Naked Came The Phoenix

Chapter Thirteen

VINCE TOSCANA CAME OUT Of THE steam house for a breath of air that didn't taste of parboiled human being and saw in an instant that if he didn't move right now, his rapidly decreasing pool of suspects was going to scatter to the four winds before sunset. And considering the financial resources of even the poorest among them, those winds might well carry the guilty ones beyond his reach.

Vince raised his voice to bellow, "Hey, Mikey!" The young cop was standing barely ten feet away, but it wasn't for his benefit that Vince had shouted. Every tense face, guest and spa employee alike, was now turned in his direction. Vince could feel the taut vibrations humming off them from twenty yards away. If you touched any of 'em, they'd twang.

"Right here, Vince."

Vince lowered his voice to a more normal level but kept his eyes on the skittish individuals on the other side of yet another line of yellow police tape.

"Mikey, we gotta get some calories into these people. Let's get a dinner together that's got some substance to it. You take charge of that. Talk to the cook-he'll call himself a chef, so mind your manners-and see if he's capable of cooking real food. If he is, have him put together an order and get your brother's market to deliver it. If not, put in a call to your cousin with the Italian restaurant and get him to send over anything on the menu that's got cheese or olive oil. Preferably both."

A wayward draft from the room in back of them prompted both men to take a step farther into the air, and caused Vince to add, "Maybe nothing too meaty. And ask your ma's bakery to bring us half a dozen cakes for dessert. Tall, gooey cakes." The kind Vince's wife would let him eat only about once a year.

"Tea and biscuits," said Mike unexpectedly.

"Biscuits?" Jeez, Vince thought: Southern cooking. "Nah, that chocolate cake with the icing that's six inches tall, or a coupla key lime pies, that kinda thing."

"No, no, I mean like in Agatha Christie, they're always giving people what my sister calls comfort food. Empty calories, you know? Sweet tea and cookies, they make people feel better. 'Biscuits' is British for 'cookies,' " he added helpfully.

"Whatever you say, Mikey. I dunno about comfort; I just don't want them keeling over on me. Get on it, would you? Have 'em bill the department."

As the young man trotted off, filled with the righteous anticipation of shoving a lot of unhealthful food down people who'd paid a small fortune for gussied-up celery sticks, Vince found himself wondering if the kid's police training consisted of anything but murder mysteries.

Agatha Christie. Bah.

Caroline stood alone in the crowd of people watching the young policeman jog away in the direction of the dining room and wondered mildly who would be the first to break. She herself felt like a cello string wound beyond tight: Would a slight weakness in the string be where it snapped, or would the bridge itself give way?

It was lucky for Douglas that he did not touch her. As it was, even his tentative pronunciation of her name made her jump as if she'd come in contact with a live wire. Had he laid a hand on her arm, she probably would have belted him one.

"What!" she bit off.

"Caroline, I-" he began, then stopped.

He looked wretched, so miserable that she nearly leaned forward into him and wrapped her arms around his chest. Why, oh why did her body persist in this nearly pathological gullibility, this insane trust in a man who had done everything short of striking her? And why, if he was such a feeble excuse for a husband, did he persist in looking so forlorn, so lost, so… lovesick?

"Douglas, what is it?" she cried before she could stop herself.

For a moment it looked as if he might crumble; he started to reach for her, and then with a clash of mental and emotional gears that was almost audible, he stepped back, the impulse to affection violently squelched.

"What on earth… Oh. Oh, my God," she said softly as remembrance cascaded down on her. She'd set out to find Douglas the moment Raoul left her room, but had been interrupted by the discovery of Christopher Lund's death, distracted by yet another round of redundant paramedics, another influx of urgent police, the further jarring festoons of yellow tape across the manicured Phoenix landscape. With her husband's involuntary step away from her, it all came back: that absurd yet primally shattering scenario Raoul had confronted her with, a scenario that was even now inhabiting her husband's mind in its full, raw horror, leaving no room for anything but the overpowering need to protect his wife from knowing that she'd been sleeping with her brother. Setting Douglas free from the all-pervading taint of incest would lift the misery from his face, she knew that. But before she could free him, she had to know one thing.

"Doug, did you sleep with that woman?"

She saw the denial in his face before he could stop it. She also became aware of a number of interested listeners. She took Douglas's knit sleeve and led him away to a bench situated to look over the glittering lake. Neither of them noticed the scenery.

Caroline went straight to the heart of it. "Douglas, you are not my brother."

The impact of these words was too great even to register on his face. He simply sat there, gaping at her as if she'd said something in Swahili or Cantonese.

"Doug, I don't know who told you that you were, but Raoul de Vries gave it to me, and I had to laugh in his face. It's true I have a sibling somewhere, but it isn't you."

"Claudia told me. It was Claudia."

"She said it was because of the hand, right?" Caroline reached for her husband's left hand and held it up, lifting her own beside it against the afternoon sky. The length of the fingers was similar, and the separation of the little finger, but nothing else: Her nails, straight thumb, and narrow wrist were from a different genetic heritage than his short nail beds, slim knuckles, and slightly retrograde thumb. "My finger was smashed when I was a kid," she told him, then shivered involuntarily, brushed by the vivid twenty-year-old memory. A furious slam of the cabin door, a soar of pain that didn't stop throbbing until the doctor numbed it days later, and the indelible link it created in her mind between parental anger and great pain. An accident, but Caroline had never whined at her mother again, and she'd often thought the injury laid the foundation for a lifetime of repressed emotion. She shook herself and returned to the present. "We'll have DNA testing if you want, but tell me: Do you really think we could have been brother and sister without knowing it?"

Now his face took on an expression of dawning wonder. "I thought… Oh God, Caroline, I knew I'd never hold you again. That's why I sent you the cello-went looking for it and bought it back to take my place-because I could then feel that if your arms were around it, they were around me, too; that when the body of it rested between your knees…" Douglas seized her hand, put it to his mouth, and began to sob.

Caroline patted his hair absently with her free hand, then said, "Doug? Douglas, sweetheart, I'm sorry, but-you bought back my cello?"

He raised his head but laced his left fingers tightly through hers; their wedding bands came together with a faint tap.

"Yes. For you. It cost me a fortune because the woman loved it so much, so I had to pay even more than I thought I would, but it had to be the real one, to set you back on the road you'd been on before I-"

"How much, Doug? I have a reason for asking."

"Thirty-four thousand. Plus shipping."

"Thirty-four? My mother told me she'd paid twelve!"

"God, no. I did ask her to pretend it came from her. I thought you wouldn't accept it otherwise."

"Thirty-four thousand dollars. And she knew I'd have some idea of what a stay at Phoenix cost so she just called it that and pocketed the difference."

"Your mother-" Douglas caught himself, and changed it to, "Your mother is a very strange woman."

My mother, Caroline thought sadly, is a damned monster. Hilda Finch's entire universe is Hilda Finch. Her husband had not mattered; her own daughter was more often than not just one more inconvenience to be manipulated away. The woman was hopeless.

Still, her mother's iniquities did not affect those of Douglas Blessing. Caroline pushed down the urge for adolescent romance, straightened her back, and retrieved her captive hand.

"Douglas, you still have an awful lot of explaining to do. You can begin with those photographs."

As Vince ducked under the tape to approach his group of captive (for the moment) witnesses and suspects, the congressman and his wife began to move away. Vince kept an eye on them, but they didn't go far, and he turned with satisfaction to the pale and ever-thinner group, the idea that officer Mike LeMat had planted shining away in his mind. If these people wanted Agatha Christie, then old Agatha he'd give them. At least for long enough to keep the lot of 'em from bolting for the exit.

"It's three o'clock now, and I want us all to have a meeting after dinner," he announced. The statement caught their attention, he was pleased to see, although these seriously underfed men and women were probably more interested in the possibility of food than the potential revelations of the meeting. In either case, they wouldn't know what hit them. He could almost taste the pepperoni now. The thought made him smile, as did the next part of his suggestion: "How 'bout we get together in the library."

Only one or two of them looked at him suspiciously, but he pretended not to notice. Instead, he told them he wanted each and every person there to write down every little thing he or she'd done since the afternoon before Claudia de Vries had died. Pens and paper were in the dining room (as one, they twitched in reaction to the word "dining," as predictable as old Professor Pavlov's dogs). He added that anyone who wanted to go to his or her room should take a uniformed along, that dinner'd be early, at six-thirty (another twitch), and thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

Most of them trailed away like a troop of very young school kids, his authority a comforting rock in the pounding surge of fear and confusion. And like school kids, they wouldn't think to object to the completely pointless writing assignment he'd given them. It would keep them busy, all this navel gazing, and who knows-it might actually give him something useful.

Not that Vince would need it. He looked down at the note from the crime scene techs that Mike had brought him on his way to town for junk food and full-sugar soft drinks, and smiled. It was all over but the shouting. And he'd be damned, after the last two days, if he'd let anyone get much shouting in now.

He looked up, startled by the sudden materialization of a great deal of smooth, exquisitely tanned male skin in front of his face. Vince had seen this particular epidermis a number of times now, but he found it no less disconcerting than the first time. The man was just too beautiful to be real.

"Detective, we need to talk," the bodybuilder in the tiny shorts began, but Vince was already looking past him at the two backs he didn't want to disappear on him.

"It'll have to be a little later, Mr. Constanza. I'm kinda busy just now." Vince glanced back to be sure that his uniformed officers were ready, then raised his voice to call, "Er, Mrs. Finch, Dr. de Vries? Could you two come with me for a minute?"

Caroline was just thinking that the bench, though scenic, was hardly the ideal place for a lengthy session of revelations and self-recriminations when she happened to glance over her husband's shoulder at a scene straight out of the evening news. In fact, seeing it enacted on the stage of Phoenix's bucolic landscape made it seem even less real than the televised version: the stereotyped shot of the handcuffed suspect, shoulders hunched against distant camera lenses, a cop's hand steering him by the elbow toward a police cruiser. The bizarre unreality of the scene only grew as she recognized the suspect as Raoul de Vries. And then she saw his companion, also handcuffed, also bent over, also urged forward by uniformed figures. Caroline shot to her feet, cutting dead the abject apologies of the man at her side. Her mother was being arrested.

The minutes that followed later became somewhat confused in Caroline's mind. Douglas had held her back, and Caroline had raged at him, but even as she struggled against his arms and pounded ineffectually at his chest, a part of her had been quite aware that if she truly wanted to go to her mother's rescue, she had only to knee her husband hard and she would be free.

That she had not done so, Caroline reflected later that evening as she pushed around the remaining cake crumbs on her lapis-and-gold dessert plate, indicated both that she had not actually wanted to go to Hilda, and that some part of her had begun to anticipate a future need for Doug's more delicate plumbing. Torn between her mother's version of the truth and her husband's, Caroline's body had known which way her mind, and her heart, had chosen. She had not forced her way to freedom.

Still, there was a heavy load of apprehension and guilt and fury and despair packed into those confusing minutes on the lakeside. Which made it all the odder that, looking back, Caroline's most vivid memory of the entire afternoon was not of the shiny handcuffs riding above her mother's expensively manicured hands; nor of the prisoner's defiant protest at the door to the police car, Hilda irritably shaking off the protective constabulary hand that threatened to mess her coiffure; it was not even the memory of Douglas's strong, satisfying, and-yes-dependable arms encircling her, keeping her from harm.

The image that had stayed with her the rest of the day and through the substantial Italian dinner that followed, an image as crisp and clear as the late afternoon sunlight, was the brief communion of the two people left behind when the arresting officers moved away. The two most unmistakable figures in the whole gathering of strong personalities had stood shoulder to shoulder, waiting until the cars holding Hilda Finch and Raoul de Vries left the compound. And then Caroline, with a blink of astonishment, had watched King David turn and seen Emilio Constanza's arms go around the green-haired rock star, comforting him just as Douglas had been comforting her.

However, not even astonishment could last long, not in the wake of the past few days. Caroline had nestled the side of her face into her husband's shoulder, gazing across the corner of lake at the other pair, feeling nothing but a kind of mindless pleasure at the simple sanity of two humans holding one another.

With that, a third figure had come out of one of the cottages, moving with a quiet, self-controlled dignity that seemed to radiate pain. Lauren Sullivan, her coppery hair blazing as if to deny the soul's aches, had approached the two men. Their arms parted as they gathered her in, and the three of them had stood locked together, oblivious to the world.

Caroline had not seen what broke up the circle, because Douglas had decided the time had come to move on, and when she'd glanced across the water, King David and Lauren had been going slowly toward the cabins, his big hand resting across the nape of the actress's neck. Emilio had remained behind, deep in conversation with Vince Toscana, who had suddenly reared back, seized by some strong emotion resembling outrage. The detective had snatched something that resembled a small book out of Emilio's hand, thrown it to the ground, and stalked away. Constanza had picked the object up, pushed it into a pocket, then followed on Toscana's heels.

"I hate to be prosaic, sweetheart," Douglas had said at that point, "and I know we have to find out what's going on with your mother, but if I don't get something to eat pretty soon I'll starve to-I mean, I'm really hungry."

Pushing away the spotless dessert plate, Caroline now found that she was smiling at the memory: by all means, let us avoid using the word "death" with its air of dark reality. Douglas was a born politician.

"We may have to send your aide to town for a McDonald's," she had told him lightly, adding in saccharine tones, "right before you fire her."

"It's never a good idea to fire somebody who knows too much, darling," Douglas had protested. "Wouldn't it be better if I just found her a job somewhere else?"

"At a higher salary," the politician's wife had suggested.

And in amity at last, looking the very picture of the successful political couple, the Blessings had gone in search of food and information. Food they had found, and information they were about to receive, both of those commodities in greater abundance than they had dared imagine.

The dinner that Mike LeMat's various family members had provided was a smashing hit, a meal that went far to counteract the depredations of the last days-both on the waistlines and in the minds. After Mike's restaurateur cousin, grocer brother, and baker mother had done their parts (the spa's chef having taken to his bed in horror), everyone in the dining room was replete, stunned with the unaccustomed bounty, drunk on carbohydrates and fats (both saturated and un-), tipsy with refined sugars and the first caffeine most of them had had since setting foot on the premises.

And Vince Toscana saw that it was good.

However, Vince reminded himself sourly, Detective Vince Toscana was no longer the chief investigator here. He couldn't think about it without a jolt, the sight of that authoritative ID wallet in the hands of the near-naked man. If he hadn't made the calls to Washington and confirmed it, he'd have slapped the guy in cuffs, too, for impersonating an officer.

Well, he'd have tried to.

Vince had to hand it to the state of Virginia: Even Philly'd never thrown anything like this at him.

Okay, he decided, these jokers had stuffed in about as much food as any Italian mother could hope for. If he waited any longer, they'd fall asleep into their tiramisu. He caught Mike's eye, and they began to encourage the players to move next door. Into the library.

Caroline wondered for an instant who the gorgeous guy in the pricey suit was and then blushed furiously when she realized that the first time she'd come in-no, not in contact exactly, the first time they'd had relations-no! The first time she'd seen the guy, he'd been wearing rather less fabric than the scrap of paisley silk that was currently sticking out of his breast pocket. Adonis, Thong Man, the hunk-of-all-trades with the Italian name and the Oxbridge accent who'd hauled Claudia out of the mud bath, a man (a whole lot of man) she'd never seen wearing more than brief shorts and a briefer tank top, was dressed in a suit that made the custom three-piece that Douglas had changed into look like it came from Penney's. Constanza straightened from applying a match to the kindling in the stone fireplace, and the room could see that, along with several yards of wool and linen, he had donned an unmistakable air of authority. They all forgot instantly that Detective Toscana was there.

"Emilio," Phyllis Talmadge said sharply, "what is going on here?"

"Why don't you take a seat, Ms. Talmadge? We'll explain when you're settled." His voice was reassuringly that of his previous incarnation, and gradually, with curiosity now overlying their exhausted apprehension, the sadly depleted band subsided into the chairs circling the fire. Caroline and Douglas sat near the fireplace; Phyllis Talmadge, a bandage still on the back of her head, sat next to Caroline; Lauren Sullivan, the only one who had picked without interest at her rich food, was joined by King David, his multicolored Medusa locks tamed into a ponytail, the lines on his face carved into gouges by the strain of the last days. Dante the masseur was there, and his colleague Marguerite, with Gustav the weight trainer, Ginger the receptionist, Jean-Claude the dietitian, and a handful of others, including Geoff the assistant pastry chef, surely the most underemployed talent on the premises. Near the door, Vince and Mike stood watch. Emilio waited for their attention to return to him, and then he began.

"Normally, in such a case as this, the police would take your statements and let you go, and you would hear nothing more until you were called upon to testify.

"Because of the glare of publicity already generated by recent events, and because some of the people involved wish to keep what has gone on here as quiet as possible, it has been decided that you should be told everything, in the hopes that you will keep your statements to the press to a minimum. And since Detective Toscana had already set up this rather literary device of the meeting in the library"-here Constanza shot a glance at the back of the room; Vince Toscana's eyebrows went up in what might have been wry apology-"I decided that we may as well make use of it. I had to draw the line at the traditional denouement of the Golden Age mystery story, namely, the unmasking of the villains and their arrest in front of the other suspects. Modern police techniques render that irresponsible, as I'm sure you understand. As for the other, I trust you will forgive the melodramatic overtones."

Here he reached into the inner breast pocket of his suit to draw out the small leather booklike object that Caroline had seen Toscana throw to the ground. He flipped it open and handed it to Douglas on his left.

"You know me as Emilio Constanza. I was hired under that name eight months ago by Claudia de Vries, who thought she was getting an herbalist from Bombay. My name is Jonathan Sassoon." ("I knew he was no paesan," Vince muttered.) "I actually was born in India, into the ancient Jewish community in Goa, although what I know about herbs I got from a book I memorized on the plane coming to take Claudia's job. My expertise," he said, "is drugs."

