in California, working on his fifth wife. She’s welcome to him.”

“Oh.” She stared down into the cup of bloodred wine. “I think I can one-up you there. I doubt my father even knows of my existence.”

“No? Your mom kept it a secret from him?”

“In a manner of speaking. Are these landscapes Afghanistan?”

His brow furrowed. “What do you know about Afghanistan?”

“Bruce told me you were stationed there. That you were a spy.”

He grunted. “Bruce babbles about things he knows shit about.”

“So? Did you take them there?” she prodded him, staring at a picture of jagged mountain peaks, the sun a blazing halo behind them.