Dwayne stepped out onto sunny the driveway and walked toward him, grinning. He raised a hand in greeting. “Hi, Bill. You seen Maude?”

Phoenix staggered past him and didn’t seem to have seen him.

“Hey, Bill . . .”

“Don’t go in there!” he heard Phoenix call, as he clambered into his van. “For God’s sake, don’t go in there!”

Dwayne watched as the van roared and shot backward. It swerved back and forth, once even going off the driveway and onto the grass. Leaving tire marks. Good. Dwayne couldn’t see the van when it reached the street, but he heard its tires squeal as it sped away.

Dwayne would have liked it if the van had slammed into one of the palm trees, but this was okay.

He walked back to the house to phone the police. He wanted to call them before Bill Phoenix did. If Phoenix ever would.

Not that it mattered. The police would contact Phoenix.

32

New York, the present

“The police have released the bodies of my girls,” Ida Tucker said.

Sitting primly across from Quinn and regarding him over his desk, she looked much younger than she had to be, which was somewhere in her eighties, perhaps nineties. Her back was straight, her chin outthrust and confident. Her blue eyes were steady. From years ago, a beautiful woman looked out from the ruins. “I’ve come to take them home, where they can rest with their family.”

“I can’t tell you, dear, how sorry I am for your loss.” Quinn meant it, and his sincerity came across in his voice.

Ida Tucker swiped at an eye with the knuckle of her right forefinger. Quinn pulled a tissue from a box on his desk, then stood up and leaned over the desk so Ida could accept it. She folded the tissue in halves, then in quarters, and used it to dab.

“It’s a hard thing,” Quinn said. “Time might not cure, but it can help.”

“Time is my best friend and worst enemy,” Ida Tucker said.

“So it is with us all.” Thinking deep thoughts.

“I suppose.” She took a final dab at her eye and slipped the tissue into a pocket of the blue cotton tunic she was wearing.

“May I make an observation?” Quinn asked.

“That’s part of your job, Detective Quinn.”

“Andria was rather young to be your daughter.”

“My husband Robert and I took her in as a ward of the state when she was quite young. We later adopted her.”

“She was an orphan?”

“Let’s just say she was unwanted.”

“I see.” Quinn wondered if there was any kind of police record, juvenile or otherwise, on Andria. He doubted it. Jerry Lido wouldn’t have missed that kind of information. But then, why would he even look in that direction? This family seemed to have been pieced together with disparate parts, yet there was a curious glue that held them together. Before Quinn sat a woman who seemed too frail to be thought of as their guiding matriarch, but age and experience could harden a soul and give it the gift of guile.

Ida Tucker clasped her hands in her lap. “I was glad when I got the message at my hotel that you wanted to see me, Detective Quinn. I also wanted to see you. Have there been any meaningful developments in the murder investigation?”

“We’re always working to develop new leads.”

Her blue-eyed assessment suggested that Ida Tucker knew bullshit when she heard it.

“I take it you haven’t learned anything new,” she said. “It’s my understanding that if they’re going to be solved, most murder investigations are successfully concluded within the first forty-eight hours.”

“If that’s true,” Quinn said, “it’s because in most homicides it’s obvious who is the killer. Quite often it’s the spouse standing over the body with a gun.”

She gave that some thought. “Yes, I can see where that would be true beyond the make-believe world of entertainment.”

“But very often it’s evidence we discover during the first forty-eight hours that turns out to be important.”

“I see. So you still have hope?”

“Absolutely.”

“Our family hasn’t fared too well when it comes to the timely solving of crimes,” Ida Tucker said.

“Tell me about this unsolved crime,” he said.

“During the war—the big war—an English woman shipped something to Willa Kingdom in a large wooden crate.” Ida held her steady gaze on Quinn, making sure he understood. “From England to Ohio, where Willa lived with her husband, Mark. They’d just moved to Ohio. Mark was in the Merchant Marines and was badly wounded when his ship was sunk by a German submarine.”

“That’s too bad,” Quinn said, thinking about how her information dovetailed with Lido’s.

Ida shrugged. “War.” She carefully adjusted her skirt, which had worked to within a few inches of one of her wrinkled knees. “When Willa pried the box open, it contained some bricks, and under the bricks were handwritten letters explaining what had been in the box, and why.”

“Were the letters from the English woman?”

“Yes. Betsy Douglass was her name. The letters related what a British soldier named Henry Tucker had told her. It all made sense, except for the bricks, which obviously replaced what Betsy Douglass had shipped from England.”

Quinn considered asking Ida if what Betsy might have shipped was Bellezza, but he decided to play that card close instead. There was no reason to tell Ida Tucker more than she needed to know. And there was reason to see how much she’d tell him.

“Why did this Betsy Douglass ship something to Willa?”

Ida leveled her gaze at Quinn. “Betsy Douglass was Willa’s sister. Willa was born in England.”

Quinn was interested in where this was all going. At sea on the waves of lies.

“Where are the letters that accompanied the box of bricks?”

Ida shrugged a bony, somehow still elegant shoulder. “They went missing.”

“Stolen, you mean?”

“Possibly. They were available, then they were gone.” She gave a sad grin that was almost a grimace. It made her suddenly look her age. “Part of the unknown original contents of the wooden crate.”

“Willa must have read them.”

“No. She simply glanced at their headings and signature, then replaced them in the box to examine them later. She was going to read them, then something interrupted her. I think she received a phone call. When she went to retrieve them, they were gone.”

“So none of you knows what was in the box?”

“It appears that way.’

You sly old fox. You know what the box contained.

“So who was the phone call from?”

“That I don’t know. People were calling Willa all the time. She volunteered a lot at church.”

Quinn just bet she did.

Ida took a deep breath. “But that’s not what we’re talking about. And I’m here to claim the bodies of my daughters.”

“Andria and Jeanine?”

“Of course.”

“I’m just trying to keep things straight,” Quinn said. “But they aren’t really sisters. I mean blood relatives.”

“Andria and Jeanine, as it happens, had the same biological father. He was a man they were well away from.”

Hmmm.

Quinn’s desk phone jangled like an alarm. He held up a hand, raising a forefinger to signal Ida Tucker that they weren’t finished talking. As he picked up the receiver, Ida settled back in her chair. She was dug in, prepared to accept the worst of whatever Quinn might dish out.

The caller identified himself, before Quinn could get a word out. “Renz.”

“I’m busy right now,” Quinn said.

“Okay, but there’s something you oughta know.”

“I keep running across that,” Quinn said.

“Something new on the DNA findings. Somebody at the lab doing a standard reevaluation of the blood samples noticed it. Two of the killer’s victims have very similar—”

“Sisters,” Quinn said. “Or maybe cousins.”

“Choose one or the other,” Renz said.

“Cousins for now. But I wouldn’t want to make my guess permanent. It’s complicated.”