"That son of a bitch," she murmurs. "That son of a bitch."

"You still think I'm lying?"

"That he would profit from my pain like that…"

"I doubt he gave it a second thought. Making money was his habit. Everything that passed through his hands had to turn a profit. You should know that better than anyone."

She looks up at last, her eyes empty of everything but desire for the truth. These are the eyes I knew in high school. "Do you really believe my father ordered Del Payton's death?"

"It's not a question of belief. I know."

"You can prove it?"

"If my witnesses reach the courtroom alive."

She folds the paper slowly. "I'm going to do something you may not believe. I'm going to do it because I don't believe my father killed Del Payton. I can't believe that. But if it should turn out that he did, I won't protect him."

"What are you talking about?"

"The papers you requested under discovery. Business records, all that?"

"Yes."

"You got sanitized versions. There's another set of files. One that nobody sees. Not the IRS, not anybody."

My heart jumps in my chest. "You realize that withholding those papers from the court-"

"Is a felony? I'm not telling you this to hear the Boy Scout oath repeated back to me. Before I tell you where those files are, I want a promise from you."

"What?"

"Any evidence of illegal activity that doesn't directly pertain to the death of Del Payton, you'll forget you ever saw."

"Livy-"

"That's nonnegotiable."

"All right. Agreed. Where are these files?"

She bites her bottom lip, still resisting the deeply bred urge to protect her family's secrets. "Ever since I was a little girl, Daddy kept his sensitive papers in a big safe under the floor of his study. He called it his potato bunk, whatever that means. If he's hiding anything from you, it's in there."

"How can I get a look in there? He's home tonight. Isn't he?"

"He's probably upstairs by now. Mother's been flipping in and out for the past few days. He's probably up there feeding her Darvocet and Prozac cocktails."

"What about the off-duty cops he called?"

"They won't look twice at you if I drive you in."

She looks sincere. But it's anger that's driving her now. Her relationship with her father has always been one of extremes, love and hate commingling in proportions that change too fast to be assayed. To see the secret safe in Leo Marston's study, I'll have to go back to Tuscany. And at Tuscany, on this night, Leo could kill me and tell the police anything he wanted. He could even have one of his cops kill me. My only real protection would be the woman standing before me.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" I ask.

She folds the paper in half, then twice again, into a tiny rectangle which she slips between the buttons of her blouse and into her bra. Her eyes shine with utter resolution.

"I've never been more sure of anything in my life."

CHAPTER 38

The grounds of Tuscany are dark. I parked my mother's shot-up Maxima at a gas station a quarter mile up the road from Tuscany's gate, then got into Livy's Fiat for the ride to the estate. As we approached the gate, she took a remote control from her purse, touched a button, and the barred fence slid back into itself. That was twenty seconds ago. We should have seen the lights of the mansion well before now.

"Livy-"

"I know. I've never seen it like this. The floodlights are always on."

"I told you he was scared of Presley."

"Look," she says, pointing at a dim light high in the trees. "They're on the third floor. Mother's room."

I close my hand around the butt of the gun in my waistband. Ike's gun.

A thin beam of light slices through the darkness and comes to rest on the windshield of Livy's car. I start to pull the gun, but then our headlights sweep across a black police uniform.

Livy slows to a stop.

The cop walks around to her window and shines his light onto her chest, sparing her the direct glare of the beam.

"Evening, Miss Marston. Everything okay?"

"Yes. My friend and I are going in for a drink. Have you seen anything suspicious?"

"No, ma'am. Not a thing."

"Why are all the lights off?"

"Your daddy said he didn't want nobody taking potshots through the windows."

"I see."

"Don't you worry. Billy and me are on the job."

"I feel so much better knowing that." She gives him a synthetic smile, then rolls up her window and drives on.

Tuscany materializes suddenly, like a spectral palace in the moonlight, ringed by towering oaks and dark magnolias. Livy pulls around to the back of the mansion and parks in a small garage.

"There's a new entrance here," she says. "To the pantry."

She unlocks the door, then takes my hand and leads me quickly through the enormous house: pantry, kitchen, breakfast room, parlor, living room. The interior is shrouded in darkness, but the sense of space, of high ceilings and broad doorways, communicates itself through the sound of our footsteps and the way the air moves. Livy stops me by putting her hand against my chest, then opens a door, peeks inside, and pulls me through.

Leo's private study looks as though it had been surgically removed from an English manor house, shipped to America, and meticulously reconstructed inside Tuscany. The paneling alone must be worth a hundred thousand dollars. Livy sets her purse on the desk and points to a Bokara rug on the floor before it.

"There."

There's a club chair sitting on the rug. As I start to move it, she takes my arm and looks into my eyes. "Remember your promise."

"Have you known your whole life that your father was a crook?"

She gives me a look of disdain. "My father made a science of walking the line between what's legal and what's not. So have a lot of other businessmen. That's the way you get rich."

"Like those adoptions?" I say softly. "Let's not forget why we're here."

"You're so damned self-righteous. You must have cut a few corners in a decade of practicing law."

"I was a prosecutor, Livy. I stayed on the right side of that line you're talking about."

"You never conveniently misplaced a piece of exculpatory evidence to keep it from the defense?"

"Never."

"I suppose you never cheated on your wife either."

"Sorry. Why don't we look at those files?"

She studies me a moment more, then drops her hand and pulls the club chair off the Bokara. I roll up the rug and prop it against Leo's desk.

Where the rug had lain, discolored floorboards outline a trapdoor three feet square. Livy goes to the desk and brings back a small metal handle with a hook on one end. Kneeling, she slips the hook into an aperture I cannot see and folds back the trapdoor, exposing the steel door of a floor safe.

She bends over the combination lock, thinks for a moment, then spins it left, right, and left again. "He hasn't changed the combination in years," she says, getting to her feet.

I crouch to turn the heavy handle of the safe, but the butt of Ike's gun digs into my stomach. After setting it on the desk beside Livy's purse, I get down on my knees, turn the handle, and pull open the heavy door.

Inside is a hoard of velvet-covered jewelry boxes, stock certificates, cash, gold coins, manila envelopes, and computer disks. Nine square feet of paydirt.

"How much time do we have?" I ask, reaching for the manila envelopes.

"Maybe five minutes. Maybe all night."

"Maybe you should go upstairs and talk to your parents. Then I could be sure-"

"I'm staying here."

The envelopes are thick and marked with handwritten labels. The handwriting is Leo's. After wading through the mountain of discovery material, I recognize it as easily as my own. One label reads: fedtax '94/NOT to be shown at audit. Another: third-party holdings (land). A third reads: