“Aren’t you wearing too many clothes?”
Two days later he tells her that he’s had another terrible argument with his father. He needs to go away, he has something to prove—to his father, and himself. He has taken a six-month assignment in the Middle East as an aid worker.
Don’t leave me, she’d pleaded.
I’ve got to. But I’ll come home to you, my beautiful Slim. I promise.
But he hadn’t come home to her. She’d never heard that glorious music again.
Until tonight. Maggie opened her eyes and listened, rapt, to the final firestorm of complex harmonies. Now the music was much darker—haunting, threatening, ultimately heartbreaking. A treacherous run of blistering notes. Too soon, the last chords of the concerto trembled in the shadowed bedroom.
For a long time she sat in the dark, the enormity of what she’d heard still ringing in her ears. All these years, she’d thought the concerto was lost forever, along with her first love, somewhere in a hot dry desert.
But Zach was alive! Brian’s father was alive.
He had to be.
Maggie let out her breath slowly. Oh God, the soaring power of the music! The brilliant timbre, the dark resonance, those shimmering left-hand tremolos.
He had found a way to finish his concerto after all. And now the music held much more than a boy’s innocent passion. It held a man’s depth of feeling and experience. It held pain. And loss.
What has happened to you, Zach?
Maggie felt suddenly cold and rose to close the bedroom window against the night. Something in the music frightened her. The answer skittered on the edge of her memory for a moment, and then was gone. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that it was important.
She reached again for the “Play” button.
Once more the haunting music ran like water through her head. The concerto was composed by Zach, she was certain, but… She closed her eyes, focusing on the chords. She could still see his sculpted hands, so strong and sensitive, moving across black and ivory keys. His touch. That was it!
She knew his hands. Intimately. Zach’s touch was his personal signature on the keyboard.
Alone in the shadowed bedroom, Maggie was absolutely certain that the piano concerto on this CD was not played by the hands of Zachary Law.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
WASHINGTON, D.C. EVENING, JULY 3
Dane enjoyed killing women.
He liked the way their skin felt, cold and slick with panic, as they struggled. He liked it when he saw that final moment of pure fear in their eyes, that terrible moment when they understood they were going to die. It was sexual. Thrilling.
Sofia Orsini had not been his first female victim. She would not be his last. His eyes sought the traitor. There, standing on the curving staircase.
Dane stood alone beneath the bronze sculpture of John F. Kennedy in the Grand Foyer of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The icy glass of Evian water in his hand was almost empty.
Act II of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly had just ended. The heavy scarlet curtains in the Opera House had lowered as the lovely, childlike Cio-Cio San knelt in her Japanese garden waiting for the return of her American lieutenant.
Now Dane, too, waited. In just a few minutes, the last act would begin.
But first he would enjoy the intermission in the great red-carpeted lobby. It was a spectacle all of its own, whirling before Dane’s eyes and enveloping him with a sensuous, smoky warmth. In the shimmering wall of mirrors, jeweled women and crystal chandeliers reflected endlessly. A far cry from the small, dirty theatres of his youth.
He reached up and touched the diamond in his ear. What would Shakespeare have made of all this? he wondered.
There was a heightened murmuring and purposeful shifting as people watched the senator from New York and his lovely auburn-haired wife walk slowly down the long foyer. Then they disappeared into the swirling vortex of fawning glitterati.
This town is all about power, thought Dane. Proximity to power, gaining power, losing power. And, ironically, those perceived to have power. But the real power, he brooded, is the power over life and death.
I have that power.
He looked down at the heavy gold Rolex circling his wrist. Expensive watches, villas, women. He’d come a long way from that scared, filthy, little water rat who had found a place to hide on the Hamburg docks.
The voices around him suddenly faded, like applause muted by a heavy curtain sliding closed across a stage.
The docks. That was when his double life had begun. Barely fifteen, but tall and strong with hard, burning eyes, it had been easy to lie about his age. The rackets of the docks by day, the sleazy little backwater theatres at night. He took small jobs at first, then the heady graduation to narcotics, smuggled so easily through his theatre and dock connections.
