She asked me to show her identification and my investigator’s license. It was a pointless routine-IDs can easily be faked, and she’d already decided she had to trust me-but maybe the trivial precaution made her feel better. We went up to her hotel room, and she dried off and pulled a sweatshirt over her swimsuit while I stood in the living room and waited. It was a three-room suite, and the door to the second bedroom was closed. When she came out of the bathroom, she saw me looking at it.

“She’s in there,” she said, knowing who I was wondering about. She watched me hesitantly, then stepped past me and opened the door. I stayed where I was, but enough light from the bathroom filtered into the bedroom to display the little girl asleep under the covers, her dark hair spilling across the pillow. Betsy Weston. I stared at her for a few seconds.

“I’m glad she’s safe,” I said, and my voice sounded slightly hoarse.

Julie Weston stood in the doorway, out of the light enough so that I could see into the room, but in my way enough to block me if I tried to move past her. Protective. I turned away, and she closed the door quietly and led me onto the balcony.

“We should talk out here,” she said. “I don’t want to wake her.” She leaned over the rail and looked down at the pool below us. “I should never have gone down,” she said. “I was so scared to leave her here alone. But I needed to get out. I had to get away from this damned room. It’s been like a prison.”

I sat on one of the plastic deck chairs and watched her as she stood with her back to me, looking at the pool. The sweatshirt extended just beyond the bottom of her swimsuit, but the slim, graceful lines of her legs were visible in the shadows. She turned back to me but stayed on her feet, pressing her back against the railing. Then she told the story.

They’d been the perfect family, she said. Happy, healthy, and wealthy. She’d met Wayne while he was working for the Pinkertons. It had been a blind date arranged by one of her friends. They’d gone out once, and at first she thought he’d been a little too arrogant, a little too slick, a little too confident. But he was good-looking, and smart, and charming. So when he called again, asking for a second date, she’d found it hard to refuse. There’d been a second date, and a third, and eventually they’d spent a week in Switzerland, and he’d proposed to her in a beautiful chalet in the mountains. They’d married six months later, and Wayne had taken a risk, leaving behind the benefits of the Pinkertons to set out on his own.

And it had worked. Worked very well, as far as Julie Weston knew. Wayne originally had a partner named Aaron Kinkaid, she told me, but they’d decided to go their separate ways, and her husband had worked alone from then on. I watched her face carefully when she mentioned Kinkaid, but if there was any emotion or passion there, she hid it well.

So the happy marriage lasted, and the career thrived, and the family grew with the addition of their daughter. Wayne was making good money-great money, in fact-and he told her business was good, couldn’t be better, there were new clients coming in every day. On their tenth anniversary, he surprised her with a brand-new Lexus. Good-looking, charming, and prone to extravagant gifts, Wayne Weston seemed like the perfect husband. He was the perfect husband, Julie Weston told me. Until one day in February. She smiled at the recollection, but it wasn’t the product of emotions one typically associates with a smile. It was hard, cold, and bitter-a smile not at the memory but at her own foolishness, a mocking smile at her own faith that had turned out to be so undeserved.

“He came home early,” she said, “and I knew right away something was wrong. Betsy always met him at the door, jumped on him, and hugged him, and he always responded playfully. That night, though, she just seemed to bounce right off him. He gave her an automatic hug and told her to go play in her room before dinner because he had a headache. She went to her room, but I looked at his face and knew right away it wasn’t a headache that was bothering him.” Her hands tightened on the rail, the knuckles pushing against the skin. “He told me he had a confession to make. And I was standing there in the kitchen, still holding the stupid meat tenderizer in my hand, just staring at him and thinking, ‘Whatever it is, we can beat it. If he’s having an affair, if he’s got cancer, we can get past it.’ And then he told me his confession. And it wasn’t an affair, and it wasn’t cancer. It was worse. He told me he’d been working for a businessman, helping him settle deals and get the best prices. And I said I didn’t see what was wrong with that. So he explained it to me.”

The cold smile came back again. “He’d been helping him by digging deep in people’s private lives and then handing the information over. He shot videotapes of married men having sex with their mistresses, he dug up information on addictions and past psychological problems, on family secrets-anything and everything people were afraid of. And then he handed it over to his boss, and they went to work turning other people’s fears into money. My husband,” she said flatly, “was nothing more than a blackmailer. That was his profession. To ruin lives, or threaten to ruin lives, so another man could make more money on his business deals or have more pull with the city government.”

I sat in silence. I didn’t want to tell her that it was not an uncommon practice. I didn’t want to tell her that secrets are money in the business world, that fear is leverage, that knowledge is power.

“I never pried about his job,” she said. “I knew it was confidential, and the few times I asked questions, that was what he told me. But somehow I’d always imagined that he was nobler, that he was out there solving cases the police couldn’t solve, or helping attorneys prepare for legitimate lawsuits. I knew the cheating-spouse cases would come and go, and there would be some unpleasant jobs, but… all he did was look for ways to hurt people. That’s it. He went to work every day determined to find some dirty secret, some sensitive topic, so another greedy man could make a larger profit.”

She sighed and shook her head, then took her hands off the railing and went back to rubbing her arms, even though she couldn’t possibly have been cold in the sweatshirt.

“He’d been doing this for years. Working for this one man.”

“Jeremiah Hubbard,” I said, speaking for the first time since she’d begun her story. She looked at me and smiled.

“Very good,” she said. “You obviously do your job well, Mr. Perry. Do the police know, too?”

I shrugged. “We’ve told them, but I don’t know how seriously they took us.”

“I see. Well, yes, it was Mr. Hubbard. And then one day, the whole beautiful arrangement fell apart. Wayne told me he’d been shooting video surveillance-using cameras that had been illegally installed, of course-and he’d videotaped a murder.”

“A murder?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Do you know who was killed? Or who killed him?”

“I don’t know any names. Wayne didn’t want me to know them.”

“Okay,” I said, not wanting to distract her from the story. “Go on.”

She took a breath and paused, remembering where she had left off. “He’d videotaped a murder. He told me this, and I stared at him, and said, ‘So what’s the problem? Call the police.’ But he said he couldn’t. He said the people involved were too dangerous. He said they were professional criminals, part of a national Russian crime syndicate, and we’d have to go into witness protection if we turned the tape over. He said they’d come after all of us, him, me, even Betsy. I couldn’t believe it. Witness protection. We’d have to throw our whole lives away.” She shook her head vigorously, aggravated by just the memory of the night.

“I told him to call the FBI,” she said. “That’s what you do in a situation like that, right? If it’s too serious for the police, then you call the FBI. And he told me he couldn’t do that, because the cameras had been illegally installed. He said he’d committed a crime just to get the videotape. But that was absurd; obviously, the police wouldn’t care about something so minor if it solved a murder for them. I told Wayne that, and he said he didn’t trust the FBI or the police-the men involved in the murder were too smart, too powerful, too dangerous.