Tessie looked everywhere but at Kat. “Gary said her street name was Sugar.”

“Sugar?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know if that’s true or not.”

“Sugar what?”

“I don’t know.”

The blows just kept coming. Kat wanted to curl up in a ball and ride them out, but she didn’t have that luxury. “Do you know what happened to Sugar after my father’s murder?”

“No,” Tessie said.

“Did she—”

“That’s all I know, Kat. There’s nothing more.” Tessie started back on the plants again. “So what are you going to do now?”

Kat thought about it. “I’m not sure.”

“You know the truth now. Sometimes that’s enough.”

“Sometimes,” Kat agreed.

“But not this time?”

“Something like that,” Kat said.

“The truth may be better than lies,” Tessie said. “But it doesn’t always set you free.”

Kat understood that. She didn’t expect to be free. She didn’t expect to be happier even. She just expected . . .

What exactly?

There was nothing to be gained here. Her mother would be hurt. Stagger, who probably did this out of loyalty to her father, could be open to tampering charges if he convinced Monte Leburne to stay quiet or change his testimony. Kat knew the truth now. Enough anyway.

“Thank you, Aunt Tessie.”

“For what?”

“For telling me.”

“I don’t think a ‘you’re welcome’ fits here,” Tessie said, bending down and picking up the spade. Then: “You’re not going to leave it alone, are you, Kat?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Even if it hurts a lot of people.”

“Even if.”

Tessie nodded, digging the spade deep into the fresh soil. “It’s getting late, Kat. I think maybe it’s time you headed back home.”

 • • •

The revelation began to sink in during the subway ride home.

It was easy to feel angry and betrayed and disgusted.

Her father had been her hero. Kat got, of course, that he wasn’t perfect, but this was the man who climbed up a ladder and hung up the moon for her. She had honestly believed it—that her father had taken the ladder out of the garage and put up the moon just for her benefit—but, of course, when you stop and think about it, that had been a lie too.

Sometimes she imagined that her father used to disappear because he was saving lives, working undercover, doing something grand and brave. Now Kat knew that he had abandoned and terrified his entire family to shack up with a hooker.

So that would be the easy way for her emotions to go—in the direction of disgust, anger, betrayal, maybe even hate.

But as Tessie had warned her, life was rarely that simple.

Her overwhelming emotion was sadness. There was sadness for a father who was so unhappy at home that he ended up living a lie. There was sadness too for Kat’s mother for all the obvious reasons, for also being forced to live the lie, and when she looked at it carefully, maybe there was sadness because this news didn’t shock Kat as much as she might now claim. Maybe Kat had subconsciously suspected this kind of ugliness. Maybe this had been the root cause for her tense relationship with her mother—a stupid, subconscious belief that somehow Mom didn’t do enough to make Dad happy and so he would go away and Kat would be scared that he would never come back and it would be Mom’s fault.

She also wondered whether Sugar, if that was her name, made her father happy. There had been no passion in his marriage. There had been respect and companionship and partnership, but had her father found something approaching romantic love with this other woman? Suppose he had been happy with this other, forbidden woman. How should Kat feel about that? Should she feel anger and betrayal—or some form of joy that Dad found something to cherish?

She wanted to go home and lie down and cry.

Her phone didn’t work until she was out of the subway tunnel. There were three missed calls from Chaz’s cell phone. Kat called him back as soon as she was at street level.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“You sound like crap.”

“Rough day.”

“It may get rougher.”

“What do you mean?”

“I got something on that Swiss bank account. I think you’ll want to see this.”

Chapter 26

Titus got tired of the prostitution ring.

The world was getting dangerous, tricky, and even boring. Whenever you had a good thing going, too many dumb people with overly violent tendencies had a habit of getting involved. The mob moved in and wanted a piece. Lazy men saw this as easy money—abuse a desperate girlfriend, make her do what you want, collect the cash. His mentor, Louis Castman, had long since disappeared, retiring, Titus figured, to some island in the South Pacific. The Internet, which made so many retail businesses and go-betweens obsolete, had made the pimp that much less valuable. The whore-to-john connection became much more streamlined with the web or with larger consolidators who swallowed the smaller pimps in the same way that Home Depot swallowed the mom-and-pop hardware store.

Prostitution had become too small-time for Titus. The risks had started to outweigh the benefits.

But like any business, when one aspect became obsolete, the top entrepreneurs found new avenues. Technology might have hurt the street business, but it also opened up new worlds online. For a while, Titus became one of those consolidators, but it became too rote, too distant, sitting behind a computer and making appointments and transactions. He moved on and ran online cons with some backers in Nigeria. No, he didn’t run the easy-to-spot spam e-mails about helping someone who owed or wanted to give away money. Titus had always been about seduction—about sex, about love, about the interplay between them. For a while, his best “romantic scam” was to pretend that he was a soldier serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. He would set up fake identities for his soldiers on social media sites and then start to romance single women he would meet online. Eventually, he would “reluctantly” ask for help so he could purchase a laptop, or airfare so they could meet in person, or maybe he would need money for rehabilitation after a war-related injury. When he needed quick cash, Titus would pretend he was a soldier being deployed and needing to sell a vehicle on the cheap, sending perspective buyers bogus registration and information and having them wire the money to third-party accounts.

There were problems with these scams, however. First, the money was relatively small and took a great deal of effort. People were dumb, but alas, they were getting shrewder. Second, as with anything profitable, too many amateurs heard about it and rushed into the business. The Army Criminal Investigation began issuing warnings and going after the perpetrators in a more serious manner. For his partners in western Africa, that wasn’t a big problem. For Titus, it could very well be.

But more than that, it was again small-time with the lowest-case s imaginable. Titus, like any businessman, was looking for ways to expand and capitalize. These cons had been a step up from his earlier pimping days, but how big a step? He needed a new challenge—something bigger, faster, more profitable, and completely safe.

Titus had used up almost his entire life savings to get his new venture off the ground. But it was paying off big-time.

Clem Sison, the new chauffeur, came into the farmhouse. He was wearing Claude’s black suit. “How do I look?”

It was a little baggy in the shoulders, but it would do. “You understand your training.”

“Yes.”

“No deviations from the plan,” Titus said. “Do you understand?”

“Sure, of course. She comes straight here.”

“Then go get her now.”

 • • •

Chaz’s shift was over, so Kat met him at his apartment in the ritzy Lock-Horne Building on Park Avenue and 46th Street. Kat had come to an office party here two years ago when Stacy was dating the playboy who owned the building. The playboy, whose name was Wilson or Windsor or something else overtly preppy, was brilliant and rich and handsome and now, if rumors were true, had lost his mind à la Howard Hughes and become a complete recluse. Recently, the building had converted some office floors into residential space.