The Bone House

Chapter One

The girl in the bikini pirouetted on the wet sand.

She was a hundred yards away, and all Mark Bradley could see was the sheen of her bare skin in the moonlight. She danced like a water sprite, with her head thrown back so that her hair swept behind her. She had her arms extended like wings. The dark water of the Gulf was as calm as glass, barely lapping at the beach. The girl splashed and kicked at the surf, sometimes running deeper into the warm water until it rose to her knees.

He could hear her singing to herself. She had a sweet voice, but it wasn't perfectly in tune. He recognized the song, which he could remember playing on his Walkman while jogging through Grant Park in downtown Chicago as a teenager. To the girl on the beach, the song must have been an oldie, something from her mother's generation. He heard her chanting the chorus over and over.

It was Billy Joel's 'We Didn't Start the Fire'.

As he got closer to the girl on the beach, Mark couldn't help but admire her. Her body was mature, and the flimsy strings of the red bikini showed it off, but she still had the gangly gait of an adolescent, all arms and legs. She was more girl than woman, with an innocence about her near-nakedness in public. He was still too far away to see her face, but he wondered if his wife Hilary knew her. He assumed she was one of the girls who had competed in the dance tournament at the resort, and now that the competition was over, she was enjoying a few sleepless moments on the beach before going home.

Mark couldn't sleep either. He dreaded the return to Wisconsin. The vacation in Florida had been an escape for a week, and now he would have to face the reality of his situation at home. Shunned. Jobless. Angry. He and Hilary had avoided the subject for most of the past year, but they couldn't avoid it much longer. Money was tight. They would have to decide: stay or go. He didn't want to give up on their dream, but he had no idea how to put the pieces of their lives back together.

That wasn't how it was supposed to be. They'd left Chicago for rural Door County because they had wanted a quieter life in a place where they could join a community and raise a family. Instead, it had become a nightmare for Mark. Suspicion now followed him everywhere. He was marked with a scarlet letter. P for Predator. All because of Tresa Fischer.

He pounded a fist against his palm. Sometimes his fury overwhelmed him. He didn't blame Tresa; she was just a girl in love. But the others — the teachers, the parents, the police, the school board — they had ignored his denials and picked apart his life, leaving him with his career destroyed. He wanted revenge for the injustice. He wanted to hurt someone. He wasn't a violent man, but sometimes he wondered what he would do if he met the principal of the school in a deserted county park, where no one would see them and where no one would ever know what he'd done.

Mark stopped on the beach. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply until his anger washed away. The waves came and went, and he felt the sand eroding beneath his feet. The peace of the water calmed him, which was why he was here. He smelled the briny, fishy aroma of the Gulf. The mild, damp air was like a tonic compared to the cold weather back home, where it was March and temperatures were still in the thirties.

He could have stayed here forever, but nothing lasted. He knew it was time to go back to the hotel. Hilary was alone, and she'd wonder where he was if she awakened. He'd slipped silently out of bed when he couldn't sleep. He'd shrugged on swimming trunks and a yellow tank top and walked out their patio door, which led directly down the flat stretch of sand past the palm trees to the water. The sea had helped clear his head, but the relief was temporary, as it always was. Things never changed. They only got worse.

Mark heard the voice again. 'We Didn't Start the Fire.'

The teenage girl in the bikini wandered closer to him. She had a wine bottle in her hand, and he watched her drink from it like Gatorade. Watching her swaying motions on the beach, he realized she was drunk. She was only thirty yards away now, her skin bronzed and damp. She tugged at the bottom of her swimsuit and adjusted it without self-consciousness. Her wet hair had fallen across her face, and when she pushed it away, their eyes met. Hers were wild and unfocused.

He knew who she was.

'Oh, son of a bitch,' he murmured under his breath.

It was Glory Fischer. Tresa's sister.

Instinctively, Mark looked up and down the beach. The two of them were alone. It was almost three in the morning. He eyed the tower of the hotel, and in the handful of rooms where he saw lights, he didn't see the silhouette of anyone looking out. Even in the moonlight, it was dark enough that no one could see them here. He hated the idea that his first thought was self-protection, but he felt guilty and exposed being this close to a young girl. Especially this girl.

She took a long time to realize who he was, but then she offered him a teasing smile as she recognized him. 'You,' she said.

'Hello, Glory. Are you OK?'

The girl ignored the question and hummed to herself. 'Did you follow me here?' she asked.

'Follow you? No.'

'I bet you followed me. That's OK.'

'Where'd you get the wine?' he asked.

'You want some?' She looked at the bottle and realized it was empty. She overturned it, and a few red drops sprinkled on to the sand. 'Shit. Sorry.'

'You shouldn't be out here,' he said. 'Let me take you back to the hotel.'

Glory wagged a finger at him, and her torso swayed unsteadily. 'Tresa wouldn't like that, would she? Seeing you and me together. Troy wouldn't like it either. He gets so jealous. If you want to do it with me, we should do it right here. Do you want to do it with me?'

Mark's body tightened with anxiety. He knew he shouldn't be here. He had to get away before this got worse, before anyone saw them together.

'Come on, let's go,' he told Glory. 'I don't want you on the beach alone. It's not safe. You've been drinking.'

'What's the problem? You'll keep me safe, won't you? You're big and strong. No one's going to mess with you.'

He reached for her arm, but she spun out of his grasp. He ran a hand back across his short hair in frustration. 'I'm not going to leave you out here by yourself,' he said.

'So don't leave. Stay. I like being here with you.'

'It's late. You should be in bed.'

Glory grinned and stuck out her tongue at him. 'See, I knew that's what you wanted.'

'You're drunk. I don't want you hurting yourself.'

She hummed again. The same Billy Joel song. 'Tresa saw you on Friday, you know.'

'What?'

'She saw you and Hilary in the auditorium. That's why she choked. She was really upset. She couldn't concentrate knowing you were there.'

'Not winning isn't the end of the world.'

'Yeah. I know.' Glory didn't look distressed by Tresa's failure. Her face had a drunken brightness to it, as if she was drowning her sorrows. 'Hey, I read a poem once that said the world would end in fire.'

'Robert Frost,' he said.

'You know it? Oh, yeah, duh, English teacher.' She looked at him like a broken toy. 'I mean, you used to be. Tresa felt bad about what happened.'

'Let's go, Glory.'

'Tresa never thought they would do anything like that.'

'We should get back to the hotel.' He put his hand out.

Glory took his hand in hers, but then she slid a damp arm around his waist. Her face came up to his neck. She tilted her chin toward him. Her breath smelled of alcohol, and her white teeth were stained darker by the wine. 'Kiss me.'

He reached round to his back to disentangle himself. He looked over his shoulder toward the hotel again and felt an uncomfortable sensation, as if he was being watched from the darkness. Or maybe someone was testing him.

'Stop it.'

'Tresa says your lips are soft,' Glory whispered.

Mark pried her hands away from his body. He took an urgent, awkward step backward in the sand to separate himself. When Glory reached out to hold him, she was too far away, and she stumbled and sank to her knees. Her stringy brown hair fell across her face. Her skin was pale, and he saw disorientation in her eyes.

'Are you OK?' he asked.

Glory didn't say anything.

He squatted in front of her. 'Glory?'

She looked up at him. Tears streaked down her face. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. On her knees, crying, she looked like a pretty, lost girl again. A typical teenager with blemishes on her forehead. A kid pretending to be an adult. He reached to touch her shoulder but pulled his hand back, as if her skin would be on fire.

'What's wrong?' he asked. 'Why are you out here by yourself?'

'I don't want to go home,' she said.

'Why not?'

She shook her head. 'I don't know what to do.'

Mark started to press her for details, but he realized he was letting himself get sucked into this girl's life and problems. That had always been his weakness. He was a fixer.

'I'll take you back to the hotel,' he murmured. He took her elbow and helped her to her feet. Her legs were rubbery, and she grabbed him for balance, clinging to his neck so tightly that her nails dug into his skin. He guided her into the dry sand with an arm around her waist, but she yanked free and skipped unsteadily back into the water. Trails of sand clung to her knees and thighs. She held her arms out to him.

'Let's swim,' she said.

'I don't think so.'

'One quick swim, then we'll go.'

'No.'

'Oh, come on.' She was a coquette again. Her moods changed like clouds passing over the moon. 'I won't bite. Unless you're into that.'

'Get out of the water,' he told her sternly. 'You're drunk. You could hurt yourself.'

'I think you're afraid of me,' she said. 'You want me.'

'Stop playing games, Glory.'

'You think I'm too young, but I'm not.'

'What are you, sixteen?'

'So what? All the parts work.'

Mark didn't feel vulnerable to her, but he remembered what Hilary had told him about teaching teenage girls. You think they're kids. They're not. He wanted this encounter to be over. He wished he had never got out of bed and never taken a walk on the beach. Nothing good could come from being here with Glory.

'It's OK to play with fire,' the girl said.

'I'm leaving.'

Glory scrambled out of the water. She sprinted up to him and stood, dripping, in front of him. Her voice was young now. 'Don't go.'

'We're both going inside.'

'Why don't you want to have sex with me?' she asked. 'Is it Tresa? I won't tell her.'

'Oh, for God's sake, Glory,' he muttered in exasperation.

'I'm not a virgin,' she went on. 'Troy wasn't even the first. You know what the boys call me at school? My nickname? It's Glory Glory Hallelujah.'

'You shouldn't brag about that,' he said, before he could stop himself. He didn't want to lecture her or be drawn into a discussion of her sexuality. He just wanted to turn around and go. Things were getting out of control.

He saw her eyes focused on the palm trees over his shoulder, and he flinched. He turned, expecting to see someone watching the two of them together. He knew it would be the same as last year if they were discovered. Suspicions. Accusations. You're a predator, they would say. Instinctively, he thought of ways to explain his behavior, to defend himself, even when he'd done nothing wrong.

Instead, he saw no one. They were alone. Weren't they?

'I'm leaving, Glory,' he insisted.

'If you go, I'll just tell everybody we had sex anyway,' she said. 'Who do you think they'll believe? If you stay, it can be our secret.'

Glory reached behind her back. He didn't realize what she was doing, but when her hands came forward, they held the strings to her bikini top, which dangled at her hips. She tugged the ties at her neck, undoing the knot, and shrugged her torso, letting the red top peel away and fall to her feet. Her eyes were serious and confident as she cupped her naked breasts.

'No one will ever know,' she whispered.

Chapter Two

'You're quiet this morning,' Hilary Bradley said to her husband.

They sat at an outdoor table by the pool with plates filled from the hotel's breakfast buffet. It was early morning, just after seven o'clock, and the patio cafe was sparsely populated. Both of them were early risers. Hilary sipped her orange juice and watched her husband, whose blank eyes were focused on the wide stretch of beach and the placid GuIf water.

'Anyone in there?' she asked when he didn't answer her.

Mark's head snapped toward her. 'Oh, sorry. I'm not quite awake yet.'

'Drink your coffee.'

He sipped from a ceramic mug, not saying anything more.

'You OK?' she asked.

'Sure. Fine.'

Hilary didn't push him to talk. She tried the jalapeno-laced scrambled eggs, which were spicy and delicious, and she picked up a piece of crispy bacon with her fingers. The buffet meant an extra hour on the treadmill tomorrow, but the trade-off was worth it. Hilary was tall, and she would never be thin. Even when she'd danced in school, she hadn't been a waif; instead, her muscular physique had been an asset in winning competitions. That was a long time ago. Now she was only two years away from forty, and she found herself waging a daily battle to maintain a weight where she could look at herself in the mirror and not wince. Each year the battle got a little harder, but she wasn't about to starve herself.

She studied her husband, who had shown surprising willpower at the buffet this morning. Mark was a rugged man, the kind who turned women's heads. She felt satisfaction when she thought about his toned body, but she also felt mild jealousy and annoyance. He carried his own weight well, but he had the advantage of being three years younger than she was. He was a man, too, and a lifelong athlete. When he gained ten pounds on a vacation, he added half an hour to his weightlifting regimen, and the pounds miraculously vanished on the second day.

Annoying.

Hilary followed Mark's eyes to the beach, where she saw a large cluster of people half a mile away near the water. They weren't dressed like swimmers. She thought they looked like police. 'I wonder what's going on,' she said.

'I don't know.' Mark sounded distracted.

She leaned back in her chair, brushed her long blond hair away from her face, and adjusted her sunglasses. Even early in the morning, it was already warm on the patio. She tried to read her husband's mind and decipher what was bothering him. 'If we have to move, we move,' she said. 'We've done it before.'

'What?' he asked.

'Home. Money. I know you're worried. So am I. But what's the worst that happens? We pack up and go somewhere else.'

Mark dragged his gaze from the sea. He rubbed his chin, which was stubbled; he hadn't shaved yet. He picked up a fork to eat his breakfast and then put it down. 'Who says it'll be that easy? Any high school district in the country looks at a male teacher released after two years, and what do they think? Inappropriate behavior.'

'Not necessarily.'

He set his mug down sharply on the glass tabletop. 'Let's not kid ourselves, Hil.'

'I'm just saying, budgets are tight everywhere. We're coming out of a big recession in a small district. People get let go. It doesn't have to raise red flags.'

Mark shook his head. 'You don't think there's a back channel between principals? You don't think they talk to each other off the record? "What's the deal on Mark Bradley?" "Forget about him, he was banging one of his students." Face it, wherever I go, I'll be blacklisted.'

'You don't know that.'

'The hell I don't.'

She saw bitterness in Mark's face, which had grown and deepened over the past year of joblessness, until it was a constant fixture in his eyes. She couldn't blame him. He'd been treated badly, convicted without a trial or an appeal. He was in an impossible situation, and he was angry about it. The trouble was that his anger didn't change the reality or make it better; it only threw a shadow between the two of them. When they were together, when they were in bed, his anger was always there with them now.

She let the silence linger, and then she changed the subject. 'Did you see the bulletin board in the lobby? Amy Leigh's team from Green Bay did really well. They got first runner-up for small ensembles.'

'Good for her.'

'I wish I could have seen their final performance, but that was the day we drove to Tampa. Amy was one of my favorites in Chicago. Bubbly girl, really sweet.'

'I remember her.'

Hilary had coached Amy Leigh in dance for four years while she taught in the northern Chicago suburb of Highland Park. Amy didn't have natural grace but compensated for it with practice and enthusiasm. They'd become friends. Hilary's last name had been Semper, not Bradley, until Amy's senior year, and Amy had been among the students who were most excited when Hilary had announced that she was getting married.

'I called Amy's room to congratulate her,' Hilary said, 'but the Green Bay bus left early. I missed her.'

'You can post on her wall on Facebook when we get back,' Mark said.

'Yeah.' Hilary yawned and worked the crick out of her neck by stretching her arms. 'I hope I can sleep on the plane. I'm still really tired. You must be, too.'

'Why do you say that?'

'You didn't sleep well, did you? I woke up at one point and you weren't in bed.'

'Oh,' Mark said. 'No, you're right, I couldn't sleep. Sorry, I was obsessing about the job again. I know you think I should just let it go.'

'I never said that. I just don't want it destroying our lives, OK? Look, we'll get home, and you can focus on something else. You can paint.'

'I'm not going to make any money that way.'

'Who knows? That gallery in Ephraim talked about selling your stuff. Anything will help right now.' She frowned when she saw Mark's face. He thought she was chastising him. She tried to make it better, but she only made it worse. 'Or you could do golf lessons this summer. A lot of women are looking for a sexy pro to help them stop shanking. A lot of men, too.'

'We've talked about this.'

'I know, I know. I'm just saying.'

She let the subject drop. On some issues Mark was stubborn, and you couldn't get him to change his mind. Golf was a big one. He'd spent several years in his twenties on the pro circuit, working his way up the ladder and into the money, until a shoulder injury ended his career. As an ex-pro, he could have made a decent living giving lessons or working in the business, but Mark had an all-or-nothing attitude. If he couldn't be competitive as a player, he didn't want to be part of the game. She'd never been able to help him past it.

Still, she couldn't complain. When he gave up golf, Mark had gone in a new direction and taken up teaching. That was how they'd met, when he was a substitute teacher in the Highland Park system. If he'd never been injured, he would have been on the Golf Channel, and she would probably still be single. So maybe it was fate. On the other hand, she knew it made the current situation even worse for Mark, because it meant that a second career had been stripped away from him in circumstances beyond his control.

'So what did you do?' she asked.

'What do you mean?'

'When you couldn't sleep. Where did you go?'

Mark hesitated. 'I took a walk.'

'On the beach?'

'Yes.'

'That must have been great. It was a beautiful night.'

'It was,' he said.

'How long were you gone?'

'I don't know. An hour maybe.'

Hilary pushed her chair back and stood up. 'I'm going to get some more orange juice. You want anything?'

Mark shook his head. He'd picked at his food but left most of it on his plate. It made her feel guilty eating everything she'd taken. If she'd been alone, she probably would have treated herself to another scoop of scrambled eggs, but instead she wandered over to the buffet and poured a second glass of juice over ice.

She noticed the cluster of police on the beach again. The handful of patrons in the cafe watched them curiously. Several guests had stood up and were shielding their eyes to get a better view of the activity near the water. A white-uniformed waiter passed Hilary with a fresh tray of cut fruit, and she smiled at him.

'Do you know what's going on?' she asked.

The waiter shrugged as he positioned the fruit on the buffet. 'Somebody told me they found a body out there.'

'A body? What happened?'

'Don't know. That's all I heard. Somebody died.'

'Do you know who it was?'

'A hotel guest, I think.'

'Here? At this hotel?'

'I guess so.'

He slid the empty tray under his arm and left without answering more questions. Hilary looked around the patio for someone she knew, but she didn't recognize anyone among the morning guests. She was concerned, because she and Mark had traveled to Florida this week specifically to watch the dance competition, which included several of her former students from Chicago. She had good friends among the girls and the coaches, and she hoped they were safe.

Hilary brought her juice back to the table. Mark saw the anxiety in her face.

'What's wrong?' he asked.

'Those are police out on the beach. The waiter says they found a hotel guest dead out there.'

Mark reacted immediately. 'Dead? Who was it?'

'I don't know.' She saw his eyes dart to the water, and she asked, 'Did you see anything last night?'

'What, like a body? Of course not.'

'Well, I wonder if you should talk to someone,' she said.

'And tell them what? I didn't see anything.'

Hilary shrugged. She saw the glass doors open on the other side of the patio, and she knew the woman who emerged from the hotel lobby. It was Jane Chapman, the mother of one of the dancers from Chicago. She waved at Jane, who made a beeline for their table. Her face was distraught.

'Hilary, it's terrible, did you hear?' Jane asked breathlessly. 'I can't believe it.'

'I heard that somebody from the hotel died. Do you know who it was?'

Jane nodded. 'A teenage girl. She was murdered.'

'One of the dancers?'

'I don't think so. I heard she's from your area, though. Door County.'

'Who?' Hilary asked. Instinctively, she felt a wave of nausea and fear.

'A coach told me the dead girl's name was Glory Fischer.'

Hilary's breath left her chest. She felt dizzy. She heard Jane asking if she was OK, but the woman's voice was at the end of a long tunnel, muffled and distant. Hilary tried to speak and couldn't. She knew. Somehow she knew, without looking at Mark, without saying a word, that this event was a tornado that would suck in her and her husband. Her head swiveled slowly so that she could stare at him. She didn't want to see the truth, but their eyes met, and his expression confirmed all her fears. She saw emotions in his face she'd never seen in him before. Panic. Terror. Guilt.

Mark, what did you do? What happened last night?

She hated it that her first thought had nothing to do with trusting him. She hated it that her first thought had nothing to do with protecting him. It didn't matter that she would never believe for a moment that Mark Bradley could ever harm another human being. It didn't matter that she had faith in his willingness to stare at temptation and walk away from it. Her first thought had nothing to do with his innocence.

Instead, she stared at the man she loved, and all she could think was: Not again.

Chapter Three

Detective Cab Bolton didn't notice the Gulf wave riding up the beach until he felt salt water lapping at his two-hundred-dollar Hugo Boss loafers. The surf rose above his ankles like a margarita in a blender and soaked inside his shoes before he had time to leap out of the way. As the wave retreated, he squatted in the sand, removed the loafers, and peeled off his wet socks. He shook his head in exaggerated dismay.

'Every time I buy a new pair of shoes, we get a beach body the next day,' he complained.

Cab rolled up the trouser legs of his navy blue silk suit. With his hare ankles and size 13 feet on display at the bottom of his six-foot- six frame, he resembled a great blue heron. His long neck, spiky blond hair, and the ski-jump slope of his sunburnt nose contributed to the impression of a bird on stilts.

Lala Mosqueda, who was the lead crime scene analyst, didn't look sympathetic. 'It's Florida, Cab. You ever hear of flip-flops?'

'I'd sooner wear Crocs,' he said.

The damage to the leather was done, but he took a handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped the sand from his shoes and blotted the excess water. He hooked the shoes on the fingers of his right hand and let them dangle. With his other hand, he stripped off his amber sunglasses and squinted at the tower of the hotel.

'So what do we have in this place, five hundred rooms?' Cab mused. 'Maybe more? You'd figure somebody had to be up there staring at the beach at three in the morning. Somebody saw something.'

Lala shook her head. 'No way. Too far, too dark.'

Cab pointed a long, crooked finger at the floor-to-ceiling windows, where at least a dozen gawkers followed the activity near the water. 'Look at the binoculars spying on us right now. Beachfront voyeurs are always looking for people humping by the water in the middle of the night.'

'Well, we've got uniforms interviewing guests in the lobby,' Lala told him. 'It's Sunday, and half the hotel is checking out. We're trying to catch people as they leave.'

'Good.' Cab eyed the narrow strip of Gulf Coast sand, which stretched along the water like a ribbon for several miles in both directions. Even in the early morning, there were already bathers sunning themselves up and down the beach. 'If you strangled someone in the surf, what would you do next?' he asked Lala.

'I'd walk along the water and head up the beach where there are a ton of footprints in the sand,' she said.

'Exactly. I hate beach bodies.' He replaced his sunglasses on his face, covering up his sky-blue eyes. 'OK, Mosquito, what do we know so far?'

Cab saw her dark eyes flash with annoyance. He knew she hated it when he used her nickname, but he couldn't resist pushing her buttons. He'd never been a master of social graces; his mouth was always getting him into trouble. That was one of the reasons he'd gone from the FBI to the police to private investigative work and back to the police in half a dozen cities over the past twelve years. His colleagues also resented his born-in-LA style. Unlike most cops working for a pension, he had a bulging trust fund thanks to his Hollywood mother, and he did what he did because he enjoyed it, not because he needed a paycheck. That didn't fly with most cops, and particularly not in Naples, which was a sun-soaked resort town of rich snowbirds and spoiled spring break college students. If you had money, you were supposed to be on the other side of the social divide.

He wasn't fooling Lala with his jokes, though. He was deliberately keeping her at a distance, and she knew it. They'd had a brief affair not long ago that was the equivalent of a supernova: super-charged, blindingly bright, collapsing with a big bang. Their attraction hadn't gone away, but what was left between them was a black hole, with both of them fighting against the pull of gravity.

'OK, Ms Mosqueda, what do we know so far?' he asked her.

She had a very pretty Cuban face, but there was definitely no light escaping from it now. Black hole.

'A jogger found the body before sunrise,' she told him. 'She was face down in the water, topless, with her bikini top wrapped around her neck. He pulled her out of the water and tried mouth-to-mouth, but she'd been dead for a while. Preliminary estimate on time of death is between two and four o'clock. From the ligature marks on the neck and bruising on the backs of the shoulders, it looks like someone held her down and strangled her in the water. The ME isn't sure yet whether asphyxiation resulted from the rope of the bikini top or the water itself.'

'But she didn't just get drunk and do a bellyflop in the surf?' Cab asked.

'No, she definitely had help. The girl had been drinking, though. We found an empty bottle of Yellow Tail near the body, and her teeth and tongue show discoloration from red wine. We won't know how much she had until we get the blood analysis back. Maybe she was drunk, maybe she wasn't.'

'Did she have sex?' Cab asked.

'She was still wearing her bikini bottom,' Lala replied in a monotone, 'and the fabric wasn't ripped or otherwise disturbed. There was no bruising, blood, or external injury consistent with vaginal or anal rape, at least based on a visual inspection.'

Cab wasn't convinced. 'You're talking about a teenage girl who's drinking and topless on the beach. That sure smells like sex was involved.'

'I'm not saying she didn't have sex, but there isn't any evidence yet of sexual assault.'

'Fair enough. I get it. Did you find anything else near the body?'

Lala gestured up and down the beach with frustration. 'We're combing the sand, but you've got a few thousand people along here every day. We'll bag and test what we find, but don't get your hopes up.'

'How about the body itself?' Cab asked.

'We're checking for DNA under her fingernails, but her hands were lying in the water. Even if she fought back, I'm not sure what we're going to find.'

'See, this is why I hate beach bodies,' Cab repeated.

Lala opened her mouth as if she had more to tell him, but he held up a hand to stop her as he let the details soak into his mind. His way of approaching an investigation was to add layers of fact to his brain like coats of paint. He liked to let one coat dry before slapping on the next one. Lala was different. She preferred to blurt out her whole report at once and sort through the puzzle pieces.

Lala was dressed all in black. Black T-shirt, black jeans, black sandals, all of it matching her shoulder-length black hair. She was in her mid-thirties, like Cab, and had spent her entire career with the Naples Police. She was intense about everything that Cab wasn't. Her Cuban family. Her Cuban politics. Her Catholic heritage. Her job. Her temper. She was fire; he was water, always flowing downhill, always running away. Still, she was about the only cop in Florida he considered a friend.

Not that he would ever say so to her face.

'Cab?' Lala asked impatiently.

'Yeah, OK, keep going. Do we know who this girl is?'

'We got lucky about that. Her name's Glory Fischer. Sixteen years old.'

Cab exhaled in dismay. 'She's just a kid.'

'Sixteen's older than you think these days.'

'Yeah, yeah, thirteen is the new eighteen, sixteen's the new twenty-one. How'd we make the ID?'

'Her sister and Glory's boyfriend were looking for her in the hotel grounds when we showed up. The sister said Glory wasn't in their room, and when they heard about the body, they both freaked. The sister confirmed Glory's ID from a photograph. We've got them with a policewoman now. A counselor's on the way.'

'What about a parent?'

Lala shook her head. 'The girls are from rural Wisconsin, an area called Door County. Mom's back home, Dad's deceased. The sister already called the mother and gave her the news. She's flying down here today.'

'Wisconsin,' Cab said. 'Remind me, that's north of Michigan, right?'

'No, the place north of Michigan is called Canada, Cab.'

'Same difference. What were these girls doing here anyway?'

'The hotel is crawling with college dancers,' Lala told him. 'There was some kind of competition this week with student teams from all over the country. The sister — her name is Tresa, T-r-e-s-a — she goes to school at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls. She came down here on a bus with her teammates. Her mother couldn't come, so it sounds like Glory and her boyfriend — his name's Troy Geier — drove down here separately to cheer for Tresa during the program. They were all supposed to be heading back home today.'

'The victim, Glory, she wasn't part of the competition?'

Lala shook her head. 'Nope.'

'Did you get any more info about Glory out of the sister or the boyfriend? Do they have any idea what she was doing on the beach last night?'

'They say no.'

'Do you believe them?' Cab asked.

'If one of them was involved, they put on a good act. Most of the time, you can see through kids if they're lying.'

'I pretty much assume everybody's lying,' Cab said.

That was part of his legacy growing up with a mother who worked as an actress. If someone was moving their lips in LA, they were probably lying. Being a cop had done nothing to change his conviction that people were dishonest at heart. He'd learned that lesson the hard way.

'How old is the sister Tresa?' he added.

'Nineteen. She's a freshman at River Falls.'

'How about the boyfriend? Did you pick up anything about his relationship with Glory?'

'Nothing about Glory,' Lala said. He saw a self-satisfied smirk on her golden face. She knew something. She'd been aching to tell him from the beginning.

'Spill it, Mosquito,' Cab said. 'What did the boyfriend tell you?'

Lala didn't blink at the nickname this time. 'Troy followed me so we could talk in private. He didn't want Tresa to hear what he had to say, because she wouldn't let him talk about it.'

'About what?'

'Apparently there's another couple from the same part of Wisconsin staying at the resort this week. Their names are Mark and Hilary Bradley. I checked, and he's right. They have a room that opens right on to the beach. It's not even two hundred yards from where the murder took place.'

'OK,' Cab said, waiting for more.

'Troy told me that we needed to talk to the husband before he skipped town. He claimed that if there's anyone in the hotel who might have done this to Glory, it's Mark Bradley.'

Cab raised an eyebrow. 'Yeah? Based on what? Does this guy have some kind of connection to Glory?'

'Not to Glory,' Lala told him, 'but to her sister. According to Troy, everyone in Door County knows Mark Bradley. He was a teacher at the high school until he was let go under a cloud last year. The police couldn't bring statutory rape charges, because Tresa wouldn't say a word against him on the record. But the story is, he was having sex with her.'

Chapter Four

Hilary Bradley sat motionless on the sofa in their hotel room as Mark paced in and out of the dusty stream of light through the patio door. They hadn't spoken. She studied the stricken expression on her husband's face. His breathing was fast and loud through his nose; he was scared. It was like a rerun of the previous year, when they'd sat together in their Washington Island home and confronted the rumors about Mark and Tresa.

Not again.

They didn't need to talk to each other to know what was going to happen. Hilary could see it all too clearly. Accusations were about to rain down on Mark like a storm. There would be a knock on the door. Questions. Suspicion. This one would be even worse than the previous year because Mark's name was already linked to teenage girls and sex — and because there was no doubt this time about whether anything bad had really happened. There would be no he-said, she-said this year.

A girl was dead on the beach. Someone killed her.

Mark stopped in the middle of the carpet. He'd closed the glass door to the beach, and the air in the room was cold and sterile. Their eyes met. She saw anger and anxiety fighting in his face. He took two steps in his long stride and knelt in front of her. He took both of her hands and squeezed them hard. 'I need to say something.'

Hilary was calm. 'Go ahead.'

'I didn't do this,' Mark said. 'I never thought I'd have to ask this again, but I need you to have faith in me. You have to believe me.'

'I do.'

He stood up again, relieved, and she hoped he didn't doubt her sincerity or wonder if she was hiding something behind her face. She wasn't lying.

A year ago, her friends had called her naive when she told them that she didn't think that Mark had slept with Tresa Fischer. He denied it; she believed him. They'd both been foolish in letting Tresa get closer to them than their other students, which was a mistake Hilary had always sworn to herself she'd avoid as a teacher. But she and Mark were new to Door County and anxious to fit into small-town life. Tresa was sincere, smart, quiet; she was pretty, but she wasn't wild or sexual like her younger sister Glory. They'd paid attention to her, and Tresa, who didn't get much attention at home, thrived on it.

Hilary had realized quickly that Tresa was developing a schoolgirl crush on her husband. It wasn't the first time. Women young and old were drawn to Mark, but he'd never shown any inclination to cheat. She hadn't seen Tresa's emotions as a threat, because she knew the girl too well and didn't believe Tresa would ever try to act on her feelings. Her affection for Tresa made her forget her first rule of teenagers, which was that they weren't girls growing up to be women; they were women in girl's clothes. She also never expected that Tresa's fantasies alone could get her husband into trouble.

Then Tresa's mother Delia found her daughter's diary.