The leather wallet indeed identified the impressive figure before them as an agent of the United States Drug Enforcement Agency.

"The feds," murmured Douglas as he passed the article of show-and-tell on to Phyllis Talmadge, on Caroline's left. "No wonder Toscana looks pissed."

"You're also going to have to forgive a certain amount of apparently disconnected narrative as I go along," said Adonis the Fed in his plummy accent. "This case has roots that go back quite a way."

("I knew this case stank of ancient history," Vince said sotto voce to Mike. Mike did not respond; he was too awestruck by the man at the front of the room.)

"You have been the unfortunate witnesses to a series of deaths, all of them related in the sense that the deaths during an earthquake are related: They share the same underlying cause, if by different actual instruments. We have here five deaths and one assault, committed by three different individuals. I do not believe any of the other murders would have occurred had it not been for the first.

"The first to die, of course, was Claudia de Vries, and the means of death may be taken as highly symbolic-a patchwork shawl drawn tight, knotted around her neck, representing the tightening knot of her various crimes and deceptions that were pulled in around her."

He caught himself and looked mildly embarrassed. "Pardon the romance," he said. "It must be the surroundings. At any rate, Claudia de Vries was killed because she was a thief, a blackmailer, and a source of illegal drugs, and because there was a struggle for power among her fellow criminals. We will return to that aspect of the case in a minute.

"As I said, that and the other deaths have roots that go back a long time. My own involvement began approximately twelve years ago, when I arrested a very famous rock star for possession of heroin. That's right: King David himself."

The wide smile he gave the wrinkly rocker was eclipsed only by the electric return grin. The singer had, Caroline noted, surprisingly good teeth for a heroin addict.

"Fortunately for David, he had a clever lawyer, a clean record, and a malleable judge. Which would have been just another instance of justice for the rich, except for one thing: David actually wanted to rehabilitate. He'd been very close to someone, another member of the band, who'd recently died of an overdose. I see some of you remember this."

They did, even Caroline, who had been barely in her teens at the time and hadn't much cared for King David's kind of music anyway, but who had read the articles about the band's troubles with avid attention, wondering at the mix of the famous and the kinky.

"I went to see him in rehab and made him an offer: He'd pass on any information that came his way about dealers and suppliers, we'd work it into our cases, keep his name out of it, all that. It's the sort of thing we do sometimes, though generally we'll offer to reduce time. In this case, I was pushing the revenge side. Not that I had much hope-his sentence was so light we had no leverage, but a person can only ask, and besides, I thought that during our interview we had connected. Turns out I was right, though not in quite the way I'd thought." Again an exchange of knowing smiles, until the agent pulled himself together.

"Anyway, to my amazement, no sooner had I mentioned the possibility of his turning informant than he started to roar with laughter, as if I'd made an enormous joke. Turns out the director of the rehab center he was staying in had offered him a line of coke while they were filling in the admit papers. I couldn't believe it-we hadn't even suspected the place.

"The center was run by Claudia and Raoul de Vries, and although they got a lot more subtle over the years, their operation grew. And we grew with them. We knew something was coming together these last few months, and that's when I came in undercover."

(The skimpy turquoise thong he'd been wearing when she first saw him flashed through Caroline's mind. That was some disguise-nobody'd think to look for a cop underneath… She blushed again and told herself to behave.)

"Chris Lund and Howard Fondulac were two of her major distributors, Fondulac in Southern California, Lund all over, wherever Ondine had regular jobs. She, I hasten to say, had nothing to do with it." He shot another glance across the room, but this time, Caroline thought, it was aimed not at King David but at Lauren Sullivan beside him. "Howard was getting erratic and had been diagnosed with the early stages of liver cancer. He was pressing Claudia to give him more of the stuff to distribute, at the same time that he was holding back a heavy percentage of the profits-he badly wanted to underwrite one last blockbuster film and was desperate for the cash. In the end, according to her notes, he said he'd given her all he could and threatened to tell all: If he was going to die, he might as well bring the whole operation down with him. So he had to be removed, whether by Raoul de Vries or by Christopher Lund or by another remains to be seen. I imagine that one of them will take our offer of a deal and give evidence on the other. This investigation, I hardly need say, is going to keep a number of agencies busy for a long time.

"I believe we'll find it was Raoul de Vries, rather than Lund, who killed Fondulac. He'd already attacked Phyllis Talmadge, though not very efficiently. He knew that his wife had a safe filled with blackmailing material, but he couldn't get at it because of the continuous presence of the police. When he heard Ms. Talmadge's declaration that the room contained secrets, he thought her statement was based on clear knowledge rather than some vague psychic intuition, and he panicked. Howard Fondulac's death was similarly opportunistic, making use of the exercise machine, but you can be sure that this time his killer was watching, waiting for just such a chance.

"Christopher Lund's problem was that he'd started using more cocaine than he was selling. His death, although the timing is suspicious, may finally prove to be the accident it appears. The crime scene technicians haven't finished in there, so it's far too soon to say anything about it.

"But now we come to Ondine's death, which is the real reason we've brought you here. The precise details of her death are proving hard to pin down." (An unfortunate turn of phrase, Caroline thought, considering the way the poor girl had died. The inappropriateness seemed to occur to Emilio/Jonathan at the same moment. He went on hastily.) "From the position of the body, it is just possible that she came back in the salon, looked into the next room and saw Karen McElroy lying dead in the pedi-bath, and fainted. She was, after all, so severely malnourished that it wouldn't have taken much of a shock." Caroline thought he seemed determined not to look over at the rock star and the actress when he said this, and she wondered why.

"So Ondine could, possibly, have fallen against the shelf unit and had it come down on top of her. It was massive, but most of the weight was in the top, and as a result the piece as a whole was far from stable. The only problem with that theory is that we found two very clear sets of prints on the side of that freshly polished wood. One set up along the back." Here he gripped his right hand over an invisible object at shoulder height. "And another lower down." In illustration, he pulled with his right arm against the imaginary weight, pushing out with his left. The room winced at the silent crash of a shelving unit, laden with nail polish, onto the fragile bones of a prostrate but still breathing model-waif.

