“I mean a guy who got pissed off, maybe made a threat, made you uncomfortable.”

“No. Well…” She shook her head as if shooing away a thought she didn’t want to have.

“Just say it. Maybe it’s nothing, but maybe it isn’t.”

“There’s this guy we run into a lot. Irina dances with him… kind of leads him on… He always wants her to leave with him, but she never does.”

“And Saturday night?”

“He called her a name. We were leaving. Irina laughed at him. He didn’t follow us or anything.”

“What did he call her?”

“He told Irina she should go for a ride with him. She said he meant a ride on him and that she wasn’t interested in riding a pony.”

“And he said what?”

“ ”You fucking Russian cunt,“ pardon my language. Irina just laughed and blew him a kiss.”

“What’s his name?”

“Brad something. I don’t know. He wasn’t interested in me, I wasn’t interested in him.”

“What club was this in?”

She rubbed her hands over her face and shrugged. “Monsoon, maybe… or Deuce. I don’t remember.”

“When you’d had the fun you could have at the clubs…”

“We came back to Wellington and went to Players for a while. It was Mr. Brody’s birthday. There were a lot of people there. I left around one.”

“And Irina?”

“She was still there.”

“With anyone?”

“No one in particular.”

“And no one was paying special attention to her?”

The girl laughed, but her eyes were welling again. “Everyone paid attention to Irina. Every man.”

Something dawned on her then, and she said, “Wait,” and dug into another of the many pockets on her shorts, coming up with her cell phone. “I took some pictures.”

She called the pictures up and scrolled through several, then stopped on one. “This is that guy. Brad.”

The photo was cockeyed and the lighting wasn’t great, but I could make out his face. A good-looking kid with the spoiled expression of a privileged youth.

“Can I send this to my phone?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said, and handed me the phone. “There are a couple more.”

I scrolled through them. Irina dancing. Irina laughing with another girl. “Who’s she?”

“Rebecca something. She’s a tutor for Sebastian Foster’s kid.”

Sebastian Foster had been a hell of a tennis player in his twenties. The Wonder from Down Under-wild blond hair, tan, quick as a cat, with a massive serve-until his shoulder had given out. I had read in Wellington Lifestyles magazine that he wintered in Wellington so his daughter could for the most part skip her education in favor of riding in horse shows.

I had firsthand knowledge of that life. My mother had taken me out of school and brought me to Wellington more than one winter growing up so I could ride and show, the only activity that seemed to keep me out of trouble. I had routinely bribed my tutor to get out of doing work. Math? Why would I ever need to know that?

I clicked to another photo. Partying hearty at Players, a restaurant and club just outside the Palm Beach Polo and Golf gated community. Like most places in Wellington, Players was overrun all winter with horse people. It was the place pretty young grooms and riders liked to go to cut loose. Not surprisingly, many wealthy gentlemen went there with eyes for those pretty young things half their age.

“Who is this?” I asked.

Lisbeth looked at the photo. “You’re kidding, right? That’s Barbaro. Juan Barbaro, the polo player.”

“I don’t follow it,” I admitted.

“He’s a ten-goal player. He’s the best in the world.”

And he was gorgeous. Thick black hair, dark eyes that seemed to stare right out of the photograph with confidence and sexual energy to burn. Adonis should have looked like this guy.

“He rides for us,” Lisbeth said. “For Star Polo.”

I had no doubt that Juan Barbaro did a lot of riding, and not all of it on horses. This guy probably had women tossing their panties onto the polo field.

Beside him in the next photo was Jim Brody with his arm around Irina, who was young enough to be his granddaughter.

And on Irina’s other side was a face I hadn’t seen in years, except in very bad dreams.

Time stopped. My body went numb. I stopped breathing but realized it only when black cobwebs began to encroach on my peripheral vision.

Bennett Walker. Still handsome. Dark hair, blue eyes, tan. Scion to the Walker family that owned half of South Florida.

Bennett Walker. The man I had meant to marry long ago, in a previous life, before everything about and around me changed.

Before I dropped out of college.

Before my father disowned me.

Before I became a cop.

Before I became a cynic.

Before I stopped believing in happily ever after-twenty years ago.

Before Bennett Walker asked me to give him an alibi for the night he raped and beat a woman nearly to death.

Chapter 8

I was living in a condo in the Polo Club off and on that winter season, 1987. Taking a break from my second year at Duke, my father’s alma mater.

I was not a good student-not because I wasn’t capable but because it irritated my father, and that was important to me at the time. I had chosen Duke for that very reason, of course.

All my life I had considered Edward Estes to be a father in name only. Even in my earliest memories he was always off to the side, disconnected, present for the sake of appearance. He probably could have said the same of me and my efforts at being his daughter, but I was a child and he was not.

Children are uncanny little creatures. They read the subtext and see the complex subtleties in people. They adjust their own thinking, their actions and reactions, accordingly. Children are closer to, and more trusting of, their intuition, and none of the influences that block and distract us as adults have had a chance to cloud that clarity of instinct.

Edward Estes was not my biological father. I had been adopted as an infant by him and his wife, Helen Ralston Estes. A private and costly adoption I would be reminded of on-at least-a yearly basis, and always in a moment when it could do the maximum emotional damage.

They had been unable to have children of their own. He had been pissed off at his own lack of ability to produce a proper heir and had, through the amazing contortions of his psyche, managed to corkscrew that anger around to direct it at Helen and at me. At Helen because of her insistence to adopt. At me because I was the living example of his physical shortfall.

Helen, a shallow, spoiled child of privilege, had found her life lacking the fashionable accessory all her friends were having at the time: a baby. So she found a baby broker, made a down payment, got her name on the list, and waited impatiently. The exercise would be repeated in exactly the same way, with exactly the same emotional depth, in the ‘90s when she had to have a money-green Birkin bag from Hermes.

Unlike the classic Birkin bag, my trendiness had come and gone with the fashions in Helen’s life. The instant I discovered rebellion at age two, I was handed off to the nanny and was seldom seen in public until I reached the perfect age of cuteness: five. At five I once again became Helen’s favorite doll, to dress up and take out to mother-daughter functions and other ideal photo-op activities, such as riding lessons.

To my good fortune, I was a natural talent on a horse. Not only was I cute as a button in braids with bows and a velvet-covered helmet, I could stick on a pony like a burr and was, in no time, bringing home blue ribbons.

Everybody loves a winner.

Even my father, as much as he disliked me, very much liked the accolades and attention I brought as a budding equestrian star. My talent on a horse became the bargaining chip that kept me from being shipped off to boarding school in Switzerland when I was fourteen and got caught smoking pot and drinking booze with the gardener’s twenty-year-old son. The fact that my photograph would appear in many a magazine on every Palm Beach resident’s reading list allowed me to blow off half a semester at Duke to show horses in Wellington in the winter of 1987.