They must have dumped their car at LaGuardia, caught a flight just ahead of hers and arrived in Tennessee in time to get shot dead.

“You hear any shots fired?” she asked Brooker.

“No.”

Neither had Nate and Rob in Central Park. “These two guys attacked me this morning in New York.” Damn. “I’m going to pat you down.”

“I’ve got a thirty-eight in an ankle holster. Right ankle.”

“How convenient.” She confiscated the weapon and finished patting him down. Hard body, lots of muscles. He must have worked his butt off as a gardener. “We’re going to the Dunnemore house. We’ll call the police on the way. I’d better not find anymore dead people there.” Nate. Sarah.

“I didn’t kill these men.”

She heard something stir in the brush behind her and started to swing around. The cool barrel of a gun touched her right ear. She could see it out of the corner of her eye and went still. “Drop your weapon now.”

It was another southern male voice. A county sheriff who’d answered a local’s call about the bodies?

“Look, I’m the good guy-”

“You’re Deputy U.S. Marshal Juliet Longstreet. I knew you’d come.”

She got it now. He wasn’t a local sheriff.

“One more time,” he said. “Drop your weapon-away from our Mr. Brooker, if you please.”

She tossed it lightly to her right.

“Brooker’s weapon,” the man with the gun said.

She pulled out the thirty-eight and tossed it, too. She felt adrenaline surge through her, obliterating the pain from her injuries.

Brooker stood very still, again with that steely look that said he was thinking five steps ahead of what was going on. Juliet didn’t know what to make of him.

“Don’t be a hero, Deputy,” the man behind her said. “You’re in no condition to take me on and risk Brooker’s life, not after what those idiots did to you this morning. Brooker, I’ll kill her if you flinch.”

Brooker hadn’t so much as let an eye flicker. “Did you kill my wife?”

“No. The men I just killed did.”

“Janssen’s men?” he asked stonily.

“Indeed. They killed your wife on his orders.” The man behind Juliet seemed almost charming, as if they were gossiping about a couple of locals. “He sent them down here to kill all of us. Clean things up.”

“Your real name isn’t Conroy Fontaine,” Brooker said.

“It’s Poe. John Wesley Poe.” He spoke proudly, the gun moving a few millimeters just below Juliet’s ear. His tone suggested he was just waiting for anyone to contradict him. “My mother gave me the same name as the women who stole my older brother gave him.”

President Poe? This son of a bitch had just killed two men in the backyard of the house where the president was raised, and now he was saying they were related?

Ah, hell.

Juliet felt a wave of dizziness. She couldn’t breathe. She started to topple forward, tried to stop herself, then thought-why not? She went all the way, pretending to faint from her injuries, and fell against Brooker’s knees. Fontaine. John Wesley Poe. Whoever he was, he grabbed her by the hair and pulled her off Brooker, throwing her aside. She landed hard on the gravel driveway, right on her road rash, and screamed out in pain, tried to yell to Brooker to duck.

But he’d gone over the edge of the bluff.

Who the hell is this guy?

Her mind was all over the place. Her body was reeling from the fresh waves of pain. Her ribs, her head. The damn road rash.

Fontaine jerked her to her feet. He looked awful. Her stomach lurched and she threw up on him, noticing that he had on green camouflage pants and jacket as she heaved. She was dizzy, reeling from pain.

He sneered in disgust. “I can kill you with my bare hands.” There was no lilt to the accent now, no charm, however incongruous, to his tone. “Do you understand? I don’t need a fucking gun.”

Juliet nodded, then felt another wave of nausea and knew she really was passing out.

Thirty-One

Sarah loaded up a big wooden tray with glasses, a bowl of ice, a sugar pot, spoons and a pitcher of tea-regular tea, not tea punch-and carried it out to the porch. She abandoned the casserole. She wasn’t hungry. Whenever she was stressed out, she’d tackle one of her grandmother’s recipes. It wasn’t just the comfort food, it was the inevitable images that came with it of her grandmother chopping onions, rolling out biscuit dough, cutting ripe peaches-losing herself, perhaps, in the ordinariness, the simple necessity, of putting a meal on the table.

But Sarah couldn’t have concentrated on another recipe. Not now.

Joe Collins had called from New York. Again, her parents hadn’t made their flight. He’d sounded faintly annoyed, as if the Dunnemores might be sucking him into some kind of drama unrelated to his investigation. Clearly, he didn’t see what role a rich tax evader, even if he was a fugitive, could possibly have played in the shooting in Central Park.

Despite his obvious doubts, Collins had assured Sarah that the FBI was leaving no stone unturned and promised to call the minute he heard anything.

Before his call, she’d found an inscription in her mother’s freshman yearbook from Nicholas Janssen, telling her he would miss her and appreciated her for being his friend. Sarah had looked him up on the Internet and found the same picture Conroy Fontaine had-a wanted poster on the FBI Web site. But Janssen was just a tax evader, if a very wealthy one. He’d made his money in real estate and had homes in Virginia and south Florida. He was divorced with no children, the only child of a northern Virginia pharmacist and a homemaker. He was just eighteen when his father died-it was the reason he’d had to drop out of college.

Sarah doubted her mother had done anything illegal in talking with this guy at the Rijksmuseum. That he also knew Wes Poe had set off alarm bells, but nothing explained what had happened to her parents.

Where were they?

Nate came out onto the front porch. He’d taken a call on the living room phone. Sarah knew he was doing his own checking, with sources he had within the Marshals Service. That was where he got his sketchy information on Ethan. But he’d just finished with another call, and from his obvious impatience, she suspected the news wasn’t good.

“Your pal Conroy needs to answer some questions. Looks like he might not be who he says he is. There’s a real Memphis reporter named Conroy Fontaine, but he’s sixty-four and just retired to Phoenix.”

“Maybe the Conroy we know is his son? Why don’t we just go over there and ask him?”

Nate leaned across the table and filled two glasses with ice, poured the tea, making his own attempt at normalcy, Sarah thought. She could see the butt of his gun under his open jacket. “I’m not leaving you here alone,” he said, “and I’m not taking you with me. Juliet’s flight got in almost two hours ago. She’ll be here soon.”

Having another armed deputy here would give him more room to maneuver. He handed Sarah a glass of tea, but she just stared at it. “I hope this all turns out to have nothing to do with what happened to you and Rob. It smells like politics and journalistic shenanigans to me. My mother-”

“Don’t jump ahead. We have no idea what your mother knew or didn’t know about Janssen, why he approached her at the museum-”

“Do you think he had anything to do with the murder of Ethan’s wife?”

“I’m not doing the thinking on this one, Sarah.”

Maybe not officially, she thought. She tried the tea. “I looked up Nicholas Janssen on the Internet. I’m sure you all have a thick file on him, but-” She’d known nothing about her mother’s former classmate. “His mother died over the winter while he was on the lam. It was unexpected-he couldn’t go home for her funeral. That had to be hard. I wonder if it’s part of the reason he sought out my mother. Maybe he was just lonely.”