"Now, before I tell you about those prints, we need to look at the other skein in this tangle. For that we need to go back even farther than twelve years.

"I believe most of you were aware some time ago that Claudia de Vries was a blackmailer. It should be obvious by now that she was a lot of things; anything that brought in money, she was willing to try. Some criminals stick to a specific area; others are generalists. Claudia was one of the latter.

"The first criminal act we know of was when she was in college and agreed to help a friend arrange an illegal adoption. For payment, naturally, to ensure that the friend's illegitimate baby went to a good, caring, if none too wealthy family. In fact, she dumped the child with a relative and kept the money."

Caroline realized that she was squeezing Douglas's hand until all their fingers were turning white. She eased off, made herself take a deep breath, and then jumped when another voice spoke up.

"That was me." The speaker, Caroline saw with incredulity, was Lauren Sullivan, beautiful and bruised. "My adult looks have taken me a long way, I know, but as a child I was difficult and funny-looking and incredibly shy. My acting career began young, when I constructed a storybook family, loving and stable and infinitely detailed, and imagined myself into their midst." She wasn't about to go into detail here, serving up her life history for these eager strangers to drink in every nuance. It was none of their business that a year ago, when her therapy reached the point that the imaginary parents really had to be dealt with, she simply killed them off in an equally imaginary car wreck, fiery and tragic. Adoring but dead parents were infinitely more comforting than the parents she'd had, and any crutch, even a twisted one, was better than no support at all. She continued with the abbreviated version. "It is a role I play still-to the extent that when he asked me, I gave Detective Toscana that fantasy version of my history automatically, without thinking about it. In actual fact, although I was taken in as an infant by Claudia's older sister, it didn't last long. I was passed from one family member to the next, then into a series of foster homes. Not until I was thirteen did I arrive in a family that actually wanted to adopt me. The week before the papers were finalized, the father came to my room. I had a baby at fifteen."

The library was so still the air reverberated, even the whispers of the fireplace seemed to pause. Into this hush dropped a name.

"Ondine."

Caroline must have made some sound, some protest, because Lauren looked up and smiled, tears quivering unshed. King David was holding her hand.

"It's a cycle, isn't it? My baby, too, was put up for adoption. Claudia's sister agreed to take me back, more or less permanently, but she couldn't handle a baby as well. Ondine was removed from me when she was two days old, and I never knew what happened to her. All I knew was that my baby was a girl and that she had a birthmark on her face, although the doctor said it would fade when she grew. On her eighteenth birthday we both registered to have our records released, but even then it took us years to find each other, the records were so confused. She was so beautiful." And then she wept.

The DEA agent cleared his throat, to take the room's attention off the weeping woman. Caroline's eyes, however, remained on the actress. Her sister.

"About three years ago, we became aware of another figure on the scene, directing Claudia and Raoul. A silent partner, with authority but working through a lawyer in Atlanta. Christopher Lund came into it around then, too, a clever young man with a growing appetite for money. There were several questionable deaths connected with the spa: two accidental deaths of the possessors of large estates; one due to a heart condition exacerbated by the extreme diet and exercise program assigned here; and the hit-and-run killing of a wealthy man about to divorce his wife (nothing was proved against her because she had an alibi). There were even a couple of late-term miscarriages that might or might not have been induced. Nothing we could pin down, except that the deaths all involved hefty inheritances or life insurance policies for their grateful families." (Such as Leticia Finnerman, Vince thought, of Newton, Massachusetts, killed by a brake failure on her way home. The macabre humor of that collection of falsified records in the conference room closet under the label "Dead Files." Typical of the criminal mind, so sure that no one would catch on.)

"So you get the idea. A lot of greedy and hard-to-prove illegalities, most of which were arranged by a known blackmailer. We're talking major income and influence. So when Ondine threatened to interfere with Chris Lund, that threatened the business's smooth running. The cold, mathematical logic of the psychopath: Lund was necessary, Ondine was a danger to Lund, therefore Ondine had to be removed.

"In truth, the deaths connected to the spa all seem to have been directed by a party other than Claudia and Raoul de Vries, a party concealed behind an Atlanta law firm, whose financial records are being subpoenaed and will, I have no doubt, reveal payments from a number of names close to the dead. And I'm very sorry to have to say this publicly, Mrs. Blessing, but we believe that person to be Hilda Finch. She was the one out to take over the operation as a whole. She was the one on hand to wrest power from the other surviving member of the triumvirate, Raoul de Vries. She seems to have had contact with family members of several of the spa clients who died under dubious circumstances. And certainly the only prints on the shelf unit that killed Ondine were hers, along with those of Karen McElroy, which belonged there."

Douglas tightened the grip on his wife's hand, but Caroline was beyond sorrow. The daughter of a smiling psychopath, she said to herself. That is what I am. Maybe she would feel sorrow later, when the numbness had passed, sorrow and guilt and revulsion against the blood that moved through her veins.

Emilio-hard to think of him as that other name-was going on, but Caroline heard only a part of it. Peddling influence, setting up a distribution network for their cocaine operation, and blackmail, that pool ever widening: business as usual for Claudia, only more so. Then he was saying something about a key.

"-on Ondine's body. Hilda obviously didn't know that Ondine had the thing, or she'd have retrieved it, but the key seems to have passed through several hands before the girl got it. Howard Fondulac's fingerprints were on it, so Ondine may have been given it by him, or maybe she found it when she was trying to get him untangled from the Pilates machine.

"I doubt we'll ever be certain. I do know that Ondine told David she would see him in his cabin tonight. I assume she would have given him the key then, to give to Lauren, whom Ondine did not wish to be seen with too often. Ondine knew that Lauren was looking for the key to a safe and thought this might be it; she had no way of knowing that David had an interest in the contents of that safe as well."

"But did she know?" Caroline interrupted. "Did Ondine know that her mother was…?"

"Lauren told her the first night. They pretended to be strangers whenever there was a chance someone might overhear, but, yes, she knew where she came from."