When Tresa wasn't dancing, she was writing. Mark was her English and art teacher. He'd encouraged her to write short fiction, and he and Hilary had both read several of her stories, in which she'd created a teenage detective who was a lot like herself. What neither of them realized was that Tresa had been writing other stories too. On her computer, she'd invented an imaginary diary in which she related the details of her passionate sexual affair with her teacher. It was erotic and explicit. She described their trysts, how he touched her, how her body responded, the things he told her, the things she told him.

It was Tresa's sexual awakening on the pages of her diary, and it was convincing enough to be real. When Delia Fischer found it on Tresa's computer, she leaped to the obvious conclusion: Mark Bradley was having sex with her seventeen-year-old daughter.

Delia confronted Tresa, but the girl's evasive denial persuaded her mother that Tresa was covering up the truth of the affair. She didn't confront Mark about their relationship; instead, she went directly to the principal, the school board, the police, and the newspapers. Faced with allegations of criminal sexual misconduct, Mark's own denials meant nothing. No one believed him. The intimate detail in the diary spoke for itself. The only thing that saved him from prosecution and jail was Tresa's stubborn insistence that the diary was a fantasy, that there had never been any sexual relationship between herself and Mark. Without her testimony, there was no case to bring to court.

Even so, Tresa's and Mark's denials didn't change many minds in Door County about what had really happened between them. When Tresa talked about Mark, everyone who listened to her could tell that she was in love with him. Her face glowed when she talked about him. To her mother, and to the school authorities, that meant she was protecting him.

Mark escaped without criminal charges, but the principal, teachers, and parents of Fish Creek High School weren't about to leave him in front of a classroom. As a second-year teacher, without tenure, he had essentially no rights under the union contract. At the end of the year, he got what he knew was coming. The ax fell. The nominal excuse was budget cuts, but everyone on the peninsula knew the real reason. They all knew what kind of man Mark Bradley was, and no one was going to let him take advantage of another teenage girl.

In the wake of Mark's dismissal, Hilary had wanted to quit, too, hut that would have left them with no income at all. She also didn't want to give anyone at the school the satisfaction of seeing them turn tail and run, as if somehow that would justify the hostility towards them, like an admission of guilt. She stayed. But since that time, it had been a long year of being shunned. She was nearing the end of her third year in the district, and she knew her own tenure decision would come down soon. Even if they granted her tenure, she and Mark were struggling with the question of whether they wanted to leave. He had no job prospects. She was tired of living under constant suspicion.

What kept them where they were was the fact that they loved their home on Washington Island. They loved Door County. They'd moved from Chicago to the peninsula because it was exactly where they wanted to live. She just didn't know if they could stay in a place where they would never be welcome.

Then there were the doubts. The questions. They followed her everywhere. Even the handful of friends who'd remained on her side sometimes lapsed into awkward silence, as if to say: are you sure?

Are you sure it was just a fantasy? Did you read the diary? It was so detailed, so precise, so explicit about their sexual encounters. What if it really happened?

That was a question Hilary refused to entertain. She never even allowed it to enter her mind. She knew her husband. If he said there was no affair, then there was no affair. But she also knew that Mark was afraid that in the end she'd begin to believe the lies. They would both be consumed by the cloud of judgement.

That was why she'd told him how she felt on the first day and never again. If you have to say it more than once, you don't mean it.

'I trust you.'

'Tell me what happened,' Hilary said.

Mark shook his head. 'Hil, I don't know. I wish I did.'

'Start at the beginning. Did you see Glory on the beach?'

He nodded. 'Yes.'

'Did you talk to her?'

'I did, but it was just for a couple of minutes.'

'Why didn't you tell me at breakfast?' she asked, keeping her tone even. She didn't want him to hear an accusation in her voice.

Mark hesitated. 'I should have, but I wasn't ready to drag up everything for you again. Or for me. I didn't think it mattered, because nothing happened. I saw. her, and then I walked away. As far as I knew, that was the end of the story. I have no idea who killed her.'

'What went on between the two of you?'

Mark sat down next to her on the sofa and stared at the carpet. 'Glory was drunk. I didn't think it was safe for her to be out there like that, so I tried to persuade her to come back to the hotel with me. She wouldn't go.'

Hilary saw the tension in how her husband was holding himself. His body was taut, like a coiled spring. There was something else that he was reluctant to tell her, and she made a guess about what it was. 'Glory came on to you, didn't she?'

Mark exhaled in a loud hiss. 'Ah, shit.'

'Tell me.'

'Yes, she kept asking me to have sex with her. I said no.'

'I get it,' Hilary said. 'Look, we both know Glory is the wild one compared to Tresa. I'm sure she liked the idea of trying to seduce the man her sister was in love with.'

'Nothing happened,' he insisted.

'You already said that.'

'Most of it was just talk, but the one thing she did — she took her bikini top off.'

Hilary closed her eyes. 'What did you do?'

'Nothing. That was it. I gave up trying to get her to go back to the hotel with me. I left.' He added, 'Things were getting out of control, Hil. I just needed to get away.'

'Don't blame yourself,' she told him.

'I do. I should have told someone she was out there, but she was threatening to say we had sex. She said no one would believe me, and she was right. I couldn't take the risk, not after last year. I couldn't put myself in the middle of it. Or you.'

We're in the middle of it anyway, Hilary thought, but she didn't need to say it out loud. Mark knew the score.

'They're going to come after me,' he said. 'They know I'm in the hotel. The police are going to paint a bullseye on my chest.'

'You're probably right,' she acknowledged, 'but let's not panic, OK? Did anyone see you leaving the room? Did anyone see you on the beach or see you when you came back?'

She watched him mentally retrace his footsteps. 'I don't know. There may have been a hotel employee on the patio when I left our room, _i but that's a couple hundred yards away. I'm not sure whether he saw me or would recognize me.'

'Did you see anyone with Glory on the beach?' she asked. 'Someone killed her. Whoever it was may have been watching the two of you.'

Mark shook his head. 'I didn't see anyone.'

She heard hesitation in his voice. 'But?'

'I don't know. I felt like we were being watched. I felt like Glory saw someone, but I didn't see anyone there.'

'Did she talk about anyone else?'

'Just Tresa,' he said. 'And her boyfriend. Troy Geier.'

'What did she say?'

'She talked about Troy being jealous. And she said — well, she said

Tresa saw the two of us during the competition, and she got rattled. That was why she didn't do well.'

Hilary nodded. She'd actually felt guilty being in the audience during Tresa's performance. Despite everything that had happened, she still liked the girl, and she hated to see her do poorly.

Mark leaned back into the sofa and stared at the ceiling. The room was gloomy and cold. 'So what do I do?'

'Right now, nothing,' Hilary said.

'I should tell the police what I know,' Mark insisted. He paused. 'Or do you think I should shut up? I mean, if no one saw me…'

He let the thought drift away, but she knew what he was thinking. If no one saw him on the beach, should he really put his head into the lion's mouth by admitting he was out there with Glory?

'We need to talk to a lawyer,' she said. 'Right now. Today. Until we do, I think you shouldn't say anything. We don't lie, but we don't volunteer. OK?'

Mark nodded. 'OK.'

'We'll get through this,' she said.

He frowned and said what she was thinking. 'It's going to be just like last year, Hil, you know that. Everyone's going to think I'm guilty.'

'You're not.'

'I'm not sure how much more of this we can take.'

'I know.'

Mark leaned over to embrace her, but before he could, their heads snapped around. Someone rapped sharply on the door of the hotel room.

Without looking through the peephole, Hilary already knew. It was beginning.

Chapter Five

Cab Bolton had to knock twice before the attractive blonde woman answered the hotel door. When she did, he made a show of checking his notes. 'Mrs Bradley, is that right? Hilary Bradley?'

She smiled politely at him without saying yes or no. 'May I help you?'

'My name is Cab Bolton. I'm a detective with the Criminal Investigations Division of the Naples Police Bureau.' He flipped open the leather folder for his badge and handed it to her to review, which she did.

'What is this about?' she asked.

'You may not have heard, but there was a serious crime committed on the beach outside the hotel overnight. A teenage girl was murdered.'

He looked for surprise in her face and didn't see any. She knew exactly why he was there. You could always see intelligence in the eyes, like a window on to the machinery of the mind. Hilary Bradley was a smart woman.

'That's awful,' she replied, 'but I'm not sure how I can help you.'

Cab pointed one of his absurdly long fingers over her shoulder at the glass doors leading to the beach. 'Your room looks out on the area where the crime took place.'

'I see. Well, come in. I don't have much time, though, and I don't believe I can help you.'

Cab ducked his head as he went through the doorway, which was what he had to do with most doorways. Behind him, Hilary Bradley let the heavy door swing shut. As he walked into the center of the room, he was conscious of the closed bathroom door and the noise of the shower. He noted two open suitcases pushed against the wall, half-filled with clothes. Laid messily on top of one suitcase was a bright yellow man's tank top with a logo that read DC. He continued past the unmade king-sized bed to the far end of the room, where he had a view through the patio doors out on to the Gulf. The beach was sheltered by a web of palm trees with drooping fronds. He saw the crime scene team at work near the water. He recognized Lala's jet-black hair.

'Beautiful view,' he commented.

Behind him, Hilary said nothing. He slid open the door and stepped on to the square stone patio, which was dusty with sand and featured two lounge chairs and a metal table. From the patio, you could walk down two steps to a walkway that led to the beach. He eyed the hotel rooms on either side of him, which all had similar waterfront access. It would be easy to come and go undetected in the middle of the night.

When he went back inside the hotel room, he noticed that both suitcases were now closed. Hilary Bradley waited with her arms folded over her chest. She made a point of not sitting down and not suggesting that he sit down. She wasn't interested in prolonging his visit.

'The guests in this wing are all potential witnesses,' Cab told her. 'We're interviewing everyone.'

'I'm afraid I didn't see anything.'

'Nothing at all?'

'No, I didn't look out overnight.'

'Did you hear anything?'

'I was asleep.'

'Did you get up at all during the night? Did you go to the bathroom?'

'No, I didn't.'

Cab nodded and let the polite dance play out between them. He wanted to put her at ease and not imply that there was anything special about his visit. She and her husband were two of many guests looking out on the beach, not suspects with a connection to the victim. Even so, he had little doubt that she'd already seen through him and was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

He studied the woman in front of him. Hilary Bradley was smart, and she was pretty, too, in a mature, self-confident way. He figured she was a few years older than he was, maybe forty, or maybe knocking on the door. Her face was rounded, with blue eyes and thin black glasses, and dangly earrings that looked like red sour balls. She wore a simple burgundy top, tan slacks that emphasized her long legs, and sandals. Despite her shoulder-length blond hair, she wasn't a classic bombshell, and he didn't imagine she ever had been one, even when she was younger. Nonetheless, she had the sexiness of a woman who knew she was two steps ahead of you in just about everything.

She looked up at Cab. Based on his height, almost everyone did. He could feel her taking his measure, even as he did the same to her. Most people underestimated him. They thought he was a spoiled beach bum; he didn't look like a man who'd graduated from UCLA in three years. They saw the pomade in his hair, the exfoliated complexion, the earring, the suit, all of it on top of a lean body that made the ceilings look low, and they wrote him off as a shallow metrosexual. He didn't care. He also didn't think Hilary Bradley was the kind of woman who would make that mistake about him. Her face was a mask as she stared at him, revealing nothing, but she had the look of someone who didn't misjudge an enemy.

Cab glanced at the hotel roster in his hand. 'You're not here alone, are you, Mrs Bradley? Your husband is with you?'

Her voice was cool. 'That's right.'

'His name is Mark?'

'Yes.'

'Is that him I hear in the shower?'

'Of course.'

'I'd like to talk to him, too,' Cab told her.

'I doubt he saw anything either.'

'How do you know? You said you were sleeping.'

Hilary got a little frown on her face, as if she was annoyed at being outfoxed by his question, if my husband saw anything overnight, he would have told me.'

'I still need to speak to him myself.'

'We'll try to find you before we leave, Detective,' she said, with a glance at the door to the room. Her meaning was clear: she wanted the interview to be over.

Cab stroked the point of his protruding chin and stayed where he was. 'Do you mind if I ask what you two are doing in Naples?'

'We're on vacation. I'm a high school teacher, and it's spring break. We had some hotel points on our credit card, so we used them to get a free week here.'

'Nice. How did you happen to choose this hotel?'

He watched her think through her response, as if she was trying to understand his motives in asking. Or maybe she was trying to assess how little she could say without lying. 'In addition to my academic teaching, I've been a dance coach for many years,' she explained finally. 'Some of my former students were performing in a college competition at the hotel this week.'

'So when you're not coaching dance, what do you teach?'

'Math.'

'Math was never my subject,' Cab said, which was a lie. He'd aced every class in school. Except geography. His brain didn't process directions. He needed a map to find his own bathroom.

'Where do you teach?' he continued.

'It's a high school in Door County, Wisconsin.'

'Where exactly is that?' he asked.

'If you look at a map of Wisconsin, Door County is like the state's pinky finger. The peninsula juts out into the water between Green Bay and Lake Michigan.'

'Sounds like a pretty spot.' 'It is.'

'Do you know a family named Fischer living in that area?'

Hilary's blue eyes turned cold. Cab figured that Lake Michigan was probably cold, but it would have felt as balmy as the Gulf compared to this woman's eyes.

'Do you think I'm stupid, Detective?'

'I'm sorry?'

'I know you're not here because we happen to have a room that overlooks the beach. I don't imagine the lead detective on a murder investigation does the grunt work of interviewing hundreds of potential witnesses.'

Cab smiled. 'There's a lot more grunt work than you might imagine.'

'Someone already told me that the dead girl is Glory Fischer, and someone obviously told you about me and my husband.'

'Yes, your husband's name did come up.'

'Mark had nothing to do with this.'

'Maybe not, but you can understand my concern, given his relationship with the Fischers. Particularly the dead girl's sister.'

'There was no relationship,' Hilary insisted. 'The accusations against him were false.'

'I don't really care,' Cab told her. it raises suspicions about him cither way.'

'My husband didn't kill Glory Fischer.'

'Except we've already established that you were sleeping, Mrs Bradley, so you really don't know what he was doing.'

'I know Mark.'

'Nobody knows anybody,' Cab said.

'Maybe you don't, but I do. I'm not going to see my husband subjected to another witch-hunt, Detective.'

'I don't do witch-hunts. I don't believe what anyone tells me, good or bad, until I can prove it one way or another. So right now, what I'd really like is for your husband to stop hiding behind the bathroom door pretending he's in the shower, and instead have him come out and talk to me.'

'I'll let him know you stopped by,' Hilary said.

'If your husband has nothing to hide, let him answer a few questions.'

'You've already lied about your reasons for coming here, Detective,' she snapped. 'So spare me the "nothing to hide" speech. Mark and I don't trust people any more than you do. We've learned that we can only trust each other.'

'I've seen a lot of wives who think that,' Cab told her. 'Most of them wind up disappointed.'

'Do I look like a naive twenty-five year old to you?'

'No, you don't,' he said.

'Then don't treat me like one.'

Cab dug in his pocket. 'Your husband is going to have to answer questions sooner or later. Here's my card. Have him call me. Don't bother leaving town today, because you'll just have to fly back here again.'

'Are you finished?'

'No, if your husband won't answer questions, then I'll ask you. Did you know Glory Fischer and her sister were here at this hotel?'

'I've said all I plan to say for now,' Hilary told him.

'You're painting a target on your husband's back. You're both acting guilty.'

'You've already said you won't believe me, so why should I say anything at all?'

Before he could answer, Cab heard his phone ringing in the inner pocket of his suit coat. It was Lala on the other end of the line. He listened to her, and he knew that the Cuban cop's voice was loud enough to be heard throughout the room. He didn't care. When he hung up, he noticed the changed expression in Hilary Bradley's eyes. She'd followed the thread of his conversation, and she was uncomfortable now. And worried.

