Eddie pulled the gun from his bellyband holster and slid it under the car seat. The anger in him beat faster, in his pulse, in his fingers tapping the steering wheel. His fight manager had always told him, "Use the anger; don't let it use you." With the bottle of springwater between his legs, he ate the hot, mushy knish and drove toward Manhattan Beach. He'd be the hunter, not the rabbit.

Borodenko's Brooklyn neighborhood was an upscale enclave immediately east of Brighton Beach. Manhattan Beach was isolated from the city's bustle, wedged between Sheepshead Bay on the north and the Atlantic Ocean on the south and east. It was mostly a community of single-family homes on twenty-three tree-lined streets, arranged in alphabetical order and named after places and people in England.

Eddie was struck by the amount of new construction, incredibly recent construction. Every street had two or three brand-new homes and another two in the framing stage. Smaller houses were being torn down and replaced by huge brick or stucco structures with columns, corbeled arches, and onion domes. Mother Russia had arrived in the night with hammer and nail.

Yuri Borodenko lived right on the ocean, on a dead-end street named for a famous poet. The only thing separating his house from the beach was a narrow concrete esplanade, badly in need of repair. Austere and window-less, except for the side that faced the ocean, the house was a series of rounded bare concrete walls. From the street, it looked like it could house a military regiment. The only breaks in the white background were a handful of metal boxes for security cameras. Getting in without being noticed would be a challenge. Eddie drove halfway down the block and pulled to the curb.

At the ocean end of the block, an older man in a white T-shirt sprayed Borodenko's beloved Rolls-Royce with a hose. The man had parked the Rolls a good distance from the driveway, not quite under a dogwood tree in full bloom. The tree blocked Eddie's position from Borodenko's cameras, but there was no way to get closer to the house without being on-camera. Even if he could get close, the house looked sealed. Breaking in without being seen seemed a complicated task at best. Keep it simple for now, he reminded himself. The answer will come to you. Eddie made a U-turn and drove away.

On the way back to Brighton Beach, Eddie finished the knish, then dumped the remaining water out the window. At the Amoco on Neptune and Coney Island Avenue, he stopped for gas. Twenty-two dollars and fifty cents filled the Olds. He put another three bucks' worth in the red gas can in his trunk. Lawn-mower season-everyone was gassing up. He paid cash.

One more stop before going home: a weedy, debris-strewn dead end in Coney Island. Gulls screeched overhead as Eddie pissed against the fence protecting the entrance to the abandoned Parachute Drop. He'd heard rumors that the Parachute Drop was going to reopen; it had been closed for years. The structure was visible from the Belt Parkway. People dropping through the air in parachutes might draw customers in. Eddie rummaged through his trunk until he found two old towels he'd used for waxing his car. He tossed them in the backseat, along with a faded Yankees hat. Then he filled his water bottle three quarters full with gasoline and stuffed a dampened oily rag into the neck.

With the smell of gas on his hands, Eddie returned to Manhattan Beach. All the tree-lined blocks were quiet, peaceful, bucolic. Manhattan Beach seemed a great place to live, the kind of neighborhood people never associated with Brooklyn. He adjusted the rearview mirror, then glanced down Yuri Borodenko's dead-end street. He jammed the Yankees hat down tight on his head, then got out and quickly wrapped the old towels over his front and rear license plates.

Back behind the wheel, Eddie took one last look in all directions. Borodenko's block was empty-no drivers, no pedestrians. The guy who'd been washing Borodenko's Rolls-Royce was gone, the green hose no longer on the sidewalk. Eddie put the Olds in reverse and backed down the block at thirty miles an hour, stopping hard at the dogwood tree. Pretty pink petals blocked him from Borodenko's cameras. He opened the door and lit the oily rag. He held the bottle until the flame was fully engaged.

Then he leaned down and rolled it under Borodenko's beloved Rolls-Royce.

Two blocks away, Eddie heard the first explosion. A second explosion, this one louder, occurred seconds after the first blast. Black smoke rose high above the trees. He stopped by an empty lot to take the towels off his license plates. It was a start.

Chapter 5

Monday

8:00 P.M.

Twelve hours after his daughter had disappeared, Eddie Dunne sat at his kitchen table, trying to decipher a recipe for angel food cake. He'd taken refuge in the kitchen, far away from the overly reassuring young detectives hovering over the phone in the living room. The cake was his granddaughter's idea. Grace had called it "angel foot cake" when she was a baby, and it always made them laugh. She wanted to have a happy surprise for her mother when she got home.

"The recipe says a tube pan," Eddie said.

"I know which pan."

Grace stood inside the closet-sized pantry, on the kitchen chair she'd dragged in. She was searching the shelves for the pan she'd watched her mother use. Eddie ran his fingers through his hair and read the card again. The steps were complicated, with words like volume and decompression.

"Do we have a dozen eggs?" he asked.

"Eggs are in the refrigerator, right under your nose."

At that moment, she sounded so much like her mother, it made his heart pound. Grace hadn't inherited the red hair, but her voice and mannerisms were eerily similar. He remembered when Kate was about Grace's age, sitting on the kitchen floor, sliding little cakes into her Easy-Bake Oven, and somehow getting perfect little pastries out of a forty-watt lightbulb. Eileen had tried to help her, but she wouldn't have any of it. That bossy confidence Eileen always called a Dunne trait would help Kate survive.

"The refrigerator's this big white thing, right?" Eddie said.

The refrigerator held two dozen eggs, neatly stacked in special trays from the Williams-Sonoma catalog. The swanky trays, one of Kate's many kitchen toys, replaced the paper egg cartons in the Dunne fridge. When Kate married Scott D'Arcy, a graduate of the New England Culinary Institute, she threw herself fully into cooking. She took classes, inhaled cookbooks, and ordered pastry brushes and souffle pans from overpriced catalogs. All they'd ever talked about were things like presentation and "erbs." After Scott landed a job as a sous-chef at the Grand Hyatt in Manhattan, they began stockpiling money for a restaurant of their own. Kate worked double shifts at the hospital until the night Grace was born. But less than two years after that event, Scott took their dreams, and a twenty-two-year-old waitress, to Seattle, where he opened his own bistro.

"Mommy only bakes late at night," Grace said. "When she can't sleep."

"Well, that's when the real bakers work. The union bakers work late at night."

"They can't sleep because they're worried, right? So they bake stuff."

"Right. Union workers are always worried. It's good, though, because they make fresh rolls and cakes and doughnuts for the stores to have in the morning."

"Is nighttime when the union says you're supposed to bake?"

"In this house, you can bake anytime you want."

"The union won't get mad?"

"I know people," Eddie said.

After Scott took off, Kate and Grace moved in with Eddie. But none of her other plans changed. For months, she'd been calling Realtors and scanning the classifieds, trying to get an idea of the total cash required to become a minor restaurateur. Eddie closed the refrigerator door and walked over to the open pantry in time to stop a falling cookie sheet from beaning his granddaughter.