That was who she'd seen with the model, Caroline realized, on the other side of the moonlit lake. Laughing or sobbing-or, more likely, both. Which also meant that if Lauren Sullivan was Hilda Finch's other, illegitimate daughter, Caroline had spent the first evening here in friendly conversation with her own niece. Those unexpected sparks of sympathy she'd felt for the achingly pretty younger woman were facilitated by blood ties. A spasm of grief took her, and she missed Emilio's next words, until:

"-Finch looks to me a fairly pure example of a sociopathic personality. Without a conscience, her concern for others a learned facade, her only interests self-serving. I haven't had a chance to interview her fully, of course, but I did ask her if she knew she'd killed her granddaughter in Ondine. She did not. There seems to have been a lot that Claudia kept from her silent partner-it was, as I said, more a triumvirate than a partnership. Claudia and Raoul, with the newcomer Hilda Finch anonymous behind the lawyer; all three jostling for power, attempting blackmail to keep the others under control, making temporary alliances against the third, aiming for domination. It is the reason a number of you were brought here, so that Claudia could assemble her victims in a bid for power against the others. Once Hilda Finch revealed herself, warfare was open-with knowledge as the weapon. One of them would feed another information to undermine the third. Hilda, for example, told Raoul about a secret compartment in Mrs. Blessing's cello case; Claudia told Hilda about Raoul's felony record. Raoul may have told Hilda that Claudia had a safe, or Hilda may have figured it out on her own. In either case, Hilda did not know where it was at first, nor did she have the key. In the case of Ondine, it is possible that Claudia herself didn't know the identity of Ondine's mother, since she had not been involved in that adoption procedure. At any rate, Hilda's reaction, when I told her, was chiefly exasperation: She'd been overjoyed to discover that Lauren was hers, not from any maternal urge but because it would be a coup for the spa."

(Vince elbowed his assistant. "I toldja, didn't I? Anyone that didn't care about her own daughter had to be dangerous?" Mike LeMat nodded.)

"Her chief regret for Ondine's death was, I quote, 'Just imagine what I could have done with this place if I'd had both of them.'"

Caroline couldn't even wince. She'd known it was coming, had known since hearing of Hilda's hidden partnership with Claudia that her mother was not just impossible, she was downright evil. Looking back, Hilda must have known that Douglas was being blackmailed, and by what means, yet she had made no move to tell him the truth, to free him from the appalling images in his mind, to free Caroline to be happy in her marriage once again. Caroline studied her hands, feeling every eye in the room on her, the daughter, born to and raised by a creature like that. Only from Douglas did she feel empathy-Douglas and, oddly enough, King David. She straightened her spine and lifted her eyes to meet the tattooed gaze squarely: She did not want this disturbing man's pity.

"The key Ondine found opened one of Claudia's two safes. The one it fit was cleverly hidden inside a storage cupboard in the corner of the conference room Detective Toscana has been using. The other, the reason Claudia de Vries was in the bathhouse at that hour of the night, was in a very clever compartment beneath one of the mud baths. That safe had a combination lock. When we emptied the mud bath, we found the keys to the bathhouse door-you may have seen how heavily locked she kept that building-but not the safe key. That is because Claudia's killer knew there was a safe and recognized the key for what it was. However, either the killer knew as well that the safe was in the conference room and therefore inaccessible until the police cleared out, or else made the mistake of murdering Claudia before finding out where the safe was. Hanging onto the key would have been dangerous-if the police did a complete search of the grounds and found it, they'd know it had something to do with Claudia's death-so the killer gave it to Howard Fondulac. He was a drunk, but he wasn't stupid; he knew that he was being set up to take the fall and in fact told Detective Toscana as much, but he couldn't very well reveal the details without giving away his own illegal activities.

"The only person who fits into this combination of inside knowledge and incomplete details is Hilda Finch. She gave Howard the key, knowing that eventually she could get the location of the safe out of Raoul, but in the end, Raoul did not know his wife had a second safe. The one in the conference room did contain a great deal of moderately secret material, but it was primarily a decoy. The bathhouse safe was where Claudia kept her real treasures-blackmail evidence and correspondence going back more than twenty years: letters, bank statements, blood tests, records of drunk-driving and prostitution arrests for dozens of people. And by the way, the material in both has been seized, but it will remain confidential. You have my word on that, any of you who might be concerned."

Phyllis Talmadge made a small noise and slumped into her chair, causing those around her to speculate what sort of document bearing her name might be inside one of those safes.

"Anybody got a cigarette?" Phyllis asked the room at large. When no one reached for a pack, she sighed gustily. "You know, until three days ago, I hadn't smoked in nearly twenty years. How's that for a health spa?"

(So much for the psychic's testimony that she'd smelled cigarettes before she was conked and thrown in the lake, Vince thought grumpily, leaving his packet firmly in his pocket. She'd been sucking mints to hide not booze but smokes.)

"So," Emilio was finishing up, "you understand why I have told you rather more than I would normally have done, by means of asking you to keep the gossip to a minimum. The press outside does not know of the familial links between several of the famous individuals here, and although the right to privacy is generally regarded in this country as a mild jest, I appeal to you to grant it to those who have already suffered enough. I leave it to your sense of honor. Of course," he added, his voice and eyes going hard as diamonds, "I need hardly add that if I am aware of a leak originating in this room, the DEA will be most attentive to the individual involved, for a long, long time. Thank you for your time, and now I think Detective Toscana will need to take yet another set of statements from a number of you."

Close on to midnight, there was no one else in the swimming pool. When Caroline had first stood with that once again pristine stretch of blue water at her feet she had nearly drawn back: It would be a long time before she was entirely comfortable with solitude, and the locked door to the ominous mud room still bore the police seal. But Douglas offered to stay with her, to float around quietly at the other side of the pool. That compromise reassured her, and the strong, steady laps she had swum in the silky water soothed her further. Soon, very soon, she would have to approach Doug with the offer to free him from marriage to a psychopath's daughter-ironic, really, considering his own efforts in practically the same cause. But not now, not here; it was more than time for a small fraction of the relaxation and ease she had come here to find.