'I don't think you were sleeping, Mrs Bradley,' he told her. 'I think you woke up, and your husband was gone.'

'Goodbye, Detective.'

'That was one of my investigators on the phone. You heard what she said. We have a witness. A hotel employee who saw Glory Fischer going out to the beach. The question is, what else did he see?'

Hilary said nothing.

Cab rapped his foot against one of the suitcases on the floor, which had been open when he first arrived. 'I saw the yellow tank top. Is that what your husband was wearing? That's hard to miss, even at night.'

She folded her arms again and was quiet. Her face grew flushed.

Cab walked past her toward the hotel room door. As he passed the closed door to the bathroom, he pounded on it loudly. 'Don't think you can hide behind your wife forever, Mr Bradley. The sooner you talk to me, the easier this will be.'

When there was no answer, he left the room.

Mark waited until he heard the hotel room door slam shut. He emerged from the bathroom, fully dressed, and found his wife sitting on the end of the bed. Her face was tired and stressed. He'd seen that look for weeks last year, as they'd both faced his accusers at the school.

'You heard?' she asked.

Mark nodded. His frustration bubbled over, and he felt like punching the wall. 'He's right. I should have come out and talked to him. I don't like to hide, Hil. That's not me.'

She shook her head. 'He was just pushing your buttons. He was trying to goad us into saying something stupid. Look, I'll call my father and get the name of a defense attorney here in Naples. There are probably Chicago snowbirds all over the place down here. We'll talk to him and then decide what to do next.'

'Guilty people hire lawyers.'

'No, smart people do,' she told him. 'This is about protecting ourselves.'

Mark glanced at the suitcases on the floor. 'We can't leave.'

'I'll call the desk and see if we can stay another night.'

'Does he really have a witness? Or was that just a mind game?'

'I don't know. I heard the person on the phone say that someone at the hotel saw Glory, but they could have staged the call.' if someone saw me with her…' Mark's voice trailed off. if someone saw you with her, maybe they saw you leave, too. Maybe they saw who really did this.'

Chapter Six

Lala Mosqueda had added black sunglasses to her all-black outfit as the sun got higher over the resort. Her skin had a glistening sheen of sweat. It was Florida, and there was nothing you could do to escape the humidity. Cab had assumed he would get used to it over time, but in two years, he never had. By the time he was done shaving every morning, his skin was already damp. Every surface he touched felt moist and swollen. When he left his high-rise, beachfront condo, his clothes stuck to his body, and he felt the thick air draining his energy. The only creatures that thrived in the damp climate were the cockroaches and spiders, which grew like mutants.

Lala leaned against the trunk of a palm tree near a wide, tiled walkway that led toward the water. The sky overhead was postcard blue. On the hotel terrace, Cab saw a goateed hotel employee with greased black hair sitting alone at a patio table, nervously pushing around the floral centerpiece and swigging water from a plastic Aquafina bottle. The man shifted and crossed his legs uncomfortably in the deckchair. White cuffs jutted out from the sleeves of his red hotel jacket, and he wore black slacks. He was in his early twenties.

Cab met Lala, who was texting on her phone. 'That our witness?' he asked.

'Yeah, his name's Ronnie Trask. He's a bartender at the pool bar.'

'He looks ready to pee his pants. Is he feeling guilty about something?'

Lala holstered her phone and pushed up her sunglasses, which were slipping on her sweaty face. 'The other employees tell me he's a smooth operator with girls who like to party too much. The younger the better. But if he was involved in what happened to Glory, I think he would have kept his mouth shut rather than stick himself in the middle of our investigation.'

'Have we found anyone else who saw anything?'

'Not yet.'

'What about cameras? Don't they have any cameras out here?'

'Not too many spring breakers want hotels with eyes in the sky, you know? What happens on the beach stays on the beach. The only place they've got a camera is the lobby. We're looking at the tape.' She added, 'What about Mark Bradley? You get anything from him?

Cab tugged the buttons of his dress shirt away from his sticky chest and adjusted the gold chain on his neck. He smelled chlorine from the nearby hotel pool. 'He ducked me. I talked to the wife.'

'And?'

'And they're not crazy about answering questions. Let's dig up whatever we can about this incident in Door County last year. Call the sheriff up there. I want to know more about it before I talk to the sister and the boyfriend, OK?'

'Sure,' Lala said. Cab turned away toward Ronnie Trask, but Lala called after him. 'Hey, Cab?'

'What?

'I saw your mother in a movie last night.'

It was an innocuous comment for her to make, but every time they deviated from work talk, he felt gravity again, as if the two of them were circling the black hole. He recognized it was a big leap for Lala even to say it, and he wondered if she had an ulterior motive.

'Yeah? Which one?'

'Sapphirica.'

Cab nodded. 'That was twenty years ago. I was on set with her when she filmed that one in Italy. It won a special jury prize at Sundance.'

'Did you travel with her a lot growing up?' Lala asked.

'Yeah, it was like being an army brat without the guns.'

'You look a lot like her,' she told him.

'Thanks.'

'So why aren't you an actor like her, anyway? You've got the looks for it.'

'My head kept getting cropped out of the frame.'

Lala laughed, but it was hollow. She went back to her phone as if he'd dismissed her with an expletive, rather than a joke. He thought about saying something more, but he didn't. He was his mother's son.

Tarla Bolton was a fierce loner, and so was Cab. She'd never married and never even acknowledged the man who got her pregnant. He didn't know who his father was, although he had narrowed the field to a few likely candidates based on the film she was making at the time he was conceived. He'd never asked her for the truth.

Cab had never married either, although he'd got close. Once. Her name was Vivian Frost. Vivian was the reason he made a point of never trusting anyone. She was the reason he was always running.

Cab took a seat at the patio table opposite Ronnie Trask and pushed the chair back to make room for his long legs. He squinted up at the sky and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. 'God, this heat, huh?'

The bartender sucked on his lower lip and drummed the glass tabletop with his nails. 'Yeah.'

'I'm Cab Bolton. Naples Police.'

'Ronnie Trask. Naples bartender.' He added, 'What kind of a name is Cab?'

'Born in one,' Cab said. 'Oh.'

'You work here at the hotel, Ronnie?'

The man drained a last swallow from his Aquafina. 'Yeah. I work nights, I work afternoons, whenever they slot me in. Crappy schedule. I sleep somewhere in the middle.'

'You always work at the bar?'

'Yeah.'

'So tell me what happened last night.'

Trask shrugged. 'I closed up the pool bar at one o'clock. I was cleaning everything up. It must have been close to one thirty when I saw a teenage girl in a bikini on the far side of the terrace. She went through the palm trees out to the beach. End of story.'

'Was anyone else around? Employees or guests?'

'Nah, once the booze shuts down, the guests go to bed. I was the only one out here.'

'Tell me about the girl.'

'What about her? She was a cute kid. Young.'

'Was she alone?' Cab asked.

'Yeah, she was alone.' 'Did you talk to her?'

Trask scowled and got defensive. 'Hey, I told you she was on the opposite side of the terrace, didn't I? How was I supposed to talk to her?'

Cab let the man stew before he went on. 'You could see her clearly, though?'

'Clear enough, sure.'

'Could you see what she had in her hand?'

'Like what? She wasn't carrying anything.'

'So where'd she get the wine, Ronnie? We found a bottle of wine with the body.'

Trask tugged at his goatee. 'Oh, yeah. She had a bottle of wine with her. I forgot that.'

Cab slid a pen from inside his suitcoat pocket. He reached across I he table and rolled Trask's empty water bottle toward him with the cap of the pen. 'We're testing the wine bottle we found near the body for fingerprints. I think we'll test your water bottle, too.'

Trask cursed under his breath. 'Shit. OK. I sold her the wine.'

'She was sixteen.'

'I didn't know she was underage.'

'You already said she looked young.'

'Fuck it,' Trask breathed. 'So what, man? She gave me thirty bucks. These kids down here will always find a way to score booze, you know? Why shouldn't I get a slice? The hotel writes it off as breakage, and everyone's happy.'

'Not Glory Fischer. She's not happy, she's dead. Had she been drinking before you sold her the wine?'

Trask shook his head. 'She looked sober enough.'

'Did you help her drink it?'

His eyes widened. 'Say what?'

'Did you have a drink with her? Did you go with her to the beach?'

'Shit, no,' he hissed.

'Word is, you do well with the girls who come down here, Ronnie.'

'Yeah, well, I don't do jailbait.'

'So you did know she was underage.'

'Oh, for Christ's sake, sure I did. Big deal. I didn't go to the beach with her. I took her money, opened the bottle for her, and she went off by herself. That's all. That is all.'

Cab heard the panic in Trask's voice. 'What did the girl say to you?' 'Nothing. She wanted a drink. That's it.'

'Did she say why she was out there?'

'No, man, no.'

'How did she behave?'

'What do you mean?'

'I mean, how was she acting? Upset? Happy? Angry?'

Trask ran his hands over his slicked-back hair. 'Oh, hell, I don't know. She was kind of flirty, you know, the way teenagers are. Smiling at me. Adjusting her bikini. Acting all girlish. I think she figured she could tease the wine out of me.'

'Did you take that as an invitation?'

'Huh?'

Cab leaned across the table. 'Did you assume she wanted sex?'

'Look, whatever she wanted, I didn't give it to her.'

'OK, Ronnie. How long was she at the bar?'

'A couple minutes, no more. She bought the wine, and she headed down to the beach.'

'Did you see anyone else after the girl showed up?' Cab asked. 'Did anyone follow her?'

Trask shook his head. 'Nobody.'

'You didn't see anyone else outside?'

'I left right after the girl did. My shift was over. I locked up, and I cleared out.'

'What about before she arrived? Did anyone go past you out to the beach during the half-hour you were cleaning up?'

Trask stared at the sky, as if he was hoping he would remember someone, but he came up blank. 'I didn't see anybody.'

'So you were the only other person out there with the girl who was murdered.'

'Hey!' he barked. 'I'm telling you, I left. I didn't follow her, and I didn't see anybody else. The clerk behind the desk saw me leave through the lobby. You can ask her. Hell, you've got hotels up and down this beach. Anybody could have done this.'

Cab knew that Trask was right. That was what worried him. Beach bodies meant thousands of suspects. If you didn't get lucky with forensics or witnesses, it was almost impossible to make a case. He thought about Glory Fischer on the beach. And about Mark Bradley. He'd hoped Trask would have spotted Bradley outside, or at least mentioned someone matching Bradley's description. He could have prompted Trask by mentioning the yellow tank top, but he guessed that the bartender would take that tidbit of information and spit it back the way jail-house informants do, to give Cab whatever he wanted to hear. Yellow tank top? Yeah, come to think of it, I did see someone out there wearing something like that.

'Did you recognize the girl?' Cab asked Trask.

'What do you mean?'

'She was at the hotel for several days. Had you seen her before last night?'

He nodded. 'Actually, yeah.'

'You sound pretty sure. This place was crawling with teenage girls this week.'

'Well, she almost knocked me over.'

Cab cocked his head. 'When was this?'

'Friday night. I was bringing a case of wine to the pool bar from the restaurant, and out of nowhere, this girl sprints past me. I mean, there I was big as life, but it was like she didn't even see me. I almost dropped the bottles. Pissed me off. You want to shout at these kids sometimes, but the hotel won't let you do that.'

'Why was she running?'

'I don't know.'

'Did anyone else run after her?'

Trask shook his head. 'Nope. There were people milling around down by the event center, hitting the bathrooms, going outside to smoke, that kind of thing. No one paid any attention to the girl, as far as I could tell. She just came at me down the corridor past the outside windows like some bat out of hell.'

'She came toward the lobby from the event center?'

'Yeah.'

'That's where they were doing all the dance competitions, right?'

'Yeah, I guess.'

'Did she stop and talk to you when she ran into you?'

'No, she kept going. I dodged out of the way, and she didn't apologize or anything. She looked really freaked.'

'Excuse me?'

'Freaked,' Trask told him. 'Scared. She was crying. It was like she'd seen a ghost.'

Chapter Seven

'Oh, man,' Amy Leigh announced. 'Did you see this?'

Amy sat in the next-to-last row of the Green Bay team bus. The window beside her was cracked open, and Amy could smell exhaust fumes as the bus sputtered through the foothills of southern Tennessee. Unlike the Wisconsin campus, where winter had barely loosened its grip, the trees and mountains here were lush green.

When her roommate kept typing on her laptop without responding, Amy nudged the girl with her shoulder. 'Hey, look at this.'

Katie Monroe glanced away from the screen impatiently. 'What? I've got to get this article done. I need to email it to the paper by three o'clock.'

'Yeah, but check this out,' Amy insisted.

She held out her iPhone to her friend, who squinted at the online news feed. After reading the first couple lines of the story, she took the phone from Amy's hand and scrolled to the next paragraph. 'Wow. Is that where we were?'

'Yes, that was our hotel. A girl was murdered there last night.'

Katie blew the bangs out of her eyes with a quick puff of breath. 'It says here she was drinking on the beach in the middle of the night. Jeez, not smart.'

'It still sucks.'

'Of course it does. Life sucks.'

Katie handed back the phone and returned to the document on her laptop. Amy wanted to talk more, but when her roommate was writing, you didn't interrupt her. Amy reclined her head against the musty foam of her seat cushion and stared into space down the dimly lit aisle of the bus. Her body jolted with the bumps of the road. Her eyes felt heavy, but she couldn't sleep, unlike most of the other girls, who were draped over the seats. It had been an adrenaline-packed week, and she hadn't come down to earth yet. Her dance ensemble from Green Bay had taken first runner-up in the competition — almost the winners, but not quite. She figured they would nail the prize next year, because the hotshot team from Louisville that beat them would be losing most of its first-string girls when they graduated in June.

Amy was a junior. One more year to go.

She tried to clear her mind, but the image of the girl dead on the beach outside their Naples hotel intruded on her brain. That was who Amy was. She was a psychology major, always analyzing people and trying to figure out what made them tick. When she thought about the girl, she imagined the world through her eyes, seeing the empty stretch of Gulf sand. Here was a teenager four years younger than Amy was, alone, assaulted, killed. Katie was right; it was dumb to go off by the water and drink in the middle of the night. But Amy had done stupid things too.

'Hey.' Her roommate waved a hand in front of Amy's face, breaking her trance. 'You OK?'

'Yeah.'

'You still thinking about it?'

'Yeah.'

'You can't take on the whole world's problems, you know,' she chided her.

'I know.'

'So knock it off.'

Katie was the reporter, who looked at the world like a black-and- white encyclopedia of facts. Amy was the eye candy with the soft center, the one who felt too much, laughed too much, and cried too much. She secretly believed that her roommate would make a better therapist than she would herself, because Katie didn't let people get to her. She kept her distance, cool and objective. Amy dove in head first.

'She was from Wisconsin,' Amy said.

'Who?' Katie asked, dragging her eyes away from her article. She'd tugged along with the team to write about the competition for the Green Bay newspaper. It made for a free spring break trip, with the

paper picking up the hotel tab and her parents not worrying about what they didn't know.

'The girl. Glory Fischer. The one who was killed. She was from Wisconsin.'

'OK.'

'Door County,' Amy added. 'That's not even an hour away from us.'

'Where are you going with this?'

'I don't know.'

'Did you know her? Was she on one of the dance teams from the other schools?'

Amy shook her head. 'No.'

'Then what's up with you?'

'It's just a feeling.'

Amy took out her phone again and ran a Google search to see if any other newspapers had picked up the story. She saw that the Milwaukee paper had already filed a report on the murder. Local girl killed on vacation — that was big news back home. The Journal Sentinel reporter had tracked down a yearbook photo of Glory Fischer that was posted with the article. Amy stared at the dead girl's face, and her sense of unease grew. She told herself that she'd made a mistake and that she was confusing Glory with someone else, but she didn't think so.

