“Sure,” Jan said.

He held out the bag and Jan took it before Dwayne could get his hands on it. She dropped it into her purse.

“So, two o’clock, then,” Jan said.

Banura followed them up the stairs, peered through the peephole, then pulled back the bar across the door.

“Goodbye,” he said. “And when you come back, you don’t bring your gun in here. I won’t have it.”

The bar could be heard clinking back in place once they were outside.

“Six mil!” Dwayne said. “Did you hear the man? Six fucking mil!”

He threw his arms around her. “It was all worth it, baby. All fucking worth it.”

Jan smiled, but she wasn’t feeling it.

It was too much money.

When he was back at his workbench, Banura picked up a cell phone, flipped it open, and dialed a number.

He put the phone to his ear. It rang once.

“Yes?”

“It was them,” Banura said.

“When?”

“Two o’clock.”

“Thank you,” Oscar Fine said and ended the call.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Natalie Bondurant said, “Either somebody’s setting you up, or you killed your wife.”

“I didn’t kill my wife,” I said. “I don’t know for sure something’s even happened to her.”

“Something has happened to her,” Bondurant said. “She’s gone. She may very well be alive, but something has happened to her.”

I’d told my new lawyer everything I knew, and everything that had happened to me in the last couple of weeks. That included my chats-and rides-with Elmont Sebastian.

Natalie sat behind her desk and leaned back in her chair. She appeared to be looking up at the ceiling, but her eyes were closed.

“I think it’s a stretch,” she said.

“What?”

“That Sebastian is somehow setting you up to take the fall for this. That he’s done something to her and found a way to make everything point your way.”

“Because it’s a lot of trouble to go to just to silence one critic,” I said.

She shook her head. “Not so much that. It’s not his style. From everything you’ve told me, Elmont Sebastian has a more direct approach. First, a cash inducement. The job offer. When you turned that down, he moved on to simple scare tactics. Mess with me and something’ll happen to you, or worse, to your child.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I think there’s a more obvious answer,” she said.

“That’s staring us in the face?” I said.

Natalie Bondurant opened her eyes and leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Let’s review a few things here. The ticket thing, going into Five Mountains.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“One child ticket, one adult ticket ordered online,” she said.

“Right.”

“You’re the only one who seems to know about your wife’s recent bout of depression. Jan says she went to the doctor but didn’t.”

“Yeah.”

“No one sees Jan from the time you left that store in Lake George. She didn’t go with you to your parents’ house to pick up your son. She tells that shopkeeper some tale about not knowing why you’ve driven her up there.”

“Supposedly.”

Natalie ignored that. “And Duckworth wasn’t lying to you. They’ve found hair and blood in the trunk of your car, plus a recent receipt for duct tape in the glove box, which is a kind of handy item to have around if you’re planning to kidnap someone and get rid of them.”

“I didn’t buy any duct tape,” I said.

“Somebody did,” Natalie said. “And guess what they found in the history folder of your laptop?”

I blinked. “I don’t know. What?”

“Sites that offered tips on how to get rid of a body.”

“How do you know this?”

“I had a chat with Detective Duckworth before you arrived. Full disclosure and all.”

“That’s crazy,” I said. “I never looked up anything like that.”

“I told Duckworth the planets are all in alignment for him on this one. That should be his first clue that you’re being set up.”

“Set up? Is that what he thinks?”

“Hell no. The more obvious the clue, the more the cops like it. There’s also this business of the life insurance policy you recently took out on your wife.”

“What? How do you know about that?”

“I’ll give Duckworth this much. He can be thorough. Tell me about the policy.”

“It was Jan’s idea. She thought it made sense, and I agreed.”

“Jan’s idea,” Natalie repeated, nodding.

“What?” I said.

“You’re not getting this, are you?”

“Getting what? That I’m in a shitload of trouble? Yeah, I get that. And don’t talk to the press. I get that now, too.”

She shook her head. “Just how well do you really know your wife, David?”

“Really well. Very well. You don’t spend more than five years with someone and not know them.”

“Except you’re not even sure what her real name is. Clearly it’s not Jan Richler. Jan Richler died when she was a child.”

“There has to be an explanation.”

“I’ve no doubt there is. But how can you claim to know your wife well if you don’t even know who she is?”

The question hung there for several seconds.

Finally, I said, “Duckworth may be covering for the FBI. She might be a relocated witness. Maybe she testified against someone and no one can say, for the record, that she had to take on a new identity.”

“You told this to Duckworth,” she said.

I nodded. “I don’t think, when I told him, he believed a word of it. I’d already told him about Jan’s depression, but that story was falling apart whenever he talked to anyone else.”

“So he may not even have checked the FBI thing.”

“I don’t know.”

“How do you explain the fact that you’re the only one who witnessed your wife’s change in mood?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I was the only one she felt she could be that honest with.”

“Honest?” Natalie said. “We’re talking about a woman who’s been hiding from you, since the day she met you, who she really is.”

I had nothing for that.

“What if this depression thing was an act?” she asked.

I had nothing for that, either.

“An act just for you.”

Slowly, I said, “Go on.”

“Okay, let’s rewind a bit here. Forget this business about the FBI getting your wife a new name and life. The FBI doesn’t have to troll around looking for people who died as children to create new identities for people. They can make them right out of thin air. They’ve got all the blank forms for every document you could ever need. You want to be Suzy Creamcheese? No problem. We’ll make you up a Suzy Creamcheese ID. So what I’m asking is, has it occurred to you that your wife might have gone about getting a new identity all on her own?”

I took a second. “I’ve thought about it, but I can’t come up with a reason why she’d do such a thing.”

“David, it wouldn’t surprise me that as we sit here the police are drawing up a warrant for your arrest. Finding Leanne Kowalski’s body only a couple of miles from where you were seen with your wife will have shifted them into overdrive. All they’ve wanted is to find a body, and now they’ve got one. Don’t think that just because it isn’t your wife’s, that’s going to slow them down. They probably figure you killed Jan, that Leanne found out or witnessed it, so you killed her, too. They don’t even need to find your wife’s body now. They’ll be able to put together some kind of case with Leanne’s. Maybe you did a better job at hiding Jan’s body, but you screwed things up and panicked and did a shitty job with Leanne’s. If I were them, that’s how I’d be putting this together.”

“I didn’t kill Leanne,” I said.

Natalie waved her hand at me, like she didn’t want to hear it. “You’re in a mess, and there’s only one person I can think of who could have put you there.”

My head suddenly felt very heavy. I let it fall for a moment, then raised it and looked at Natalie.

“Jan,” I said.

“Bingo,” she said. “She was the one who ordered the Five Mountains tickets. She was the one who fed you-and you alone-a story about being depressed. Why? So when something happened to her, that’s the story you’d tell the cops. A story that would look increasingly bogus the more the police looked into it. Who had access to your laptop to leave a trail of tips on how to get rid of a body? Who could easily have put her own hair and blood in the trunk of your car? Who went in and told the Lake George store owner that she had no idea why her husband was taking her for a drive up into the woods? Who persuaded you to take out life insurance, so that if she died you’d be up three hundred grand?”