When the three figures at the far end of the echoing, chlorine-scented room caught her eye, she was startled, but not badly so, and although she glanced to the side to make certain that Douglas was there (and he was, standing protectively upright in the hip-deep water), she put her head down and continued her measured strokes to the end, where she surfaced to prop her arms on the rim of the pool.

"We need to talk with you, Caroline." It was, strangely, King David who spoke, not the beautiful DEA agent whom she had decided had to be the rock star's lover. She looked from Emilio to Lauren Sullivan, then dropped back underwater to swim to the side and pull herself out. Retrieving her terry cloth robe from the bench, she belted it on and swept her wet hair back from her face.

"About what?" About how devastating it was to have a mother who murdered and blackmailed and God knew what else without a qualm? About the link she had to this stunning red-haired woman before her, a link neither of them could mention without drawing forth the deep shame of being birthed by Hilda Finch? About how miserable and lost she felt, with only Douglas left to her? And how being faced with the larger-than-life trio of a seven-figure actress, a drop-dead-gorgeous bodybuilder, and a six-foot-four rock singer with black and green hair, tattooed eyes, and more sheer animal magnetism than Mick Jagger (all three of them, moreover, fully dressed, and in clothing so expensive it showed no sign of the long day behind them) made her feel like a low-rent cockroach? The three of them presented a united front, linked together in a bond that Caroline did not fully understand and felt that she personally would never again know. She faced them with her chin up. "You want to talk to me about what?"

The tattooed eyes gave a quick sideways glance to where Douglas stood. Doug Blessing, whose own looks and charisma faded in their presence as a star in daylight. She held out one hand to her husband, her eyes defiantly on those of the rocker, who nodded and waited until Douglas had sloshed from the pool and joined them.

"Let's sit down," the singer suggested. They sat, on two facing benches. His words, though spoken in a low voice, reverberated back from the mosaic tile scenes that lined the room, and as the blue water grew still again, the universe seemed to contract to where the five of them sat.

Caroline could not bear it. She seized the initiative and spoke first. "If you're here to tell me that Lauren Sullivan is my half sister, I already know it. And Lauren," she went on, forcing herself to meet that world-famous gaze, "I promise never to tell a soul that my mother had anything to do with you. I'd probably deny her myself, if I could. Is that all you wanted?"

"No," said the actress, her sultry voice ripe with some intense but unidentifiable emotion. "Dad, do you want to…?"

She was, Caroline saw in disbelief, speaking to King David, who stirred and reached into a pocket.

" 'Dad!' Did you call him-but… you told me you're, what? Forty-four?" Caroline objected, staring incredulously at the rock star. Even for someone as wild as King David, fathering a child at the age of, what? seven or eight? was a bit hard to believe.

He laughed, checked the two photographs he had taken from his pocket, and handed one of them to Caroline. "Detective Toscana found these on Hilda Finch when he arrested her."

Caroline dried her fingers on her robe and took the faded snapshot by its white-bordered corner. It showed a red-haired young man, in profile. She turned it over and read, in a girl's handwriting, "Tad Blake."

"Okay," she said, waiting for the explanation.

"Hold it up," the singer ordered, and when she had done so he got to his feet and turned his head to give her the side of his face.

"Christ!" exclaimed Douglas, who saw it at the same instant: The picture showed the baddest boy of heavy metal music as a clean-cut, all-American college kid, before tattoos, heroin, and decades of late nights in smoke-filled rooms.

The singer looked down at Caroline, the lightning bolts crinkling in amusement. "Yeah, that's me all right. I dropped out a couple months after that was taken, went to San Francisco to become, if you can dig it, a folk singer. Instead of that, I discovered drugs. I woke up five years later, cleaned up my act a little bit, and discovered hard rock. But can you imagine somebody called Tad Blake eating live bats on stage? The name would be fine for a folk singer, I guess, but it just didn't have the right ring for where I wanted to go. So I changed it, got the tattoos to change my looks and my image, traded my gold-rimmed glasses for contact lenses, lied about my age-remember, these were still the days when we didn't really trust anyone over thirty. I wrote 'King's Revenge' in 1972, it went platinum, and I haven't been off the charts since. And now everyone just assumes that I'm in such lousy shape for my age because of all the years of drugs and parties. I don't have to let on about the vegetarianism and health spas."

"Tad Blake?" Caroline said, looking at the red-haired youth in wonder. Douglas nudged her elbow; she looked up to see a second photo being held out to her. She took it and nearly fell backward off the bench: Tad again, this time looking straight at the camera, his arms around a small, trim girl: Hilda Finch.

Caroline gaped at the man across from her, then at Lauren. "Dad," indeed; Lauren's resemblance to the boy in the picture was unmistakable. She covered her mouth to stifle a laugh, a slightly hysterical sound that caused the other four to eye her with concern. "Sorry," she gasped. "I was just thinking what Douglas 's constituency would do if they found out that their congressman's wife was related, even secondhand, to King David."

"They wouldn't know whether to impeach me or ask for your autograph," Douglas replied, sounding rather uneasy at the prospect.

"You'd sure as hell dominate the heavy metal vote," the rock star reassured him, the sheepish grin on his middle-aged features eerily like that on the snapshot. "But hang on, it gets even weirder. You're right saying you're Lauren's half sister, but it's not through Hilda Finch that you're related."

"What? What are you talking about?" Caroline's mind seemed to slip gears a fraction, then spin wildly. Her voice climbed higher. "Of course we're related through Mother, who else is-"

She broke off as King David and Lauren Sullivan, after a quick exchange of glances, rose as one and came to sit on the bench next to her. Without a word, Lauren lifted her right hand into the air and held it out, the palm toward Emilio. On the other side of her, the singer did the same, his thumb brushing her little finger.

"Now you," Lauren told Caroline. "No, the right hand."

Three hands held up to the air, the precise way she'd done that afternoon with Douglas. Only, where that comparison had denied the similarity, these three hands clearly differed only in size and muscular development: long nail bed, strong nails, thumbs without a hint of backward curve, prominent knuckles, an oddly long index finger, and a slightly outward turn to the smallest finger. King David's hand was the biggest, of course, and Caroline's fingers reflected long hours working the bow of her cello, but…

"Ondine's were just the same," Lauren said sadly.