The first murders were almost too easy. And just a natural progression. Suddenly the money was bigger, the jobs more frequent.
The curtain of his thoughts slid open, and once more Dane looked around the glittering foyer. This is my life now, he thought. Thanks to Victor.
Victor Orsini, the man he’d met over the baccarat table in one of the very private upstairs salons at Monte Carlo. Dane had had the money to gamble. But still he hadn’t belonged. And then—there was Victor. Brilliant Victor, with his power and wealth and influence. His art. His music. Buying him a drink, asking questions, listening with those deep, obsidian eyes.
Victor, who taught him how to dress, what to say and when to say it, which wine to order. It was simple, really, for a man whose passion was Shakespeare. Just another role to play.
Then, when he was finally ready, Victor had given him the job in Athens. Another in Central America, testing him and paying more than he’d ever dreamed. Victor, who made it an easy leap to the exclusive society of successful executioners. An easy leap to the two Swiss bank accounts, the women, the Armani suits, the villa in Provence. The secret hilltop refuge in Greece.
Yes, Victor Orsini had changed his life. They’d had a good relationship over the years. But then—everything changed when Sofia Orsini died in Brittany. He had told Victor that her death was accidental, as she fought for the boy. But the trust was gone.
It was time to disappear. Only one more assignment, after this one. Next week, the final job in the US. And then—Greece. Freedom.
He just had to stay safe until then. He would never survive in prison.
Dane swallowed the last inch of ice water, wanting his usual Absolut vodka. But he never drank on a job. Victor had taught him that, too. Always be in control.
Once more his eyes scanned the faces in the crowd, searching for the traitor.
Suddenly, in the shimmering mirrors that lined the foyer walls, he glimpsed a woman whose hair sparked with black fire.
He swung around. The night fell away as pale faces floated beneath the glowing lamps. Like petals on dark water.
The last time he’d seen his mother, it had been in a setting just like this. He had been barely twenty, the guest of a wealthy French racketeer at a glittering party in Paris—and shocked to see his mother for the first time in thirteen years. Since that day he’d come home from school and she was just—gone. Leaving a frightened little seven-year-old boy alone and defenseless with an angry, violent father…
Why didn’t you want me?
That night in Paris, his mother had come swirling like a half-remembered dream into the nightclub, her dark beauty still undimmed. He had stared at her from across the room the way a child might stare at a glorious exotic bird. She’d laughed, swinging the thick black hair he remembered, and he had been drawn inexorably toward her fire.
Standing close, he’d heard the low murmuring voice of his childhood. Her light spicy scent was achingly familiar. He was assaulted with fragmented images—the soft words of a lullaby, a hand caressing his cheek. The shine of her hair in the lamplight.
Her shawl slipped and he caught the silk, re-settling it on her s
houlders. She turned to thank him and, for a moment, her hand had cupped his, jolting him with the memory of her touch. Golden eyes met his with no spark of recognition, and she turned away.
The fine stem of his own glass snapped beneath the pressure of Dane’s fingers as flashing theatre lights drew him back to the Grand Foyer of the Opera House. Dropping the shards into the earth of a heavy planter, he pulled a linen handkerchief from his breast pocket and, as he had done countless times on the stage in the past, wiped bright blood from his fingers.
Dane stared at his reflection in the glittering glass doors that led to the terrace. In the mirror of the rain-streaked window, his eyes met the eyes of the dark-haired woman who had reminded him of his mother.
But she was a stranger.
What was the matter with him tonight? Losing control was inexcusable. He had to focus. Concentrate totally on the target.
Again his eyes scanned the crowd, lingered briefly on the striking brunette, then moved on. There, halfway up the right stairway. The traitor, champagne glass in hand, surrounded by sycophants, returning to the box seats in the first balcony.
Dane smiled as he moved toward the woman who had betrayed Victor Orsini. The traitor who had lured Victor out of hiding, to Paris. The one responsible for the photograph now in Simon Sugarman’s possession.