Glory was the girl she'd seen. The one Gary was talking to. She'd seen them together that Friday night.

'What's wrong?' Katie asked.

'I recognize her,' Amy said.

'The girl who was killed?'

'I saw her. I remember her from the hotel.'

Katie looked dubious. She grabbed Amy's phone again and eyed Glory's picture herself. 'Are you sure? Yearbook pictures make everybody look like everybody else.'

'I know, but I think it was her.'

Katie closed the cover of her laptop and shifted in her seat so she was sideways. She pulled her skinny legs underneath her. She was medium height and lean compared to Amy, who had a big-boned, muscular frame. Katie poked Amy in the shoulder.

'OK, so you saw her. I know it's creepy.'

'It's not just that. It's who I saw her with.' 'Who?'

Amy opened her mouth and closed it. Her eyes darted around the bus to see if he was nearby, and her full pink lips sank into a frown. 'This is crazy. I must be wrong.'

'Come on, you're freaking me out, Ames.'

'It's nothing,' Amy insisted. 'Write your article.'

'Tell me.'

'There's nothing to tell. I'm a dork.'

'You think that's news to me? Spill it. What did you see?'

'Forget it. You've got a deadline. I'm going to sleep.' Amy gave her it hollow smile.

She waited until her roommate was typing again, and then she closed her eyes. Her blond curls splashed across her face. She tried to convince herself that she was being stupid. She wasn't sure of anything; she'd made a mistake. Or if she hadn't made a mistake, maybe it didn't mean anything at all. What she'd seen, what she'd heard, was a misunderstanding.

She breathed slowly in and out. She was certain she wouldn't be able to sleep, but the vibrations and noise worked on her brain like 11 drug. Glory Fischer went away. The bus went away. She was back at school in Green Bay.

In her dream, Amy practiced a dance routine, solo, in the center of the gymnasium, moving to the beat of a song by Kristina DeBarge. She knew her moves were feline and sexy, and she wished she had a crowd to admire her, but the gym was almost deserted. She could see only one person in the uppermost row of the bleachers, almost invisible in the shadows, and she realized it was her old dance teacher from high school in Chicago. Hilary Bradley. She hadn't seen Hilary in years, but she looked the same, still pretty and confident, exactly the kind of woman Amy wanted to become. Hilary waved at her and cheered.

Seeing Hilary made Amy want to hit every step, to show off how good she was. She wanted to dazzle her and make her proud. Instead, she felt her body lose the rhythm of the music. Every motion felt awkward and clumsy. It was as if she couldn't remember dancing before in her life, as if her mind had erased every move she'd ever learned. She stuttered. Tripped. Stopped. Her face grew hot and red with embarrassment. She stood in the center of the lacquered floor, frozen.

The music ended. The gym had an echoing silence. She stared up at Hilary and wanted to shout an apology to her for failing, but Hilary was gone. The bleachers were empty.

She heard sarcastic clapping, slow and mean. She realized someone else was with her in the gym. She wasn't alone.

It was him. Her coach. Gary Jensen.

Gary walked toward her. He wore a black turtleneck and gray slacks. His black dress shoes tapped on the floor. He smiled at her, but his smile was like the snarl of a wolf. She heard herself begin to explain and ask for another chance, but he said nothing at all. He came up to her until he was so close that she smelled burnt coffee on his breath, and then, still smiling, he wrapped both hands firmly around her neck and began to choke her. His fingers were strong. Amy struggled. Pushed back. Fought. She tried to scream and couldn't. She waved at the bleachers, but no one was there to rescue her. Amy sucked for breath and found nothing. Her eyes closed.

Then they opened.

Amy awoke with a start, lurching forward, her heart racing. She was back on the bus, which rattled on as if nothing had happened while she was gone. Outside, she saw highway signs for Nashville. She'd been asleep for almost two hours. The other girls on the bus were still sleeping, too, their tousled heads dipping off the seats into the aisles. Beside her, Katie dozed, her article finished, her laptop closed and packed away.

Amy cupped her hands over her face. The dream had unnerved her.

'You OK?'

Amy jumped as a hand touched her arm. She looked up and saw Gary Jensen standing over her, and she recoiled. He smiled at her, and it was the same hideous smile from her dream. His hand on her bare skin was warm. She had to remind herself that it wasn't real. He hadn't been trying to kill her a moment ago.

'Oh,' she said. 'Oh, yeah, I'm fine. Bad dream.'

'Take it easy, Amy,' he said. 'We'll be stopping for a break soon.'

'Good.'

'Great job in Florida. You were a star.'

'Thanks,' she said.

Gary winked. He continued toward the front of the bus, and she watched him go. She wondered if he knew how much she disliked him. He'd been the dance coach and a physical education instructor at Green Bay ever since she'd arrived at the school three years ago from her high school in Highland Park. He knew his stuff, and as a coach he had an eye for what worked and what didn't in their routines. But that wasn't the only thing he had an eye for. The girls on the team all talked about it in the locker room. The coach was a flirt. A lech. He was in his middle forties, widowed, with a head of thinning brown hair that she knew he colored. He biked. He stayed in shape, and he made sure everyone knew it with his tight shirts and jeans. He was the kind of teacher who never made an overt pass, because the university frowned on teacher-student relationships, but you got the signal in his attitude and his grin. She'd felt the come-on when she was a freshman in the way he looked at her and touched her. If you wanted more, he had more to give.

Gary sat down near the driver and glanced back down the dark aisle of the bus and saw Amy watching him. Something in her expression obviously made him uncomfortable. Normally, she had warm blue eyes and an easy, infectious laugh, but not now. He looked as if he were about to come toward her again, with a question on his lips. Instead, he turned away and sank into his seat.

'What is it?'

Amy glanced at her roommate, who had awakened and was staring at her. It's nothing, Amy told herself.

But she didn't think it was nothing.

'I saw Gary talking to the girl who was killed,' she murmured.

'Gary? Are you sure? When?'

'Last night. Late, around eleven o'clock. I saw them on the terrace of the hotel. At first, I thought it was one of the Green Bay girls, but then I realized it wasn't.'

'Did you hear what they were talking about?'

'No, but Glory looked upset.' Amy shook her head. 'If it was really her. I just don't know.'

'All the coaches talk to the girls from different schools,' Katie reminded her.

'But this is Gary.'

'I know you don't like him, but that doesn't mean anything. I profiled him in the paper last year. He didn't seem like such a bad guy.'

'What about the thing with his wife?' Amy asked.

'Wasn't that an accident?'

'There were rumors.'

'I think you're getting paranoid.'

'There's more,' Amy said. 'There's something else.'

'What?'

Amy could see the back of Gary's head. A reading light bounced off the pate of his skull. It was almost as if he could feel her stare, because he looked up into the driver's mirror. She saw his pupils glow the way a cat's eyes shine at night, and she felt a shiver of fear as their eyes met. He reached up and turned off the light above him.

'My room was next to his,' Amy said.

'Yeah, so?'

'I couldn't sleep last night. I was awake sometime after three in the morning, and I heard footsteps in the hallway. I didn't look out, but I heard Gary's door. He was going back into his room in the middle of the night.'

Chapter Eight

Cab sipped a Starbucks iced latte through a straw and watched Tresa Fischer and Troy Geier behind the window of the interview room. It was late afternoon on Sunday, and the police headquarters building on Riverside was uncomfortably warm, the way it usually was. The counselor who had been with the two teenagers for most of the day had departed ten minutes earlier, leaving them alone. Cab had received word that Delia Fischer, Glory's mother, had landed at the Fort Myers airport, and he wanted a chance to sit down with Tresa and Troy individually before Delia arrived. He knew that once the victim's mother was in the building, the two kids would be more guarded with their answers.

He took his coffee into the interview room, where Tresa and Troy waited in silence, ignoring each other. Tresa sat at the interview table and drank a can of Diet Sprite. Troy, who was a fleshy sixteen year old, drank root beer and leaned against the wall. To Cab, the silence between them felt hostile. They weren't friends.

'Your mom's on her way,' Cab informed Tresa. 'She'll be here in an hour or so.'

Tresa didn't look happy with the news. Cab guessed that the girl would bear the brunt of guilt and blame when Delia arrived. As the older sister, she'd failed. I trusted Glory with you, and now she's dead.

'Troy, I'm going to ask you to wait outside,' Cab told the boy. 'Hang around, though, because I need to talk to you, too. Ask one of the officers to fix you up with some chips or a sandwich if you're hungry.'

Troy grunted and pushed himself off the wall. He put down his empty bottle of root beer and left the room without a word. Tresa's eyes followed him, and Cab thought his first impression about the two of them was correct. Tresa didn't like her sister's boyfriend.

Cab sat down at the interview table opposite Tresa and gave the girl a reassuring smile. At nineteen, Tresa still had a naive way about her that made her look younger than she was. She was extremely skinny for her height, which made Cab wonder if she had an eating disorder. She played with her straight red hair between her fingers and stared vacantly at the wooden table. Her pretty blue eyes were rimmed in red, and her face was marked with streaks of tears. Talking with her earlier, Cab had found her to be painfully shy, a loner without a support network of friends. He'd offered to ask some of the other dancers from River Falls to stay behind with her, but Tresa hadn't given him a single name of someone who was close to her. It was also obvious in her answers about her family that her sister Glory got most of the attention from their mother. Tresa, who was clearly artistic and smart, had been left to live in her own world.

'I know it's been a long day,' he told her. 'I appreciate you being patient with us. It probably seems like we cover the same stuff over and over, and you know what? We do. But that's usually how we find the details that help us figure out what really happened.'

'Do you have any idea who did this to Glory?' Tresa asked. Her voice was barely louder than a whisper.

'I wish I could say yes, but we don't, not yet,' Cab admitted. 'I'd like to make sure that we haven't missed anything important. OK?'

Tresa nodded without enthusiasm. 'OK.'

'You came down on a university bus from River Falls with the rest of your team last Monday and Tuesday, is that right? And Troy and Glory drove down from Door County on Tuesday and Wednesday?'

'Yes, they took turns and drove straight through,' Tresa answered. 'They got here around ten o'clock Wednesday morning.'

'Did anyone else from Door County come down at the same time?'

'No.'

'Did Glory and Troy bunk with you in your room?'

'Uh huh.' She added quickly, as if her mother were already listening, 'Glory and I shared the bed, and Troy took the couch.'

Cab noticed the girl fidgeting. She was hiding things, and she wasn't good at it. 'Tresa, I need to know who your sister was, even if there's stuff that wasn't so good. Understand?'

Her eyes narrowed. 'What do you mean?'

'I mean, teenagers do things that their parents don't always know about. I don't care about that. I just need to know if Glory was involved in anything that might have gotten her into trouble. See?' 'Yeah, I get it.'

'So it doesn't matter to me who slept in what bed, but I would like to know if Glory and Troy were having sex while they were here.'

Tresa hesitated. 'What difference does that make?'

'Maybe none at all,' Cab admitted, 'but I need to get the whole picture.'

'OK, yes.'

'You know that for a fact?'

'Yeah, I came back from practice once, and they were in bed together.' Her tone was pinched and unhappy.

'You sound like you didn't approve,' Cab said.

'It wasn't any of my business.'

'Did you not like the idea of your little sister having sex, or did you not like the idea of her having sex with Troy?'

Tresa shrugged. Her grief couldn't overcome years of sibling rivalry. 'Glory's been having sex since she was thirteen.'

'With Troy?'

'No, Troy's just the latest.'

'What about drugs?' Cab asked.

'Yeah, Glory liked to do grass. That was her, not me. I'm not into it;

'OK. How about this week? Did Glory use any drugs while she was here?'

Tresa nodded. 'She and Troy scored some on the way down. I told her not to use it in the room, because I didn't want to get in trouble. But I smelled it. I told Troy to get rid of it, but I don't know if he did.'

'You don't like him, do you?'

'Who, Troy? He's OK, just dumb. He's a stupid puppy dog, and Glory liked to yank his chain.'

'Was it serious between them?'

'He thought it was, but I don't think she did.'

'Did you see Glory with anyone else while she was at the hotel? Did she hook up with any other boys?'

'Not while I was around, but I wouldn't put it past her either.' Tresa lowered her eyes and looked guilty. 'I shouldn't talk like that. I'm sorry. You must think I'm a shitty sister.'

'No, I don't. I asked you to be honest with me.'

Tresa nodded. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

'Would Troy get jealous if he saw Glory flirting with someone else?' Cab went on.

'You mean, would he hurt her? I don't think so. Troy's a big kid, but he's a wuss. Everybody treats him like dirt.'

Cab thought that was an interesting comment. In his experience, when you poked the bear long enough, eventually it poked back. 'When you woke up early this morning and Glory wasn't in bed, was Troy in the room?'

'Yeah, he was zonked out on the couch, snoring away.'

'Was he there all night?'

'As far as I know.'

'Could he have left and come back without waking you up?'

'I don't know. I guess. I don't think he did, but I can't be sure.'

'Let's start at Saturday night and move backward, OK? I know we've covered some of this before, but bear with me. Was Glory in your room when you went to sleep?'

Tresa sighed. 'No. Last time I saw her on Saturday, she was swimming in the hotel pool. That was around nine o'clock. I went back to the room to read. Troy came back about half an hour later by himself, because he wanted to watch a movie on HBO. I crashed around eleven thirty, and Glory wasn't back yet. Troy had already fallen asleep in front of the TV.'

'Were you worried that Glory hadn't come back?'

'No. Glory stays out late a lot.'

'Was she hanging out with anyone else at the pool?'

'Not while I was there. There were a few girls from the various teams in the water. Some guys, too. Glory didn't know any of them, but I don't know what happened after I left.'

Cab nodded. They were still trying to identify the other teenagers who'd been in the pool on Saturday night, but so far, they'd had no luck. 'You told me earlier that Glory was acting strangely on Saturday.'

'I guess so. Yeah.'

'Describe it again for me, OK?'

Tresa rubbed her eyes with both hands, fighting off exhaustion. She looked upset. Kind of angry, too. She snapped at Troy a lot during the day. I wasn't really paying attention. I was upset, too, because I choked during my performance on Friday, so I kept to myself that day. I just figured Glory was pissed off because we had to go home, you know? No more sunny Florida, back to dreary cold Wisconsin.'

'Did she say anything to you about what was bothering her?'

'Glory wouldn't do that.'

'What about on Friday? How did she seem to you then?'

'During the day, fine.'

'And at night?'

Tresa shook her head. 'I don't know. I didn't see her in the evening. I mean, I saw her right after I blew it in the competition, but I didn't want to talk. She gave me a hug, but I needed to get out of there. I don't know what she did after I split. I went off on the beach by myself, and I didn't get back to the room until real late. She was already in bed.'

'Was Troy with Glory at your performance on Friday night?'

'Troy? At a girl's dance show? No way.'

'Where was he?'

'In the room, I guess.'

'I talked to a hotel employee who saw Glory at the event center on Friday night,' Cab told her. 'He said she ran past him, and she was crying, and she looked scared. Do you have any idea why?'

'I already told you, no,' Tresa insisted. She twisted the loose fabric of her T-shirt into a knot, and her eyes grew teary again. 'Don't you think I'd tell you if I knew what happened? When I left her, she was fine. I was the one who was upset.'

Cab eased back in the chair, his long legs stretching out, his arms behind his head. He watched the girl in front of him, and he thought about all of the messes, insecurities, fears, jealousy, pettiness, and traumas of being young. There were so many nicks and cuts that felt deep even when they were shallow and left scars that you could pick at years later. To him, Tresa looked like a typical teenage girl, screwed up in all the ordinary ways, but looks could be deceiving.

He brought his arms back on to the table and leaned forward. 'Tell me about Mark Bradley,' he said.

Tresa recoiled in surprise. 'What about him? How do you know about him?'

'It doesn't matter.'

'Troy told you, didn't he? That stupid jerk.'

'I know Mark Bradley and his wife were here at the hotel this week. I know you and he have some history together.'