"Would you look at that." It was Douglas, speaking Caroline's wonder.

Now Emilio spoke up, for the first time. "When Hilda got to her thirtieth birthday and had never been pregnant again, she decided she needed a child. I gather by the notes in Claudia's safe that your father was tested and judged not to be the problem. Eventually it was determined to be the result of some long-ago infection, perhaps just after Lauren was born, blocking her tubes. Surgery might have helped, but instead she went looking for Claudia de Vries, thinking that if her old college roommate had been able to get rid of one child, surely she could lay hands on another."

"As it turned out, she was right. Claudia never forgot an old friend, never lost track of someone she'd once used. She was one of the few who knew what had become of Tad Blake. By this time she had a whole staff of snoopers, one of whom found out that King David, in those good old pre-AIDS days of drugs, sex, and rock and roll, wasn't always punctilious in his use of birth control. Your mother was a sound technician on his road gang. You were three months old when she agreed to give you up, and Claudia handed you over to Hilda. Who, so far as I have been able to determine, had no idea where you came from. Claudia may have been saving that bit of information for the future."

King David now reached across Lauren to claim Caroline's hand and to take possession of her attention with that magnetic gaze that she had mistaken for a man's desire, when all along it had been a father's yearning that gazed out at her, just as the mesmerizing touch of his hand had been blood calling to blood. The key that he told her he was searching for, she suddenly knew, was not just a slip of metal, but something more. The beloved lost possession that Claudia had dangled in front of his nose to get him to come here was in fact herself, Caroline. His daughter. "I knew as soon as I laid eyes on you," he was saying. "That's why I couldn't take my eyes off you, couldn't help touching you. You look just like your mother. She was a beautiful, talented, big-hearted woman. Catherine was her name, although she called herself Cat. She died nine years ago, I'm sorry to say, but I have pictures of her for you. She didn't want to give you up, but it would have meant losing what she had worked long and hard for-a rock band on the road isn't exactly the place for a baby. She made the decision that it would be best for you to go to a loving, two-parent, relatively wealthy, and stable home. She couldn't have known… And I should have taken responsibility, but it was the seventies, and we were touring nearly three hundred days a year, and frankly in those days I was just a hyped-up bastard. I'm sorry, I was barely aware of you. I have to admit, you and Lauren aren't the only ones."

Of course, he would say that Caroline's mother had been a paragon, even if he scarcely remembered her. But it was his last statement that snagged her attention: more siblings? A father-this father? And maybe, once she'd gotten used to the idea, a member of the band's road gang wouldn't be such a terrible mother figure. Lord, even an irresponsible, drugged-out groupie of a mother would be better than…

With that thought Caroline shook off her father's grip and turned to lay a tentative finger on the slim wrist of the woman between them. "Lauren? I am so sorry about Ondine."

Emilio answered. "Giving those people in the library the fact that Ondine was the daughter of Lauren Sullivan was Lauren's own idea. Obviously, someone in the group will sell the story to the papers before the ashes in that fireplace are cold. We'd thought of it before, but after Ondine died, we wanted Lauren to keep it quiet. She said no, and she's right. Doing it this way will distract the media, giving them a bone to chew so they don't keep digging and get the rest of the story. If they found out that the four of you are tied together, by blood and marriage, the feeding frenzy would never let up."

Douglas looked ill.

"At least Ondine's death was quick," the actress said, although none of them believed she found much consolation in the fact.

"That manager of hers would have killed her before much longer."

"Chris Lund?" Caroline was startled. "They seemed to get along so well."

Again Emilio's English tones gave the explanation. "Ondine had a huge life insurance policy, with Lund the benefactor. She was starving herself to death. Lund pretended he was against her dieting, pretended that he was on the brink of force-feeding her, but at the same time he was the one who had told her she needed to lose weight, and that was what she believed. Just before she died, they'd had word of a major contract cancellation, the second this year lost to younger models; they could both see the writing on the wall. He decided to, as they say, cash in his chips."

"But I thought you said that Mother-that…" If Hilda wasn't Mother, what was she?

Lauren answered her protest, in a bitter voice. "Hilda pushed over the shelf unit, but Chris Lund put my daughter there, vulnerable."

Emilio clarified. "We think Lund killed Karen McElroy either because she'd noticed the similarity between Ondine's hands and Lauren's when she did their manicures, or because she'd overheard him and Ondine arguing and was calling the police. We found a blood spatter on one of his shoes that I'm pretty sure will turn out to be Karen's. Ondine either saw him, or found the girl shortly afterward. And as I said earlier, fainted."

Again, Douglas said what was foremost on Caroline's mind. "And you don't think Lund's death was a little… convenient?"

"An accident," Emilio said blandly, although a bit too quickly.

Caroline glanced at King David-at her father!-and saw him studying his hands, those oddly elegant, larger versions of her own, as if reading their history in the skin and bone. Then Lauren reached her right hand over and wrapped her fingers through his, before doing the same with her left hand and Caroline's.

A family, joined together, with one daughter's husband and the father's lover looking on. A family, rising phoenixlike from the ashes.

Yes, thought Caroline. Lund's death was an accident.

Much better that way.

But-"Wait a minute," she objected. Everyone tensed, willing her not to say aloud that it could not have been, but Caroline had something else in mind. "There was a polka-dot bikini in Claudia's hand when we dragged her out of the mud bath. If… Hilda… killed Claudia, where did that come from? And you can't tell me that my mother was wearing that thing." She fixed the agent of law and order with a look of accusation and was astonished to see those finely chiseled features turn a furious shade of red, flushing down to the neck of his expensive wool suit, and beyond (just how far beyond was a speculation that crossed the minds of all four witnesses).

Emilio gave a short bark of uncomfortable laughter and with great dignity told them, "It was mine. I'm afraid that, among Claudia de Vries's other sins and wickednesses, she was also guilty of the most blatant form of what I would have to call, er, sexual harassment."

He looked up at their snorts of laughter, none of them stifled with much success, and protested. "Honestly, she wasn't a very nice woman!"