He gave a bitter laugh. “Thanks for that, Judge.”

“What aren’t you telling me?” She stepped toward him. “What’s happened to you, Cal?”

“Do you believe in the devil?”

Her heart jumped. “What?”

He abandoned whatever he’d started to say. “You’ll be gone in the morning before I get up. Have a good trip to New Hampshire.” He managed a small smile. “Say hi to the loons for me.”

“Cal -”

“I don’t want anything to happen to you, Bernadette. I never have.”

He walked away from her, taking his drink with him. She debated following him, but what good would another fight do? He was stubborn and secretive by nature, qualities that had their advantages, as well as their liabilities. But she’d never been able to penetrate the hard shell that he’d developed to protect the most vulnerable parts of him, where his insecurities lived. She’d gotten tired of trying. If he gave in to his compulsions instead of rising above them, what could she do?

Get out of range when they backfire, she thought.

But she knew better. She adhered to the judicial code of ethics as strictly as any of her colleagues, but that wouldn’t help her when it came to appearances. If Cal was in trouble, she had no idea if their divorce would protect her from public backlash, or if she’d end up like Harris Mayer, disgraced and ostracized.

No charges were ever brought against Harris, but that didn’t make him innocent, she reminded herself. Regardless of his personal culpability, he’d had a hand in some shady dealings.

Most people she knew appreciated her unwillingness to completely cut off an old friend, even if they didn’t understand it. But would they understand if she’d unwittingly paired Harris and Cal, and they’d cooked up some fraudulent deals?

“You’re getting ahead of yourself,” she said aloud, looking around at her empty kitchen. Cal would be gone when she returned from New Hampshire. She’d have her life back. She smiled suddenly, surprising herself. “Thank heaven.”

She headed upstairs, replacing visions of unpleasant imagined headlines with real memories of the lake, the mountains, the feel of cold dew on her feet on a late summer morning, memories, she thought, of home.

Twenty-Four

Mackenzie noticed a fat spider scurry in front of Cal Benton’s shoe into the lush greenery of the “natural” courtyard of his condominium complex on the Potomac. Cal had called her on her cell phone, reaching her just after she’d had her stitches removed. He’d asked her to meet him privately as soon as possible. Since she’d allowed for more time than she’d ended up needing for her appointment, and had her own reasons for talking to him, she’d agreed and drove straight to his condo. He’d met her in the lobby and brought her out to the courtyard.

He was visibly tense, sweat already glistening on his upper lip as he stood on the cobblestone walk in the shade of a clump birch. The air was dead still. Nothing but the spider moved. A perpendicular walk led to an air-conditioned glass breezeway that connected the main building with the parking garage. Cal was undeterred, apparently, by the oppressive heat, dark clouds and rumble of thunder.

The spider disappeared, and Mackenzie tilted her head and gave Cal a long look. He was dressed casually, appropriate for a blistering Friday in August – not to mention his impending move. “Not going to give me the grand tour of your new condo?”

“Another time, perhaps.”

Meaning never, she thought. “Bernadette’s on her way to New Hampshire?”

“I assume so. She left before I got up this morning.” He nodded to the sky. “I hope she can make it to the lake before this line of storms reaches her.”

“She’s been making that trip for a lot of years.”

He lowered his eyes. “Yes, she has. Mackenzie – I’ll be blunt.” He raised his gaze to her, his expression serious, but she thought she detected a measure of embarrassment, too. “I have no intention of telling Bernadette about what you saw earlier this summer. If you weren’t in Washington and seeing her regularly, you wouldn’t consider telling her, either.”

“That’s not true -”

“It’s not that you feel she needs to know as much as it is you don’t like keeping something from her. You’re worried what she’ll think of you if she finds out you knew about this situation and said nothing.”

Mackenzie didn’t let him get to her. “The attack on me at the lake changes the equation. It happened on Beanie’s land, and that puts her under scrutiny. The police, the FBI, the marshals – reporters, even – will look into her background for any evidence she has a history with this man. The longer they can’t find him, the more likely her life at the lake will go under the microscope.”

“That means my life, too,” Cal said quietly. “I hadn’t looked at it that way.”

“Cal, she can’t find out about your brunette from the police or reporters. She needs to find out from you.”

“You saw me with a woman with dark hair?”

“Yes – shoulder-length dark hair. I was canoeing. You two were on the screen porch. There’s no need to -” She broke off midsentence and grimaced. “Oh, hell, Cal. She wasn’t the only one. There have been other women.”

He took in a sharp breath through his nose. “You have no right to judge me.”

“Just stating the facts.”

“I’m normally not that promiscuous,” Cal said. “The divorce affected me more than I thought it would. I guess I was sowing my wild oats ahead of the official paperwork. I’m hardly the first man to give in to…” He trailed off, waving a hand as if Mackenzie was free to finish his sentence for him.

She wished the spider would poke back up out of the decorative grasses and crawl across Cal’s foot. “I wish I’d gone canoeing someplace else that day. If you believe word of your affair – or affairs – is about to come out, will you at least tell Beanie before it does?”

He nodded. “I will. Right now, it’s not my biggest concern – or yours, I would think.” Clearing his throat, he reached into a side pocket of his pants and withdrew a folded sheet of paper. He opened it carefully, then showed it to her, revealing the police sketch of the man who’d attacked her a week ago. “Is this a decent likeness?”

“Except for the eyes,” she said. “It’s hard to capture just how soulless and eerie they were. Why? Do you recognize him?”

He flipped the paper over on the fold, as if he wanted that face staring up at him. “I don’t know.” Cal seemed to regain some of his natural arrogance. “When I first saw the sketch last week, nothing hit me. But I keep thinking about it.”

“Keep thinking what, Cal?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t put my finger on it.” He thrust the sketch at her. “Do you suspect he’s one of the people Bernadette’s helped?”

Mackenzie took the paper but didn’t unfold it. She didn’t need to. “I have no idea.”

“You still haven’t been able to place where you’ve seen this man before?”

“Not yet, no.”

“Strange, isn’t it?” Cal he didn’t wait for her to reply. “I’ll call the detectives in New Hampshire and let them know he seems familiar to me, too. Maybe it’ll help, maybe it won’t.”

“I’ll follow up and let them know we’ve talked.”

He gave her a cool look. “Of course. If Bernadette did help this man, it’s more likely it was before I was in her life. She’s become more circumspect. I keep telling her she doesn’t need to engage in direct charity. She can give money to organizations and lend her credibility to her favorite causes.” He took out a folded handkerchief from his back pocket and blotted the sweat above his lip. “As she did with the literacy fund-raiser last week.”

Mackenzie tried not to show just how irritating and condescending she found him. “Beanie’s a generous person.”

“It’s odd, don’t you think, for someone who’s as tight with a dollar as she is?”