Tresa pushed her chair back, physically adding distance between them. 'That was all a misunderstanding.'

'He was a teacher accused of having an affair with a seventeen-year-old student.'

'It didn't happen like that!' Tresa retorted. 'God, all of you are so stupid. No one listened to me. No one believed me.'

'He lost his job.'

'Yes, and it was my fault!'

'Are you in love with him?'

Tresa's face flushed. She tugged at her dirty red hair. 'That's none of your business.'

'Mark Bradley was at your performance on Friday night, wasn't he? Is that why you didn't do well? Did it make you nervous having him there?'

'I choked. The pressure got to me. That's all.'

'What was Mr Bradley's relationship with Glory?' Cab asked.

'None. There was no relationship.'

'Did Glory believe that you and Mark Bradley were having an affair?'

'No! That was my mother. That was all her stupid idea.'

'Did you or Glory have any contact with Bradley this week? Or with his wife?'

Tresa shook her head fiercely. 'No. I didn't even know he was there until I saw him on Friday. We didn't talk to each other.'

'Are you protecting him?' Cab asked.

'From what? He didn't do anything.' She hooded her eyes and stared at her lap. 'Are we done? I need to find my mom.'

'Sure. I understand. You can go.'

Cab watched her as she gathered up used tissues from the table in her fist and left the room. Her face was a pouty mask. He realized that he'd reached a roadblock with Tresa anyway. The girl was shutting him out. What frustrated him was that he still didn't know a thing about Mark Bradley, and he didn't have any evidence about the man, only rumors.

He was an enigma. Was he an angry predator with a predilection for teenage girls or an innocent victim?

Maybe Glory Fischer, drunk, sexually promiscuous, had met Mark Bradley on the beach on Saturday night. Maybe it was an accident or a deliberate rendezvous.

Maybe.

If Glory did meet him, what happened next?

Chapter Nine

'It was him,' Troy Geier insisted, bolting out of his chair. 'Bradley. He did it. I know it was him. That son of a bitch.'

Cab held up his hands. 'Sit down, Troy. OK? Take it easy.'

The burly sixteen year old paced back and forth between the walls of the interview room and then slumped heavily into the chair again. 'Sorry.'

'You did the right thing by telling us about Mark Bradley. I appreciate it. Right now, though, I want to talk about Glory.'

Troy's big head bobbed. 'Sure. OK.'

Cab sucked out more of his iced latte, which had melted and was mostly warm. He gave Troy a minute to calm down. The teenager was a beefy kid with a broad face dotted by pimples. He had wavy brown hair covered by a baseball cap, which he wore backwards. His flabby chest and huge forearms stretched out the green fabric on his Packers T-shirt. As Cab watched, Troy stuck an index finger between his teeth and chewed on the nail.

'This is my fault,' Troy murmured, his mouth full.

'Why do you say that?'

'I never should have left her alone.'

'You're being pretty hard on yourself,' Cab told him.

'Yeah, but we argued, and it was stupid. She wanted to stay and swim, and I really wanted to see this Will Ferrell movie on TV. I told her to come with me, but she wouldn't, so I just left. Then the movie sucked, and I fell asleep anyway.'

'You never realized Glory hadn't come back?'

'I was out like a light. The bartender snuck me a couple beers for a few bucks. I crashed.'

The bartender. Ronnie Trask obviously had a thriving business funneling alcohol to minors. It was a spring break tradition in Florida.

'Tell me a little more about Glory, OK?' Cab went on. 'How long have you known her?'

Troy shrugged. 'Pretty much all our lives. We go to school together. Both of our families have been in Door County forever. We're natives, but now it's all rich fibs moving in, buying up the land.'

'Fibs?' Cab asked.

'Fucking Illinois Bastards.'

Cab smothered a smile. 'When did the two of you start dating?'

'Last year. She had a bad summer break-up. She was dating an older kid who was staying on the peninsula for the summer. A tourist. She figured he loved her, but he was just in it for the sex. After he dumped her, I think she decided she wanted someone who really wanted her. That's me.'

'What was Glory like?' Cab asked.

'She was super cute. Really outgoing, doing things a mile a minute. Me, I'm pretty shy, and I always felt like I was running to keep up with her.'

'Was it exclusive between the two of you?'

'Oh, yeah. Definitely.'

Cab was dubious. 'Are you sure it was exclusive for her?'

'Absolutely. After school, we were going to get married.'

'Was that your plan or hers?'

'Mine, but Glory wanted it too.'

'Most girls aren't looking for a serious relationship at sixteen,' Cab told him.

'Well, I loved her, and she loved me,' Troy insisted. 'We weren't thinking about college. You go to college, and they ship your job over-seas these days. I figured we'd both work at my dad's restaurant after we graduated. That's where Glory's mom works. When my dad retires, I figure I'll take it over, although he tells me I can't handle it.'

'Why does he say that?'

Troy frowned. 'Oh, he never thinks I can do anything right. He still thinks I'm a dumb kid.'

Cab thought about what Tresa had said. Troy's father didn't treat him well, and neither did Glory. Despite his size, Troy looked like the kind of boy who got kicked in the head and came back on his knees for more punishment. At some point, all the kicks probably felt like love.

'I heard that Glory was a wild child,' Cab told him. 'Sex, drugs, drinking. Is that true?'

'Sure, Glory liked to do crazy stuff sometimes. Drugs once in a while, but nothing heavy. She'd get me to sneak some wine from my dad's restaurant on the weekends. So what?'

'Sex?'

'Yeah, we had sex. Glory was cool about it.'

'It sounds like you two were pretty different, though.'

'I told you, I had to run to keep up with her, because she was always going two hundred miles an hour. It was like I was along for the ride sometimes.'

Or maybe you were just the designated driver, Cab thought. He understood the attraction for Troy, who had obviously worshipped Glory for most of his life. It wasn't as clear to him what Glory saw in Troy. The teenager was plain, and simple in a farm boy way, but he had the attraction of being utterly pliable. Cab guessed that Troy's role in their relationship was to do whatever Glory wanted him to do.

'Whose idea was it to go to Florida?' Cab asked.

'Glory's,' Troy said.

'To see Tresa dance?'

Troy shrugged. 'Yeah, that's what she told her mom so she'd say yes. Really, she just wanted a vacation in Florida, you know? Swim and sun.'

'How was it for you two hanging out with Tresa? Big sister, little sister. Did that slow you guys down?'

'Tresa's pretty low-key compared to Glory. Always with her nose in a book. We didn't spend much time with her. She was practicing a lot for the dance thing anyway.'

'Were there any arguments?'

'Between Glory and Tresa? No.'

'How about between you and Glory?'

Troy flushed. 'Just on Saturday. Glory was really pissy with me. I don't know why. That's one of the reasons I left her at the pool. She'd been giving me shit all day over the stupidest things.'

'Did something happen?'

'No, that's the thing. We'd been having a great week.'

'When did it start?' Cab asked. 'I told you, it was Saturday.' 'Not Friday night?'

Troy stopped. He chewed his fingers again. 'Well, that night she went to see Tresa dance, and I stayed back at the room watching basketball. Glory came back around ten thirty.'

'How did she seem?'

'She was quiet,' Troy said.

'Upset? Angry?'

'I'm not really sure,' Troy admitted. 'I was watching the game. I know I should have paid more attention, but I didn't. I found out the next morning that Tresa hadn't done well in the dance competition, and I figured Glory was just disappointed for her.'

'What did Glory do when she came back to the room?'

'She took a shower. I remember thinking she was in there a long time.'

'Then what?'

'She came out and sat down next to me. She had a towel on, and I thought maybe she wanted to have sex, but when I tried to kiss her, she pushed me away. I asked what was wrong.'

'What did she say?' Cab asked.

'She said it was nothing.'

'That's all?'

'She told me that she saw someone she knew.' Troy blinked nervously, as if he realized he'd forgotten to share something important.

'Someone she knew?' Cab leaned forward. 'Who?'

'She didn't say.'

'Did you ask?'

'Yeah, but she didn't answer me. She didn't make it sound like it was a big deal. She just said she was going to bed.'

'Did you ask her about it the next day?'

'No, she didn't say anything more about it.'

Cab laid this nugget of information down in his head and stared at it. Someone she knew?

Not a stranger. Someone who sent her running through the dark corridor of the hotel in tears, nearly colliding with the hotel bartender, Ronnie Trask. And the next night Glory wound up dead on the beach.

It still could have been a random assault. Boy meets girl, boy rapes girl, boy kills girl. Sometimes it happened that way, but Cab was beginning to wonder if Glory's death involved a more personal motive.

'Did you see anyone you knew during the week?' he asked. 'Anyone that Glory would have known?'

Troy shook his head. 'Nobody,' he said. 'Nobody except Mark Bradley.'

Chapter Ten

Cab found a bag of organic plantain chips in the drawer of his desk. He ate them one at a time as he reviewed the interview notes gathered by the police with guests at the hotel throughout the day. He also reviewed the crime scene photos, and as he studied the body and imagined how Glory Fischer had ended up in the surf, topless, strangled, he found his memory going back to Vivian Frost.

The girl he'd asked to marry him. The girl who had said yes.

It wasn't a big leap from Glory to Vivian, not that they looked alike or had anything in common about their lives. What they shared was the similarity of their deaths.

Glory, a dead body on a beach in Florida. Vivian, a dead body on a beach north of Barcelona.

A dozen years later, he could still picture her face, vivid both in life and death. He'd always assumed that the memory would fade, but it didn't work out that way, no matter how much he tried to outrun her. She followed him as he moved from place to place and job to job. Whenever he felt the urge to let down his guard, Vivian was there, reminding him that trust was a dangerous thing. Lala and the other women in his life since then had paid the price.

That was another reason he hated beach bodies. They came with a lot of baggage.

Vivian Frost. His mother had warned him that he was falling too hard and too fast. Tarla Bolton was a Hollywood actress, which meant by definition that everyone was trying to screw her. She'd tried to protect her son with an emotional suit of armor, but back then, in his early twenties, Cab was still young enough and naive enough to reject her view of the world. He hadn't been burned as a cop or as a man, and he didn't want to end up as disillusioned as his mother. Vivian changed all that.

He'd gone to Barcelona as a newly minted special agent with the FBI, dispatched to Spain to liaise with local authorities in the search for an American fugitive named Diego Martin, who'd been caught on videotape in a bar on Las Ramblas. The waitress he'd interviewed at the bar, a divorced woman ten years older than he was, languid and sensual, was Vivian Frost. She was a British expat who'd married a Spanish computer executive and been kicked out of his estate after she got tired of his cheating. Like most Londoners who moved to Spain, she had no interest in going home, even after she'd found herself alone and mostly penniless in the city. She worked long hours. She smoked incessantly, the way everyone smoked there, and it gave her a husky voice. She had bone-white skin in a city of golden faces. She glided where everyone else walked.

After an interview in which Cab decided that Vivian knew nothing about the man he was chasing, he went back to the bar that same night and sought her out again for his own purposes. She professed to be utterly uninterested in men, and the more she rejected him, the more he returned to the bar like a moth to a flame. He became obsessed with Vivian. He fell completely under her spell.

The fruitless investigation dragged on for weeks, then months. There were no more leads. The American fugitive, Diego Martin, had gone underground or left the city entirely. Cab's superiors in the Bureau wanted him back home if the trail was cold, but he gave them hope where there was mostly no hope at all. What he wanted was more time with Vivian. His lies bought him three more months, and slowly, cold indifference on her part gave way to a few casual dates and then to their first night of sex in her cramped, smoky apartment, with the neighbors listening on the other side of the thin walls. He found her to be uninhibited, making love with abandon, unlike any other woman he'd known. After that night, they were inseparable.

When the Bureau finally ran out of patience with his delays, he quit. He walked away from the job he'd sought from his earliest days out of college. His mother told him he was insane and that he didn't understand women or how manipulative they could be. He told her he was in love. Madly in love, and that was the truth. He told her he was staying in Spain and getting married. Looking back, he remembered those days as the one time in his life when he'd been innocent enough to be happy.

Vivian Frost. Beautiful, funny, intense, wicked, graceful, faithless, and treacherous. Vivian Frost, who'd wound up dead with a bullet in her brain on a deserted beach north of the city.

Unlike Glory Fischer, though, there was no mystery for Cab about who had killed her.

He'd done it himself.

'Someone she knew?' Lala Mosqueda asked as she sat down next to Cab's desk. 'Troy said that Glory recognized someone?'

Cab sat with his hands cupped over his nose and mouth. He didn't hear her. Instead, he heard a roaring noise that sounded like the Spanish surf, and he saw Vivian's face again, eyes open, entry wound in her forehead.

'Hey, Cab?'

He blinked as Lala said his name and heard concern in her voice. He rocked back in his chair and reached for the bag of plantain chips, but it was empty. He forced a smile on to his face. 'Moh-skee-toh,' he said, drawing out her nickname, talking loudly enough to cause others in the department to turn and watch them.

Lala shook her head in disgust, then leaned closer and hissed under her breath, 'Why do you do that?'

'What?'

'Push people away.'

'Is that what I'm doing?' he asked.

'You know damn well it is.'

She was right. He'd become an expert at keeping women on the far side of his safety zone. Those he liked, like Lala, were the ones he worked hardest to alienate.

'Fine,' she said, when he didn't reply. 'Be an ass. I don't care.'

Cab wanted to apologize, but he swallowed it down. 'Yes, Glory saw someone she knew,' he said. 'That's the story. Troy thinks she was talking about Mark Bradley, but he's just guessing. Glory didn't say who it was.'

Lala waited before she said anything else. When she spoke again, the softness in her tone was gone, replaced by cool detachment. She'd opened the door; he'd slammed it shut. That was his pattern.

'Do you think Troy is telling the truth?' she asked calmly. 'Did Glory really say anything like that, or is he simply trying to point us toward Bradley?'

Cab shrugged. 'I don't believe Troy is enough of a deep thinker to come up with a plan like that. He says he's certain that Bradley killed her. If he was going to lie, I think he'd just say that Glory said she saw Bradley on Friday night.'

'What about Tresa? Did Glory say anything to her about recognizing someone?'

'Apparently not.'

'Well, Troy backs up what Ronnie Trask told us,' Lala pointed out. 'Glory saw someone she knew, and for some reason she freaked and ran.'

'Too bad, I was hoping Trask made the whole thing up,' Cab said. 'The question is who Glory saw.'

'Could it be Mark Bradley?'

'Sure it could. Troy's guessing, but he may be right. What did you find out about Bradley and the Fischers?'

'I called the sheriff's department in Sturgeon Bay, which is the county seat for Door County,' Lala told him. 'I talked to the sheriff himself, tough old goat named Felix Reich. He said that pretty much everyone in the department believed Bradley was having sex with the girl. That would have been a misdemeanor assault in Wisconsin given their ages, but Tresa was adamant in denying the affair. No witness, no charges. Even so, Bradley wound up losing his teaching job. Tresa's mother, Delia, kept calling for his head. The district called it budgetary, but no one expected the school to keep him on. He hasn't found another job.'

'So he's got reason to be pissed off.'

'Yes, but I'm not seeing any motive for him to kill Glory,' Lala pointed out. 'No one accused them of having an affair.'

'That doesn't mean they weren't.'

'You're pretty cynical, Cab. For what it's worth, the sheriff had some things to tell me about Glory, too.'

Cab raised an eyebrow. 'Such as?'

'She was a troubled kid. Multiple arrests going back several years.' 'Several years? She's only sixteen.'

'Yeah, her first drug possession bust was at age twelve, and it wasn't her last. The local cops think she may have done some selling, too, although she was never actually charged. She was involved in vandalism, shoplifting, breaking and entering. It's not a happy picture.'

'Have there been any problems reported at the hotel this week?'

'The usual minor stuff. Glory's name didn't come up.'