At the foot of the curving stairs, he stopped for a moment close to the slender brunette who had kindled the memory of his mother.
The lights dimmed, went out. He heard the orchestra’s opening chords. It was time. He turned away from the woman on the stairs.
Inside the theatre, he could hear the distant clanging of anchors, the far-off voices of sailors rising from a painted harbor toward the garden where Cio-Cio San knelt. Butterfly’s night of waiting had passed. For Dane, too, the long night was almost over.
Very slowly, Dane climbed the red-carpeted stairway to the first balcony.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA. EVENING, JULY 3
Sugarman opened his eyes and looked around. Jesus! He’d fallen asleep at the kitchen table again. As usual, his tenth-floor Arlington condo was littered with empty take-out cartons, chipped mugs filled with cold coffee, and the Sunday Times crossword puzzle—completed in ink, thank you very much. Except for 33 Down. How was a kid from the Harlem tenements supposed to know that damned Cymbeline quote?
Restless, he wandered to the bank of windows that looked across the dark Potomac. Sugarman gazed at the lights of Washington and closed his eyes wearily as he thought about the city he called home.
No more deaths, he vowed. But how do I protect them all?
Sometimes, he thought, you just gotta get a break. Two weeks earlier, he’d been approached at the Café Milano bar by an old agency pal, just as he’d told Maggie O’Shea. Always tell as much of the truth as you can.
Pounding music, sexy lights, six deep at the bar. The perfect cover for a very private conversation. “There’s someone you should talk to, someone who might have a lead to Victor Orsini. Be at the fountains outside the National Gallery of Art, nine p.m. tomorrow night.”
He closed his eyes, let himself fall into the memory.
The fountains, lit by floodlights against the black night, are blurred in the rain.
The informer approaches, body swathed in long raincoat, face hidden by a black umbrella. Rain drums steadily on the canvas.
“You’re Sugarman. I can give you information on Victor Orsini.”
“Why’d you come to me?”
“Because I’m scared out of my mind.” The whispered words are hoarse, edged with panic. “I’ve fallen into something big. Now my family has been threatened…”
The fountain waters rise and fall, loud as rain and dazzling behind the shining black umbrella.
“Talk to me. And I’ll take care of your family.”
“Orsini is a collector. His Achilles heel is religious art. And rare music…”
Behind them, the spray from the fountain drifts like mist into the night.
Sugarman shook his head. Funny how things worked. The information had led to a late-night meeting with a Left Bank art gallery owner in Paris named Vanessa Durand. A quietly arranged, very private sale of a rare Fra Angelico Madonna offered to interested collectors. Then the photograph, emailed to his iPhone, with four faces that sent him packing to see an old guy in a penthouse in New York. And finally to a music shop in Boston.
Sugarman loosened his tie. As he drank the last dregs of cold coffee, he stared at his cell phone, willing it to ring. C’mon, Doc.
Across the Potomac, the lights of Washington glimmered in the rain. The informer who’d betrayed Victor Orsini by the light of the fountains was over there at the Kennedy Center tonight, no doubt dressed to the nines, drinking French champagne in the VIP box, surrounded by glorious music.
And here I am, dog-tired, in bad need of a shower and shave, and having another dinner-for-one from a cheap take-out carton. Waiting for a phone call from a beautiful woman who wants nothing to do with me.
What’s wrong with this picture? Sugarman asked himself moodily, turning his back on the bright city lights.
The phone buzzed. He whipped it to his ear, expecting Maggie O’Shea’s voice. But it was a state trooper, calling from Maine. He listened, felt his gut tighten.
“Dead guy, isolated coastline, no ID,” he repeated. “So why are you calling me?” He went still. “What? He was dating one of our agents at Justice? How did he die?”
The answer chilled him. A knife.
He turned to stare out the window at the Kennedy Center, ablaze in lights across the river.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
BOSTON. LATE NIGHT, JULY 3
“I don’t want to tell him.”
