“You look surprised,” Melanie said.

“I am. Diaz has been at Otisville since day one. It’s weird he’d get moved all of a sudden. Why do you think they transferred him?”

“Leona said there was no reason given in the order,” she said, evading his question.

He looked over at her quizzically. “Any relationship between you coming up here and Delvis getting moved?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Hey, can we stop playing games here? What’s the matter, you don’t trust me or something?” He looked upset, kept his gaze on her. The car swerved slightly in its lane.

“Will you watch where you’re going, please? I don’t want to end up dead,” she said.

“Answer my question.”

“Of course I trust you.”

“Well, you’re sure not acting like it.”

Dan’s mouth set in an angry line. They drove on in silence for some time. Eventually, he signaled and pulled off the highway onto the exit ramp for Millbrook. Within minutes they were on a winding road flanked by views of red barns and pastures dotted with creamy white sheep and picture-book horses. Dan consulted the atlas sitting open in his lap and adjusted the route slightly. They drove for a while longer, the scenery getting better by the minute. On either side were gentleman’s farms, graced by painstakingly restored nineteenth-century farmhouses with freshly painted shutters and elegant landscaping. Their late-summer gardens competed in lavish display with the first blazes of color appearing in ancient, towering trees.

Dan focused on the road, staying quiet.

Finally he asked, “Is it that you’re upset with Randall? I vouched for him, and he didn’t come through? If that’s it, you should tell me.”

“Naturally I’m upset,” she said, seizing on the explanation he offered. “I know he’s your friend, but his performance has been a problem, and it’s past the point where it can be overlooked. Blowing that interview with Delvis was one thing. But he was supposed to be guarding Amanda. And now she’s dead.”

“I know, I know. You’re right,” he said, shaking his head.

The pain in his voice sounded real. She studied his face in profile, wishing she could see through into his brain. Every instinct told her he was just as true-blue honest as he looked, but the facts suggested otherwise. And after all, how well did she really know this guy?

“Were you able to get in touch with him this morning?” she asked.

“No, and that has me worried. I can’t get him at home or on his pager. Oh, hey, I think this is it.”

Dan pulled into a gravel driveway that sloped gently up and away from the road, got out and opened a latched iron gate that stretched between two large brick-and-limestone portals on either side of the drive.

“Wow. Not bad,” Melanie said when he got back into the car.

Farther up the drive, though, the Bensons’ spread started to look less scrupulously tended than the neighboring estates. A small outbuilding on the way to the main house had two broken windows. Its door sat slightly askew, blown open by the wind. The fenced paddocks sloping away from the drive on either side were emptied of horses and badly overgrown.

“Looks abandoned,” Dan remarked.

“Yeah.” Melanie shivered slightly in the air-conditioning.

At the top of the rise, a semicircular drive led to a gracious Georgian brick mansion, its three stories perfectly symmetrical, with evenly spaced mullioned windows and white shutters. The house veritably gleamed in the hot sun, yet the windows seemed blank and dark. A separate four-bay clapboard garage stretched off to the right, one of its bays, oddly, thrown open.

“Do you think your informant’s still here?” Melanie asked, a high-pitched note of anxiety in her voice.

“He better be. If not, I’ll prob’ly never get my hands on him. Place sure looks empty, though. Let’s check it out.”

“We don’t have a warrant.”

“So what? The garage door’s open. If you’re nervous, stay in the car.”

“I’m not nervous,” she said. But she was, terribly. Palms sweaty, heart rate elevated. She couldn’t decide whether to follow Dan into the garage, on the theory that she was safer with him than alone, or stay in the car, on the theory that he might be leading her into a trap.

Dan sprang out of the low seat and strode deliberately toward the open garage bay, hand at his waistband near his gun. She opened the passenger door and got out tentatively, lingering in the drive. From the top of the rise, the blue shadows of the Catskills were visible to the west. A delicious summer breeze washed over her, carrying the scent of wild anise and a whiff of animal dung. The deep lowing of a herd of cows made its way up from the valley, providing a counterpoint to the high chirp of sparrows and jays from the surrounding trees.

She looked longingly at the cool grass under the trees. It was so beautiful here. Suddenly she felt exhausted by all the sad things that had happened. For just a minute, she wished for a completely different life. She and Dan, no murders, no Benson investigation. Up here for the weekend, as lovers, maybe even married to each other, with a picnic lunch. As if they’d met when she was single, before Steve. But then she shook herself. If she’d never married Steve, she wouldn’t have Maya. Not to mention that Dan might somehow be complicit in a string of brutal murders. Oh, yeah, that.

“Hey, nature girl,” Dan called from the gloom of the bay door. “There’s a brand-new Hummer in here. Thing is fucking huge. You like cars. Come check it out.”

Inside, it took a moment for her eyes to adjust. She flipped a switch near the door, turning on overhead fluorescent lights to reveal a well-maintained garage, its floor freshly painted a glossy gray. Five heavy-duty black rubber trash cans stood along the far wall, their lids off, empty but still emitting a sour smell. A large refrigerator stood beside them.

“Did you check the fridge for bodies?” she joked.

“Yeah, actually, that’s the first thing I did. There’s some skanky-looking meat in there, but I’m pretty sure it’s venison. Get a load of this car, though. I found it sitting open like this.”

He stood in front of the only car in the garage, an enormous black Hummer with aggressive metal piping, a row of spotlights across the roof, and military-style flat windshields. Solid and massive as a bank vault on wheels, the vehicle sat with its four doors wide open.

“Wow,” she said.

“Yeah. Thing’s insane, but you gotta love it.”

“You think it was Benson’s?”

“Who else?” he said. “Look at it, it’s like a fricking death star. I’ll tell you, it sure looks like it belonged to a drug dealer.”

“Or else some crazed rapper.”

“Same difference,” he said.

Dan climbed up into the high front passenger seat, rummaged through the glove compartment, and brought out a handful of papers. “Yup, it’s registered to Benson,” he announced. “Bought two months ago.”

From where she was standing, Melanie noticed an odd glint of red shining in the lower-left-hand corner of the small rear windshield. She came around to inspect it, running her finger over a metallic red sticker. It was affixed on the inside and bore the image of the Looney Tunes Road Runner cartoon character.

“Hey,” she called to Dan. “You were right, drug-dealer car. There’s a Road Runner sticker back here. This car has a trap.”

Dan jumped down from the front seat and raced around to where she stood. Like Melanie, he instinctively brushed his finger over the sticker. They’d both done enough drug cases to know what it meant.

“Jesus, whaddaya know. Jed Benson with a trapped-out car.”

The Road Runner was the most famous trap installer in the five boroughs of New York City and had been for a decade. He’d never been caught. Traps-also called hides, stashes, or secret compartments-were the kingpins’ preferred way of moving contraband. If you wanted to transport drugs, you needed one, a good one, one nobody could find. The Road Runner’s were the best. Legend had it he’d been a structural engineer back in Colombia, and it showed in his work. His traps were customized to fit into the least expected places in bad guys’ cars, with the carpeting and leather matched exactly to camouflage their location. Their triggering mechanisms were the most sophisticated ever seen, opening hydraulically on complex, coded electronic sequences sent by normal vehicle functions. You could rip a car apart down to the floorboards and still not find his traps, unless you knew the precise code for opening them. The traps were so good that bad guys could afford to indulge themselves by flaunting them with the Road Runner’s signature sticker in the rear window. It was a status thing-show off for your homies, taunt law enforcement. Yeah, I have a trap, asshole, the sticker said, but you’ll never find it.