'If we can pin this on someone, the defense is going to say Glory got involved with the local drug scene or hooked up with the wrong crowd.'

'That may be what happened,' Lala told him.

'Yeah, I know. Maybe. Let's keep talking to everyone we can, but put an emphasis on girls who were at the event center on Friday. I want to see if we can find someone who saw Glory before she went running toward Ronnie Trask. I want to know who she recognized.'

'The Bradleys are the only other people in the hotel from Door County,' Lala said.

'I know, but it sounds like Door County is a tourist area in Wisconsin. If Glory saw someone who visited the area but doesn't live there, that opens up a lot more possibilities. Particularly with a bunch of college kids staying at the hotel.'

'We're looking for a needle, and the haystack just got a lot bigger,' Lala said.

'There were a lot of people at that competition. Someone other than Ronnie Trask is bound to remember a girl running through the hall crying.'

Lala shrugged. 'Teenage girls do that all the time.'

'Yeah? I don't picture you doing that, Mosquito.'

'I was tougher than most,' she replied. After a moment, she added, 'You have a nickname, too, you know.'

'Catch-a-Cab Bolton,' he said, nodding.

'You know about it?'

'Sure. I know about the betting pool, too. When will Cab quit and move on? It's been two years. The welcome mat is wearing thin.'

'It's nothing to be proud of, Cab.'

'Did I say I was?' he asked.

'You never say anything.'

Cab opened his mouth to fire off a sarcastic reply, but for once he let it go. Then he asked, 'So what week do you have in the pool?'

'Next week, actually,' she said, without smiling.

'That soon?'

'I know you better than the others.'

It was as if she'd given him a terminal diagnosis. 'Well, if anyone's going to make money on me, I'd like it to be you.'

Lala didn't answer. Behind Cab's shoulder, someone gestured to her, and she climbed out of the chair and chatted with a uniformed officer in the doorway of the investigation division. When she returned, she was all business again. There wasn't time for anything personal between them, and he wondered if she was relieved by the interruption.

'You've got a visitor in the interview room,' Lala told him.

'Delia Fischer?' Cab asked, checking his watch. 'She's right on time.'

Lala shook her head. 'It's not her. It's Mark Bradley. And his attorney. They want to talk.'

Chapter Eleven

Hilary Bradley emerged out of the Naples Police headquarters building into the bright sunshine. She slipped sunglasses on to her face. She stopped on the circular brick walkway and hesitated, unsure where to go. Mark was upstairs, and she assumed the police would interview him for an hour or more. At least he wasn't alone in facing their questions. She liked the attorney they'd hired; he was a bulldog, according to her father. It was the smart thing to do to get help, but she knew Mark was right about perceptions. The police would see him with a lawyer, and one word would jump into their heads.

Guilty.

She'd heard it in her father's voice, too. Her parents had stood behind Mark last year, because Hilary had convinced them he was innocent. Now she'd gone back to the well, and this time, there was an unspoken doubt in their reactions. They didn't know what to believe anymore. They probably wondered what she believed and whether she was being honest about her suspicions. But they had stayed silent.

Hilary stood in front of the pink stone building and saw a police cruiser glide up to the curb twenty feet away. The front passenger door opened, and she stiffened with dismay as she recognized the woman climbing out.

It was Delia Fischer. Glory and Tresa's mother.

Delia's head swiveled as she looked up at the two-story building, and her eyes were vacant, as if she was lost and overwhelmed. Her stare passed over Hilary without recognition, and then, slowly, horribly, it came back and landed on her and froze there. They confronted each other across the sidewalk. Hilary took off her sunglasses and nodded at Delia. There was no point in pretending.

Glory's mother approached without saying a word. She was several inches shorter than Hilary. She looked beaten and exhausted, with deep worry lines furrowed in her brow and around her mouth. Her cheaply colored blond hair was tied in a ponytail. She was rail-thin, a woman in her mid-forties who looked ten years older than she was. She wore spiral earrings made from aluminum cans; that was one of the eBay businesses she used to earn extra money in the off season. If you weren't rich in Door County, you always had something going on the side to make ends meet. Hilary had bought some of Delia's jewelry as a gesture of friendship the previous year, before everything erupted over Tresa.

Despite their history with her, Hilary had never been able to hate Delia. She understood the emotions that drove her. Delia was a single mother struggling with two teenage girls, fiercely proud and protective. Hilary could easily imagine the stunned fury Delia had felt in reading Tresa's diary, believing that her child had been exploited and abused by a man she trusted. All of that anger had landed on Mark's head, regardless of Tresa's denials. If Hilary had been in her shoes, she probably would have done exactly what Delia did — launch a crusade to destroy the man who had stolen her daughter's innocence.

Hilary didn't think that Delia had ever suffered a pang of doubt. She was convinced she was right and would never believe otherwise. In her eyes, Mark was a child molester who deserved the ostracism he'd received. Now, like a bad dream, he was back in her life, violating her family again in an even more terrible way than before.

'Mrs Fischer, I'm so sorry,' Hilary began. 'Mark and I—'

'Don't you dare.'' Delia cut her off in a voice hoarse with bitterness. 'Don't you dare defend him. Don't you dare speak his name in front of me.'

'Mrs Fischer, please. I understand your grief.'

Delia's cheeks flushed. 'You don't know the first thing about my grief, so don't pretend that you do. Everyone says how smart and attractive you are, and all I see is a woman who's a fool. You're married to a monster, and you won't admit it to yourself. Maybe if you'd opened your eyes last year, my daughter would still be alive.'

'Mark didn't do this,' Hilary told her, but she knew her words were useless, and she almost regretted saying them.

Delia flinched, as if she might slap Hilary's face, but then she closed her eyes and breathed heavily. When she opened her eyes again, Hilary felt a wave of violence breaching the small space between them. The policeman coughed, like a gentle warning to draw their attention, but Delia ignored him.

'I almost feel sorry for you,' Delia said, 'trying to convince yourself that he's not evil. But then I think, you must know, and you just don't care. Because you're not a fool, are you? You really are as smart as everyone says. So I guess you've just decided you'll protect him regardless of what he's done.'

Hilary noticed that other people coming and going from the police building had begun to stop and watch them. She felt a burn of embarrassment. It was familiar; she'd learned to expect stares from strangers. She knew that Delia was lashing out in pain and desperation, and she knew that there was no way for her to bridge the divide between them. If anyone could comfort Delia, it wasn't her. Her presence just made it worse.

'I should go,' Hilary told her. 'You may not believe me, and it doesn't matter, but I'm very sorry about Glory. You're right, I can't understand your grief. I can't imagine losing your daughter. It may mean nothing coming from me, but I'm hurting for you. I really am.'

Delia's face was impassive. Hilary hadn't expected to reach her. The policeman approached Delia and touched her elbow in order to guide her toward the door of the building. Delia allowed herself to be led, but she pulled away abruptly and jabbed a finger at Hilary's face.

'Do you have any idea what he took from me?' she shouted. 'Glory was my baby! I almost lost her once, and I thought I got a second chance. But now I've lost her all over again because of you and your husband. He took her away from me. It wasn't enough what he did to Tresa. He had to go after my baby, too.'

Hilary said nothing. She stood there and let the woman vent her despair.

'Mrs Fischer,' the policeman murmured. 'Let's go inside.'

'Well, you know what?' Delia continued, screaming at Hilary now.

'He's not going to get away with it! I promise you that. Not again. This time I'm going to make sure he pays for what he did to us!'

Troy Geier sat on a concrete bench in the lobby of the police building. His back was slumped as he leaned forward, and his hands dangled between his thick thighs. Tresa sat next to him, as straight as a board. They both watched the altercation outside between Delia Fischer and Hilary Bradley, and the noise of Delia's screaming cut through the glass windows, clear and shrill.

Tresa didn't look at Troy. 'You told my mom, didn't you? You told her you thought that Mark did this.'

'What the hell was I supposed to say?' he muttered.

'You bastard. Mark would never hurt Glory.'

Troy blew out his breath in a disgusted sigh. 'Shit, Tresa, listen to yourself. You're more concerned with your teacher boyfriend than you are with your sister. Glory's dead, and you're still protecting him. What do you think? He's going to leave his wife for you?'

'You don't know anything,' Tresa snapped.

'No? Who the hell else do you think did this?'

'It wasn't Mark.'

Troy shook his head. 'You're actually jealous, aren't you? Jesus. The fucking pervert was stalking Glory, and all you can think about is yourself.'

'You have no idea what you're talking about. There was nothing between Mark and Glory.'

'Oh, come on, Bradley obviously had a hard-on for her, the son of a bitch.'

Tresa shoved him, which was like pushing against the trunk of a tree. 'Shut up, Troy, just shut your mouth. You think Glory was so sweet? Do you have any idea how many boys she slept with?'

'Don't talk like that!'

'What, I'm supposed to pretend she was a princess because she's dead? Sorry, I won't do that. She probably came on to some biker on the beach, or she tried to buy drugs from the wrong person. Wake up, Troy. Glory used you like she used everyone.'

'I loved her,' Troy murmured.

'I loved her too, but she got a free pass for everything. Mom's probably out there right now wishing it was me that died.'

'That's crazy.'

'Yeah? For the last six years, I've been invisible. Everything's been about Glory. Ever since the fire.'

'She almost died,' Troy protested.

'I know. She almost died. Poor Glory, she's screwed up because of the fire. Well, fuck her.' Tresa bit her lip, knowing she'd gone too far.

It had always been that way between the two sisters. Sometimes you didn't know they loved each other because of all the bitterness and jealousy. Troy watched tears slip down Tresa's face, which she wiped away with her shirt. He felt like crying too, but he hadn't been able to squeeze out any tears since he heard the news. He was just numb. And guilty.

He saw Glory's mom storm into the foyer. When she got angry, you didn't want to be in the firing line with Mrs Fischer, because she had a temper. He cringed to see her, because he knew what she would say. Their eyes met, and he could feel all of her grief and rage unloading silently on him across the room. Before he could say anything or explain, she gestured to Tresa and opened her arms. Tresa ran to her, and the two of them embraced and sobbed together. A minute earlier, Tresa had been bitter about Glory; now, she moaned into her mother's shoulder as they shared the loss.

Delia stroked Tresa's red hair. Troy sat there, ignored. It was probably better that way, with her not looking at him. Eventually, though, Glory's mom detached herself and told Tresa to get her a glass of water. Delia Fischer waited until Tresa was gone, and then she descended on Troy.

He climbed to his feet, and the tears finally came. 'Mrs Fischer, listen, I—'

'Don't make excuses with me, Troy,' Delia said, practically spitting at him. 'You promised me, didn't you? What did you say? You said you'd protect her. You said I didn't need to worry.'

'I know, it's just that I didn't — I mean, Glory didn't come back — '

Troy's voice cracked. He hated himself for being weak. He hated himself for having failed her.

'You knew that pervert, that rapist, was right here at the resort, and you left Glory alone? Are you crazy?'

'Tresa says she doesn't think that Bradley would have done this,' Troy protested meekly.

'Tresa? What the hell do I care what Tresa thinks about Mark Bradley? That man brainwashed her into his bed. I know men like him. I know what they do to teenage girls. This is about you, Troy. I trusted you. I trusted you. You told me you'd protect my baby, and she's dead. You let her die.'

For a husky kid, Troy felt himself getting smaller and smaller, until he thought he could shrink into the tiniest hole in the earth and disappear. 'I'm so sorry, Mrs Fischer,' he pleaded. 'Really.'

Glory's mom slapped him. Her fingers clapped against his cheek so hard that he stumbled backward. His hand flew to his face, which stung like he'd been attacked by wasps. He opened his mouth to say something, to say anything, and he had nothing to say to her at all.

'Your father's right about you,' Mrs Fischer sneered. 'You are completely fucking useless.'

She turned on her heel and stalked away, leaving him alone and in tears. Troy sank on to the bench again and covered his face in his hands. He thought about Glory, and he realized that everyone was right. Mrs Fischer was right. His dad was right. He'd had a chance to prove himself, and he'd failed.

He really was useless.

Chapter Twelve

Cab found Mark Bradley inside the interview room, along with a rotund older man who sported a lion's mane of curly gray hair and a devilishly pointed goatee. He was impeccably dressed in a gray suit with a buttoned vest and a pink tie. As Cab entered, the older man jumped to his feet with a spry bounce, hopped round the wooden table, and extended a hand. Cab shook it and felt his finger bones groaning under the man's iron grip.

'Archibald Gale,' the attorney announced. 'I don't believe we've had the pleasure before, Detective Bolton.'

Cab sat down and studied the man's eyes, which twinkled behind tiny owlish glasses. 'Meeting a lawyer really isn't my idea of pleasure, Mr Gale.'

'Ah, you're funny, Detective. I like that.'

'Are you new to Florida, Mr Gale? I thought I knew all the local criminal attorneys.' Cab said the word 'criminal' with a small smile directed at Mark Bradley.

'I've just begun wintering here. My other home is in Duluth, Minnesota.'

'I'm not familiar with that area,' Cab admitted.

'It's a beautiful place, but we've had an unusually high murder rate in recent years. That's a mixed blessing if you're a lawyer.' Gale put an arm around the shoulder of the well-built man seated beside him, whose face was smoky with caged anger. 'Detective Bolton, this is Mark Bradley.'

'Mr Bradley, I didn't recognize you without the shower going.' Cab smiled, and Bradley shot him a look of naked resentment.

'Detective, we're here as a courtesy,' Gale interjected. 'I hope we'll all be polite.'

'It's just that I'm anxious to hear Mr Bradley speak,' Cab went on. 'Whenever I'm around him, he seems to have other people talking for him.'

'This was a mistake,' Bradley said, getting out of the chair.

Gale put a gentle hand on his shoulder and eased him back into his seat. 'Don't worry, Mark. Let's just focus on the unfortunate business at hand and provide whatever information we can.'

Bradley didn't hide his impatience. Instinctively, as a result, Cab proceeded slowly. He pushed back his chair, crossed his long legs, and picked up a yellow pad of handwritten notes. Under the guise of reviewing them, he studied Mark Bradley over the top of the pad. Bradley wore a red, collared polo shirt and tan dress slacks. He had the easy, unconscious grace of an athlete when he moved and looked like a man who was comfortable in his own skin. He was attractive, but not in a Hollywood way like Cab or in the macho way that some athletes exuded. He was simply good-looking without thinking about it. His brown hair was cut short without much care. He wouldn't have been caught dead with an earring or a gold chain or cologne. His fore head and nose were so pink with sunburn that he may as well have said: I like the sun. Screw cancer.

'You look familiar, Mr Bradley,' Cab told him. 'Do I know you from somewhere?'

'I was on the PGA tour for a few years in my twenties,' Bradley replied.

'Really? Why did you give it up?'

'I injured ligaments in my shoulder in a car accident about eight years ago. It doesn't restrict my day-to-day activities, but I no longer have the precision I need to be a pro.'

'I'm sorry to hear it,' Cab said. 'Why go from golf to teaching? I assume you could coach or give lessons or something along those lines. You'd make a lot more money, wouldn't you?'

'I was a professional golfer, Detective. When you've done that, the idea of helping fifty-something investment bankers go from a thirty-six to a twenty-eight handicap doesn't sound too attractive.'

'And teaching?'

'I like working with kids. I like the flexibility of having my summers off. You may not think there are athletes who enjoy painting on the beach or talking about Henry Fielding or Chaucer, but you know what? Some of us do.'

Without changing the expression on his face, Cab struck like a snake. 'Tresa Fischer ended all of that for you, though, didn't she?'

He saw Gale's hand lightly cover Bradley's wrist, as if to send his client a message. Stay calm.

'That wasn't Tresa's fault,' Bradley said.

'Whose fault was it?'

'I'm not sure it was anybody's fault. If you're a male teacher these days, people have a bias to believe just about anything bad that gets said about you. It doesn't matter whether it's true.'

