"What's going on?" she asked.

Dan glared at her, and Stride saw in his expression what it was like to spend a lifetime of impotence under a rich woman's thumb. "This doesn't concern you."

"No? I heard you mention your cock, Dan. That always concerns me."

"Funny."

"It's not funny at all," Lauren said. "What have you done?"

Dan was silent. Lauren turned to Stride with a question in her eyes.

"He's being blackmailed," Stride said. "He hired Serena to be the go-between. The blackmailer kidnapped her tonight."

"Oh, my God."

"This guy is blowing up all the mines he buried, Dan," Stride told him. "Mitchell Brandt was paying off your blackmailer over an insider trading scheme, and this guy decided to fuck him. You're next. Don't you get it, Dan? Your number's up. This guy is capable of anything. We think he's already added rape and murder to his extortion racket."

"How much did you pay him?" Lauren asked her husband.

Dan didn't answer.

"How much?"

"A hundred and ten thousand dollars."

"You idiot," Lauren snapped.

"What does he have on you?" Stride asked.

Dan hesitated and looked at Lauren.

"Tell him," she said. "Tell both of us."

Dan shrugged. "It was Tanjy."

"Did you rape her?" Stride asked. "Did you kill her? Is that what this is all about?"

"No! We were having an affair."

Stride shook his head. "Why was that worth so much money?"

"You know what Tanjy's fantasies were like. We did things that no one would understand. He had photos of us. It would have been devastating if people found out."

"Did you kill Tanjy to keep her quiet?" Stride asked.

"No, no, that's not what happened at all."

Lauren's face was a mask of granite. "You realize what this means. This is all going to be in the papers." She looked at Stride. "Am I right?"

Stride nodded.

" Washington is gone," she told Dan. "We're ruined."

"It was never supposed to come out," Dan protested.

"Who do you think you are, JFK? Bill Clinton? You think you can get away with anything? I can't believe what you've done to me. It's all over now, Dan. Do you realize that? You just threw our lives away."

"I'm sorry," he said.

"Was it really worth it?" Lauren demanded. "Was she worth it?"

Dan stared at her hard, and Stride wondered if it was the first time in his life that he had told her the truth. "Yeah, she was."

Lauren stalked across the room and slapped him so hard it sounded like a rifle firing. It was an end-of-life slap. End of everything. Lauren and Dan were over the cliff. She turned and marched out of the room, and five seconds later the front door slammed so hard that the old house quivered.

"We need to find this guy," Stride repeated. "I need to know who he is."

"I have no idea."

"Then we're going to sit here and figure out how he tore apart your life, and how he tore apart Mitchell Brandt's life, and how he knew about Sonia and the goddamn sex club. And don't tell me you didn't know about the club."

"I knew about it," Dan admitted. "Look, Stride, I didn't want to tell you this, but there's something else. I don't think it will help us find him, but you should probably know about it."

"Go on."

"This guy's obsessed with Serena," Dan said. "He was obsessed with her from the very beginning."

"What do you mean?" Stride asked. He could barely breathe.

"I mean, it wasn't an accident that I hired Serena to be the go-between. That was part of the deal. Part of the price. He didn't just want money when he first approached me. He wanted Serena."

48

Stride let the silence drag out between them and grow violent. Hostility filled the room like smoke flooding from the air vents. They stared at each other. The computer on Dan's desk whirred as its fan blew. Somewhere outside, the engine of an expensive sedan raced as Lauren fled from the garage and away from the estate.

"I had no idea anything like this would happen," Dan said.

"You should have had alarm bells going off in your head, but you just didn't care. You were trying to save your ass."

Dan shrugged. "All right, maybe I was."

"If something happens to Serena, I will destroy you."

"You'll have to take a number."

"Is that all you have to say?"

"Look, I did not think it would go down like this. You know as well I do that most blackmailers aren't violent. They're cowards at heart. I thought maybe this guy had a crush on Serena, or hell, I thought they might be in it together. She was new in town. I had no idea who the hell she was."

Stride didn't believe him, but it didn't matter. He shoved his anger aside. "Do you have any clue who this guy is?"

"I told you, no."

"Did Serena?"

"If she did, she never told me."

"How did he contact you?"

"The first time was by phone," Dan said. "He called me at home."

"When?"

"Last Tuesday."

"What did he say?" Stride asked.

"He knew about my affair with Tanjy."

"What did he want?"

"He wanted ten thousand dollars, or he was going to tell the press and Lauren about my affair."

"Did he say why he wanted Serena involved?"

"No, he just said he knew I wasn't going to want to handle the dirty work personally, so there was someone who could be our go-between. I don't know how he knew her, or why he wanted her."

"How did he know about you and Tanjy?"

"I have no idea."

"What happened next?"

"I paid him, end of story. Serena handled the drop. A few days later, he gave Serena a very explicit photograph of me and Tanjy in Grassy Point Park. This time the price went way up."

"How did he get the photo?"

"Like I told Serena, I don't know. Tanjy took them, but I deleted them from her computer. No way this guy should have been able to find them."

"Were the photos stored anywhere else? Were they on your computer?"

"No, Tanjy took them on a digital camera, and I uploaded them to her PC for her. As far as I know, that was it. She sure as hell wouldn't have shared them with anyone else. I got rid of them back in November, after the rape charge blew up and Tanjy and I split."

"So she could have retrieved them."

"Tanjy? That girl needed a manual to turn her computer on."

"Well, someone retrieved them. Unless this guy found them before you deleted them."

"Then why wait to blackmail me?"

Stride nodded. He didn't understand the logic, but he also realized he was getting close to something important. The blackmailer had to have access to Tanjy's computer.

"What if this guy is a hacker?" Stride asked. "He could be intercepting e-mails, or breaking in via an Internet connection, or piggybacking on a wireless network."

Stride thought about everything else the blackmailer knew and felt his adrenaline surging. Mitchell Brandt and his insider trading scheme. Dates, trades, dollars, Brandt had said. The sex club and Sonia, who kept detailed records about the club on her desktop. Photos of Tanjy and Dan. Stored on Tanjy's computer.

"No way this guy got into Tanjy's machine from outside," Dan said. "It must be someone who was inside her apartment."

Stride thought about his first visit to Tanjy's apartment and then remembered the kid from across the street who spent his days spying on Tanjy from his bedroom window. What the hell was his name? Doug? Duke? If Stride got into her place simply by unlocking a window, how many times had this kid done the same thing? What if he booted up Tanjy's computer and found a gold mine?

Stride was excited, but then he discarded the thought. Even if the kid had a connection to Tanjy, it didn't explain how he could have known what Mitchell Brandt or Sonia Bezac were hiding.

He thought about what Dan had just said. "Why are you so sure this guy didn't hack in from outside?"