“Come on, Cupie, you think I don’t know how to deal with a crime scene?”

“Four eyes are better than two.” Cupie produced a flashlight about four inches long. They walked into a large living room with glass sliding doors overlooking a porch and the beach at one end. The room was a good forty feet long, Cupie reckoned. “Great for entertaining a hundred and fifty of your closest friends, huh?”

“I could get my closest friends into a jail cell,” Vittorio remarked. “This place looks like a platoon of maids just left.”

Cupie used his flashlight to illuminate corners of the spotless room. He looked under sofas and chairs, too. Nothing in the living room. They moved into the next room, a library, with a spacious home office off one end. Nothing.

They retraced their footsteps and crossed the hall into a large dining room, then through a swinging door into a kitchen, appropriate for a large restaurant. The block holding all the kitchen knives was full-no empty spaces-and everything was perfectly neat.

“Upstairs,” Cupie said. “Stay close to the wall, behind me, and don’t touch the banister.” There was a huge master suite upstairs that included two dressing rooms and two baths. Vittorio looked in the closets. They crossed the hall and walked into another bedroom.

“The kid’s room,” Cupie said, “but weird. No rock posters, no sports-team pennants. I’ve never seen a kid’s room this neat.”

Vittorio checked the closets, too. “This place is untouched by human hands,” he said.

Cupie led him back downstairs and to the kitchen. “Guesthouse at the other end of the pool,” he said. He opened a sliding glass door and walked the length of the fifty-foot pool. The front-door key worked in the guesthouse door, too. They found two bedrooms and a sitting room, and the place smelled a little musty, as if unused for a while. “Let’s walk the perimeter of the property,” Cupie said.

They did so, finding no footprints outside ground-level windows, no sign of forced entry. They reentered the house through the kitchen sliding door. Cupie called Ed Eagle’s office.

“He’s out for an hour or so,” the secretary said.

Cupie thanked her, hung up and called Eagle’s cell phone.

“Eagle,” he said.

“We’re in Malibu,” Cupie said. “The house is clean as a whistle. Any criminals operating here had a lot of house-cleaning experience.”

“Lock up and wait in your car to hear from me,” Eagle said. “I’m almost to the Tano Norte house.”

EAGLE PULLED INTO the driveway and stopped in front of the house. It was a typical Santa Fe home for an affluent family, he thought. Looked to be seven or eight thousand square feet, richly landscaped with native plants, guesthouse fifty yards down a flagstone path. He walked around the house and found nothing more surprising than a four-car garage, then he went back to the front door and found the house key under the firewood rack.

He rang the bell a couple of times and, getting no response, tried the front door, which turned out to be unlocked. The alarm system was not armed, either. “Hello!” he shouted, but got no answer. He turned right and came to the kitchen, a big room, with all the usual top-end appliances: SubZero fridge, Viking range, two Miele dishwashers. Not very different from his own kitchen, he thought.

He checked the dining room next door, then walked into the living room, which seemed to be in perfect order. He walked across a hallway to a large study, with many books on the shelves, then left it through another door and came to what seemed to be a wing of bedrooms. Directly ahead of him was a set of large double doors. He opened one of the doors and stepped into the master suite. Immediately, he detected a familiar odor, but he couldn’t place it. He stopped and thought about it, then it came to him.

It smelled like a butcher shop.

15

EAGLE TRIED NOT to move his feet. He leaned over and looked into the bedroom. He could see the corner of the bed and a pair of feet, a woman’s, with one shoe missing. He took a deep breath and walked into the room, keeping near the wall.

He stared at the bed for a long moment, until he was sure he had seen enough, then he retraced his steps and stood in the hall, taking deep breaths. When he had calmed himself, he went to his cell phone’s address book and called the district attorney’s direct office line.

“Bob Martínez.”

“Bob, it’s Ed Eagle. Write this down: I’m at 180 Tano Norte, that’s the old County Road 85, renamed a few years ago, runs off Tano Road.”

“I know it. What’s up?”

“I had a phone call an hour or so ago from a man named Donald Wells, calling from Rome. He said he had had a phone call saying that his wife and son had been kidnapped, and he asked me to check it out.”

“Did you call the police?”

“No, he didn’t want that, unless something was confirmed.”

“And…?”

“And I’m at the house, and his wife and son are dead in the master suite. There’s a lot of blood.”

Martínez was not fazed. “Okay, call nine-one-one right now, and let’s get this on the record. I’ll be there soon.” He hung up.

Eagle called 911 and answered the operator’s list of questions, then he went outside and sat in a rocking chair on the front porch to wait for the police. His cell phone vibrated.

“Ed Eagle.”

“Mr. Eagle, it’s Don Wells. Your office gave me your cell phone number. I wanted you to know that I went downstairs and spoke with the manager, who spoke with the hotel telephone operator on duty. The call I got about the kidnapping came from my Santa Fe house.”

“Tell me about the call.”

“The phone rang, and I picked it up. There was a kind of click and I heard some sort of computer-generated voice, a recording, I guess. It said something like, ‘We have your wife and son. Start raising five million dollars, and we will contact you about arranging payment. If you tell anyone about this, your wife and son will be killed.’ Then there was another click, and the line went dead.”

“Mr. Wells, are you sitting down?”

“Yes, I’m at the desk in my sitting room.”

“I’m at your house now, and I’m sorry to tell you that your wife and son are dead.”

There was a long silence, and when Wells spoke again his voice was unsteady and his breathing audibly shallow. “Are you sure about this?”

“I’m sorry, I am sure. I’ve called the police and the district attorney, and I’m waiting for them to arrive.” Eagle heard the sound of a police whooper from somewhere up the road. “I can hear them coming.”

“But why?” Wells said. “Why didn’t they wait for the money? I would have given it to them.”

Eagle thought he knew why, but he said, “I don’t know at this point. It’s important that you stay right where you are; the police will want to speak to you. Please don’t leave your suite until you hear from me or the police, but you might ask the concierge to arrange travel for you to Santa Fe as soon as possible. I’ll speak to you later to get your arrival time.”

“All right,” Wells said, sounding dejected but in control of himself. “Mr. Eagle, I want to retain you to represent me in all this.”

“You have already done so, Mr. Wells. I’m very, very sorry for your loss. When you feel up to it, you might give some thought to any arrangements you want to make. My office will assist you.”

“Thank you,” Wells said softly, then hung up.

Eagle looked up to see two police cars and a van pull into the drive. He stood up to greet them. Before he could speak to the first officer, the district attorney’s car drove in behind the other vehicles, and Bob Martínez got out.

EAGLE TOOK THEM through the house, following his original path, then he went back to the front porch and sat down again. A few minutes passed, then Martínez and a Detective Reese joined him, pulling up chairs.