It was just after ten o’clock. The old orange cat had jumped up onto the bed and now she looked squarely at Maggie, waiting.
Maggie scratched the torn ears. “What should I do, Gracie? How do I tell Brian that his father might be alive after all these years?”
Gracie turned away, her attention caught by a train whistle somewhere in the night.
“Okay,” muttered Maggie. She reached for the phone.
One ring. Two.
She held her breath, listening to the distant ring of a phone in a weathered Cape Cod colonial perched on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.
Three rings. Four.
She pictured a tall young man, opening the door, dropping some sheet music on a cluttered coffee table, lunging for the receiver.
Five.
“Stewart here.”
Maggie’s heart caught at the sound of her son’s deep, familiar voice. Okay. Just tell him the truth.
“Hello, you!” she said, her voice relieved and full of love.
“Mom? Hey, Almost-Grandma! You caught me on my way to the club.”
She smiled. “Don’t rush the Grandma thing. How is Laura feeling?”
“Big. And ready. We can’t wait to see you. And I can’t wait for you to hear the guys, Mom. We’re doing a lot of Charley Parker and Monk. Ella, of course. Hank Jones, Randy Weston, some kick-butt Basie. I’ll do a Gershwin Prelude, just for you.”
The warmth in her son’s voice enveloped her. Closing her eyes, Maggie could picture Brian sprawled easily on the secondhand sofa, six feet two inches of bones and angles and dark curly hair that was much too long. The jutting nose, that wide crooked grin. The deepest brown eyes. Zach’s eyes.
“One of my favorites,” she whispered.
“I know.” Her son’s voice changed. “But it’s Brahms I play for Laura and the baby every night. I keep thinking about you giving our kid the very first piano lesson. I’ll have to warn him—or her—about your March of the Middle C Twins.”
She laughed. “Don’t you think my grandchild needs to be able to sit up first?” Keep it light. “But, speaking of music—”
“Mom? What’s wrong? You’re not calling to cancel, right?”
She took a deep breath. “Just postpone
, Bones. Only for a week or so—”
“Mom, no! You—”
“Please, just listen to me, sweetheart. I wouldn’t change our plans without a really good reason.”
Silence. Then, “Okay. I’m listening.”
“I just spoke to your Grandfather Cam, and he and I agreed that it’s time you know something.”
She could hear him take a deep breath. “Should I be sitting down?”
“Wouldn’t hurt.” She waited a beat, then said, “Not long ago Cameron received a letter and a CD of music, mailed from Vienna. We think the letter was from your father, Zachary Law.”
Her son made a sharp, shocked sound.
“Yes. The CD holds a piano concerto, a piece that I know Zach composed three decades ago. Oh, Bones, it’s possible that your father is still alive.”
And then, while her son listened, she told him everything she knew.
* * *
Finally, she was silent, her hand damp on the phone. What would he say?
Then her son’s voice, low and loving against her ear. “So the agent who investigated Sofia’s death seems to think you might be able to help find Tommy by tracking down my father. In France.”
She smiled in spite of herself. “That’s the gist of it, yes.”
“It will be hard for you, going to France again so soon after losing Aunt Fee and Johnny.”
Her narrow shoulders shrugged in the darkness. “Maybe just the opposite, a pilgrimage in a way. And I’ll finally be doing something for Fee.”
“Fee was murdered, Mom. I don’t want you in any danger.”
She thought about the shadows in Sugarman’s eyes. “I’ll be attending a music festival, Brian. I’ll be careful. Agent Sugarman has promised that I won’t be alone. And if I can help find my godson, it’s the right thing to do.”
“If you’re sure—
“Very sure. But—” She closed her eyes. “For me, this is not just about Fee and Tommy. It’s about you, Bones, about finding Zach. It hurts your grandfather and me that you never had a chance to know your father. What if I don’t find him? But, God, what if I do?” What if he wants nothing to do with us? “I don’t want you hurt by this.”
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