Excellent! If the killer’s first shot didn’t hit home, he had time to pump another bullet into Quinn before the doomed cop could reach his rifle. He moved to the base of a large tree where he’d be difficult to spot, even after firing at Quinn.

The killer couldn’t help smiling slightly and thinking, Checkmate.

4

Sarasota, 1992

The cabana with the blue-and-white striped sides was off to the east, so it didn’t spoil the view from the house.

Dwayne, if he was careful, could make his way through trimmed shrubbery and around to the back of the cabana. The way the bay curved, he could only be seen from the water, and that didn’t pose much of a problem. He could crouch unseen there and listen to nearby conversation, and whatever sounds filtered through the cabana’s thin wall.

It was almost sunset, and he waited for it to get dark before he went to his spot behind the cabana. Now not even someone out on the bay on a boat, with a telescope or binoculars, was likely to notice him.

His father was in Augusta on business, and Dwayne was supposed to be bent over his homework. Maude and her lover, Bill Phoenix, wouldn’t suspect that Dwayne wasn’t in his room, but behind the cabana’s back wall. Dwayne knew from experience that they would talk to each other inside the cabana, thinking that outside the sound might carry over water. Not to mention that Bill Phoenix had voiced a fear of being observed and eavesdropped on by the neighbors.

Dwayne suspected it wasn’t really the neighbors Phoenix worried about. Not them personally, anyway. But they might gossip, and he was doing things with the wife-to-be of one of the richest, most powerful men in Florida. The kind of man who might hire detectives.

Or worse.

Maude was not only rich, she was sizzling hot. Phoenix was a guy who maintained swimming pools for the rich.

Figure it out.

Dwayne, who knew about his father, was sure he didn’t suspect Maude of seeing another man, especially at their home. Not many men would be so stupid.

But Maude had a way about her.

Dwayne nestled closer to the cabana wall. Even pressed his ear to it.

“I’ve talked him into setting a date,” Maude was saying, her voice easily understandable on the other side of the thin wall. “When we get back to town, we’ll tell people we’re married. Maybe we’ll even throw a big party.”

“Jesus!” Bill Phoenix said. “Next week.”

“It’s gotta be that way. There’s a window of opportunity and we gotta get through it. The old windbag is in a trance that won’t last forever. With his wife dead, he’s gonna make a new will, and his new wife—that would be me—will be the beneficiary of his fortune.”

“What about the kid?”

“The entire fortune.”

“I don’t follow. He’ll still want the kid to have some of it.”

“Being dead, he won’t have a say in it. He’ll trust me to give a fair share to Dwayne. He really thinks I love the little prick. That I’m like his actual mother. Anyway, I’ve got him convinced the kid is mentally deficient, according to his tutor. Just can’t learn. Might never learn how to handle real money. We’ve already made arrangements for a private school in Kentucky to take him. Big surprise for the kid.”

“What about the tutor? She go along with this?”

“She’ll get hers.”

“But won’t she hold it over us?”

“Not when she realizes what we’ve done, and that she’s done it with us. She’ll take her reasonable commission and lose herself.”

“And the kid?”

“Don’t make me laugh.”

“He might make trouble, Maude.”

“Not to worry. I’ll take care of it. I took care of the wife, didn’t I? Cokehead bitch got the biggest and last heroin trip of her life.”

Dwayne knew what she meant. His mother had been murdered. No doubt about it. His body began to shake so hard he feared they might hear him.

Then a calm came over him, like a cool breeze off the sea. He was in a real predicament. But Mrs. Jacoby herself had taught him how he should keep his head and not be overwhelmed by the facts. He should stay calm and think.

Think.

After all, he wasn’t sorry his mother was dead. He didn’t have to pretend otherwise, even to himself, after the things she’d done to him. Especially he didn’t have to pretend to himself. He wasn’t sorry she was dead. That her death wasn’t an accident didn’t make that much difference, did it? Maude was planning on marrying his father and then killing him so Maude could inherit his fortune. Then Maude and Bill Phoenix would be rich and live happily ever after.

That wasn’t all bad either, was it?

It didn’t have to be.

Not if you turned it this way and that in your mind, like Mrs. Jacoby had preached. Dwayne was grateful to Mrs. Jacoby, even if she was going to take money from Maude and Bill Phoenix to help lie to him and put him in a prison-like distant public school.

She thought.

Dwayne scooted back away from the cabana. Careful to keep to the shadows of the shrubbery, he made his way back to the house.

He lay in bed most of the night without sleeping, thinking about what he’d heard.

Next week. Like Bill Phoenix had said, that wasn’t much time. Dwayne was sure that if Maude wanted his father to take her to Las Vegas and marry her, that’s what his father would do.

Then what?

Dwayne refused to be trapped again in the games adults played.

He knew Maude, and knew his father. He didn’t want to go to a private school where life would be miserable. And he knew that when his father and Maude were married, and Maude was sleeping in the bed where Dwayne’s mother had slept, things would eventually become the same as when Dwayne’s real mother was alive.

Then, after a long enough time that it wouldn’t seem too suspicious, Dwayne’s father would die.

That was how it seemed to work.

The family would be together again, at least for a while.

5

New York, the present

When Andria Bell opened the door of her suite in the Fairchild Hotel in New York, she expected maid service or a bellhop. Instead, she found herself face-to-face with the worst thing she could have imagined.

She’d seen the man talking to Grace in the Museum of Modern Art earlier that day, and there’d been something about the way he was looking at Grace, the subtle smile, the lean of his body toward hers, that suggested predator and prey.

And here was the predator at her door.

Still standing in the hotel hall, he looked beyond Andria. She saw a quick movement of his head and darting of his eyes, to make sure they were alone.

His eyes.

The predator again.

Then he showed her a gun, which he drew out from beneath his light jacket that was still spotted with rain from the drizzle outside.

It was a stubby gun of the sort operated with both hands, and it had what Andria had heard referred to as a banana clip. An automatic rifle, she believed. Rat-a-tat-tat. . .

She knew little about guns, but she understood that the carnage could be astounding.

Andria had never had a gun pointed at her. She taught art, not war. Her legs went rubbery as she stared into the black hole at the end of the muzzle. It was hypnotic, the way the gun’s dark bore seemed like an eye gazing back at her with malicious meaning.

She retreated as if in a trance when the man pushed his way in and closed the door softly behind him. He raised a forefinger to his smiling lips in a signal—a warning—for her to remain silent. Then he clicked the gun onto a clasp on his belt so it dangled pointed forward. He smiled with his head cocked to the side, and shrugged while displaying turned up palms, as if to say, See. No problem here. Nothing to be scared of, lady.