'That must be infuriating. I mean, first you lose one career, then another. I'd be pissed off at somebody.'

Gale leaned forward. 'Excuse me, Detective, but this doesn't seem to have a lot to do with your investigation.'

'I'm interested in your client's state of mind, Mr Gale. I think if I were in his shoes, I'd be angry at how I was treated.'

'I was,' Bradley admitted before his lawyer could stop him. 'I am. But that has nothing to do with Tresa or Glory.'

'Did you have a sexual relationship with Tresa Fischer?' Cab asked, watching Bradley's face.

'No.'

'What about Glory Fischer?'

'No.'

'Have you ever had sex with a girl under eighteen?'

Bradley cocked his head. 'What, in my life? Do you want to know when I lost my virginity? Do you want to know everybody I dated in high school?'

'I think we'll skip that question, Detective,' Gale interjected.

'I'm suggesting that athletes and teachers both have to deal with underage girls, Mr Bradley,' Cab went on. 'You've had girls making passes at you your whole life. You've had girls trying to manipulate you. Come on, it must happen all the time. It has to feed your ego.'

'I'm married to a mature, beautiful, independent woman who's a hell of a lot smarter than I am,' Bradley retorted. 'That feeds my ego.'

Cab pursed his lips in surprise. He hadn't expected that response, and it sounded sincere. However, he'd known some accomplished liars in his life. Starting with a girl in Barcelona named Vivian Frost.

'Many athletes look at women with contempt, Mr Bradley. You figure if they don't respect themselves, why should you?'

'I wanted something more meaningful, Detective, and I found it. I hope you're as lucky as I am.'

'Well, here's my problem. Glory Fischer is dead. You lost your job, and you're pretty much hated in the community where you live, al because of the Fischer family. You had a room overlooking the beach where Glory was killed. Those are big coincidences.'

'Wrong,' Bradley snapped. He ticked off his responses on his fingers. 'The Fischer family did not fire me. The principal and the school district did. I bear no ill will at all toward Tresa or her mother, and certainly not toward Glory. It's no coincidence at all that I'm at the same hotel as Tresa, because she's a dancer, and my wife coaches dance. As for my hotel room, half the rooms in the building overlook the beach.'

'But you were out on the beach last night, weren't you?' Cab asked. 'You met Glory Fischer there.'

Gale jumped in quickly before Bradley could say a word. 'Sorry, Detective, that topic is off limits.'

'Excuse me?'

'Mr Bradley will not answer your questions about where he was overnight,' Gale informed him sharply. 'I've instructed him to say nothing. We're not saying he went out on the beach, we're not saying' he didn't. We're not saying he met Glory, we're not saying he didn't. No info. No answers. Nothing.'

'In other words, he was out there,' Cab retorted.

'In other words, if you think he was out there, then you better be prepared to prove it,' Gale said. 'We're not going to do your work for you.'

'We have a witness who saw him.'

Gale wasn't fooled. 'Good for you, Detective. If you have a witness, you trot him out. In the meantime, Mr Bradley isn't answering any questions about his actions last night. The most important thing is that Mark did not kill Glory Fischer.'

'If he was out there, then he may know something that can help our investigation,' Cab reminded him. He looked at Mark Bradley.

'Did you think about that, Mr Bradley? A girl is dead. If you didn't kill her, someone else did. If you're the kind of man you say you are, then I'd think you would feel a moral obligation to tell us anything you saw.'

Cab saw a genuine conflict in Bradley's face. The man wanted to talk. Or maybe Bradley thought he was smart enough to deflect suspicion by appearing cooperative. It didn't matter. Gale shut it down.

'We're done, Detective,' the lawyer announced. 'Obviously, if Mark knew anything that would be relevant and important to your investigation, I would have advised him to share that information with you. You can conclude from his silence on this matter that he doesn't.'

'Neither of you is in a position to make that call,' Cab told him. 'Mr Bradley, if you saw Glory Fischer on the beach and you did not kill her, then you can give us a time at which we know she was alive. That will help us pinpoint the time of death.'

Bradley glanced at Gale, who shook his head.

'Give me some help here, Mr Bradley,' Cab insisted. 'I think you're a man who stands up and does the right thing.'

Gale got out of his chair and reached for Bradley's arm. 'Let's go.'

Bradley remained seated, staring calmly at Cab. 'Theoretically,' he began.

'Mark, stop.'

'Theoretically,' Bradley continued, ignoring his attorney, 'on nights when I can't sleep, I sometimes get up and clear my head around two thirty in the morning. But if I do, I'm usually back by a few minutes after three.'

'Did you do that last night?' Cab asked. 'Did you arrange to meet Glory?'

'No, I didn't.'

'But you did see her on the beach.'

'That's it, Detective,' Gale interrupted. 'Mark, we're going. Now. Come on.'

Bradley got to his feet, still staring at Cab. He was sending him a message, and it was obvious to Cab that his suspicions were correct. Mark Bradley had been with Glory Fischer in the middle of the night.

'I'm going to send a police officer to your hotel room to make sure nothing is removed. Based on your responses today, I'm sure we'll be able to get a search warrant.'

'My responses?' Bradley asked.

'I think a judge will conclude what you and I both know to be true. You left your room last night. You met Glory Fischer.'

'Mr Bradley isn't changing his travel plans to accommodate your fishing expedition,' Gale told Cab. 'Tomorrow, he and his wife are going home to Door County.'

'Running away won't get you off the hook, Mr Bradley,' Cab said.

'I never run away,' Bradley snapped.

'I'm glad, because I may just follow you back to Wisconsin. If you won't talk to me, I'm sure there are people who will.'

Gale smiled at him and steered Bradley toward the door. 'If you go, enjoy the view, Detective. Just don't have any conversations with Mr Bradley. I'm sure you know that anything he tells you wouldn't be admissible, now that he's represented by counsel.'

'Of course.' Cab added, 'Tell me one other thing, Mr Bradley.'

Bradley stopped and looked at Cab suspiciously. 'What?'

'Exactly why do they call it "Door" County?'

Bradley laughed without humor. 'The peninsula juts out into the water between Lake Michigan and Green Bay. The area where the waters come together at the tip of the land is extremely treacherous. A lot of people have lost their lives in those waters. So the passage got the French name Porte des morts.'

'I'm afraid I studied Spanish and German, not French,' Cab said.

'It means Death's Door.'

Chapter Thirteen

Sheriff Felix Reich drove his Chevy Tahoe off the Washington Island ferry, and the vehicle clanged over the ship's metal gate on to the mainland at the tip of Door County in Northport. The crossing through the Death's Door passage had been rough, but Reich had made the journey thousands of times in his life, and he was immune to the jockeying of the waves. Most of the travelers on winter midweek mornings were locals who had iron stomachs even in the worst weather. On this crossing, Reich had shared the ferry with only three other vehicles bound for the peninsula.

Reich turned off Highway 42 beyond the port on to a gravel road known as Port des Morts Drive. He drove between winter trees that clawed for his truck with bare branches. Through the web of trees, Reich could see secluded, expensive waterside houses hugging the cliff tops, but there was hardly anyone in residence to admire the panorama below them. Most of the owners only arrived during the high season, leaving the empty land to the small tribe of year-round residents in other months. Even in summer, most tourists didn't venture beyond the main highway or travel north of the shopping towns like Fish Creek, Ephraim, and Sister Bay. When you got as far north as Gills Rock and Northport, you were usually alone.

He drove to the very end of Port des Morts Drive, where he parked in a sheltered turnaround. He got out of his Tahoe and walked up a muddy dirt driveway toward Peter Hoffman's log home. It was a small house on a large lot that was thick with mature oak trees. Pete had lived there since he and Reich returned from Vietnam together. His friend kept it impeccably maintained; the house was his hobby and his passion. There was not much else in Pete's life, not since the loss of his wife to cancer seven years ago. Not since his retirement.

Not since the fire.

Reich rang the bell, but the quietness of the house told him that Pete had left for his morning hike. He knew where to find him. He got back in his truck, retraced his path for a quarter-mile, and turned toward the water at Kenosha Drive, which led into the county park. Toward the end of the short road, he could see the bay through the grove of towering spruce trees, and under the dark sky, the water was so blue it was almost black. He parked in the dormant grass, where remnants of snow clung to shaded patches of earth. Ahead of him were two gray benches, angled toward the water. Sitting on one bench was Peter Hoffman.

Reich climbed down from his truck. He could see his breath. The morning was cold, with a gusty breeze that had tossed the island ferry like a whale heaving up and down through the waves. Even in summer, it was cold here, but he never felt the cold himself, or if he did, he shut it out of his mind. At sixty years old, he woke up every morning with a bone-deep aching in his limbs, but he didn't let it stop him from the chores of the day: shoveling his island driveway, splitting and chopping wood for the fireplace, or lifting weights religiously in his basement gym. As far as Reich was concerned, he may as well have been forty-five.

He wore a brown sheriff's department uniform, which fitted perfectly and was pressed into sharp creases. He hadn't gained a pound in years. His badge glinted like gold on his chest, and he shined his boots to a high polish every night, cleaning off the grime of the job, which took him into muddy, dusty corners of the county. His white hair was cropped to a half-inch length and was as flat as it had been in his Marine days. He wasn't tall, about five feet eight, but he had fought and beaten men who were thirty years younger and fifty pounds heavier over the years. He figured he still could.

Reich watched the water with a grim expression. You could live here your whole life, as he had, and find something different in the colors of the waves every day. On the horizon, he saw the rocky outline of Plum Island and, beyond it, the low shelf of Washington Island, where he'd bought his home in the 1970s and stayed there, alone, unmarried, ever since. He felt a kinship with the island and the rocky passage to the mainland, but he was no romantic about it. Every season, they fished out the bodies of those who underestimated Death's Door.

Not saying a word, Reich sat down on the bench opposite Peter Hoffman, who didn't look at him. Tree stumps dotted the clearing around them. Spidery shadows from the birches made a web in the grass. Pete drank coffee from the plastic cup of a Thermos, and Reich could see steam clouding above the mug. He could also smell whiskey on his friend's breath.

'Pretty early for the sauce, Pete.'

Pete held out the Thermos. 'You want some?'

Reich shook his head. He liked to drink, but never on duty and never when he was flying or driving. And not at nine in the morning.

'You heard?' Reich asked.

Pete swallowed his doctored coffee and wiped his mouth. His eyes were focused way out in the bay. He nodded, but he didn't say anything.

'Glory Fischer,' Reich murmured. 'Like that little girl didn't suffer enough.'

Pete took a loud, ragged breath. Reich thought his friend might cry. He was worried about Pete and had been for the better part of a year. When they'd served together, Pete had been just like himself, a hard nail you could pound and never bend its shape. That had stayed true for most of their lives. Both of them were natives, which made them a rare breed in Door County. They could practically see each other's homes across the four miles of the passage. They'd hunted, fished, and gotten drunk together more times than Reich could count. They had identical values about God, life, and evil that had stayed rock solid while the rest of the world went to hell.

But this was not the Pete he knew. The old man drinking on a bench in the early morning. Letting himself go. Drowning in his sorrow. Limping around his empty house, thanks to the bullet he'd taken when he stepped in front of a rifle aimed at Reich in 1969. His rigid bearing had begun to slump, and only his hair, which was still oddly black, resembled the man who had been Reich's best friend for his entire life. Pete was eight years older, and he looked as if he, like the water, was at death's door.

'I talked to Delia,' Reich told him. 'She's been in Florida with Tresa and Troy Geier for a couple days, trying to get the local cops off their asses. She'll be home today. Tresa's not going back to River Falls this term. She's staying here.'

'Good thing,' Pete rumbled.

'Delia and the cops think it was that son of a bitch who was banging Tresa,' Reich added. 'The teacher. Mark Bradley. He was down there at the hotel. The cops are pretty sure he was on the beach with Glory.'

Pete turned to him with bloodshot eyes. 'Is he going to get what he deserves this time?'

'If I have anything to say about it, you're damn right he will.'

The two men sat in silence. The wind roared between them, waking up the trees. Early-season birds chattered in agitation. Peter Hoffman pushed himself off the bench, and his body swayed unsteadily. Reich made a move to help him, but Pete waved him away. Pete leaned against a tree stump and overturned his Thermos, letting the coffee splash into a puddle in the dirt. He straightened up as well as he could and looked down at Reich with immense sadness.

'It's going to come up again, isn't it?' Pete asked. 'The fire.'

'I imagine it will.'

'I really thought we were done with it. I thought it was over.'

Reich said nothing. He knew the fire wasn't the kind of event that was ever really over. No matter how much you tried to lock the past in a cellar, it found a way to get out. That had been true for Pete since it happened, and it was hard to blame him. He'd lost his oldest daughter. Two of his grandchildren. All of that, the year after his wife succumbed to a slow, horrible disease. It was like having his whole life leveled to the ground with napalm.

'I guess the fire got Glory after all,' Pete went on.

Reich shook his head fiercely. 'This has nothing to do with the fire or with Harris Bone. Mark Bradley is the one who did this to Glory, and I'm not going to let him throw up a smokescreen.'

Peter Hoffman shoved his hands in his pockets and stared at the sky through the tangle of trees. 'Harris Bone,' he said fiercely.

Reich found himself getting angry with his friend. 'We can't change the past, Pete. This is about getting justice for Glory. OK? We owe it to that girl. We were the ones who found her.'

It was over before anyone knew.

It was over before there were sirens and lights and before a single high-pressure fire hose blasted water over the super-heated remains. By the time a neighbor near Kangaroo Lake awoke in the middle of the night and smelled the sharp aroma of burning wood in the air, and called 911, the Bone house was gone, its walls consumed into ash, its roof caved in over scorched Sheetrock and stone. The fire was complete in its destruction.

That night, Felix Reich and Peter Hoffman had been playing poker with two of Felix's deputies in a farmhouse east of Egg Harbor. The air had the deadness of summer, humid and warm. Mosquitoes and moths clung to the screens. Their T-shirts were wet with sweat. They were on County Road E, only three miles west of the home where Pete's son-in-law lived. Harris Bone was married to Pete's daughter Nettie, father to his grandchildren Karl, Scott and Jen. That was the man's only redeeming quality in Pete's eyes.

Reich knew that Pete had little time for his son-in-law of seventeen years. Harris had taken over his mother's liquor store in Sturgeon Bay after she passed away, but it had failed when a larger competitor opened in town. Since then, he had spent most of his life on the road, scraping together money as a vending machine salesman around the state of Wisconsin. Even when he was home, there was no peace. He and Nettie tore into each other like feral cats. It was a house painted over with thick coats of bitterness and bile.

In truth, Reich knew that Nettie was no prize, but you didn't say that to a friend. He'd listened to her pick apart her husband for years. Harris was a failure. He wasn't religious enough. He wasn't successful enough. He didn't know how to work with his hands. He was always wrong. Reich, who'd never wanted a wife and never missed having one, felt the tiniest sympathy for Harris every time he was in the house, listening to the man's ego get chipped away by this tiny, overbearing woman, who dominated his life from her wheelchair. The boys had begun to pick up the same habits, running down their father to win their mother's approval. For Harris, being home in that house must have felt like being in a cage.

Reich knew they would never divorce. Godly couples didn't do that. He had just never imagined where it would all lead when Harris finally snapped.

He heard the call on his radio as the poker game was winding down. The report of the fire. He jumped in his truck to respond, and Pete, who'd driven with him to the game, joined him for the ride. They had no address, but the closer they got to Kangaroo Lake, the more the smoke guided them, until they spotted a black column above the trees that was even darker than the night sky. It had never occurred to either one of them where the fire might be, and it was only when they turned down the road leading to the lake, where Pete's family lived, that Reich began to get a sick feeling. He drove faster, and the loose gravel made a roar under his tires.

He could sense it in Pete, too. The fear. The horror.

When they were half a mile away, he saw the glow of the fire, but it was too late. He parked on the road, and both men got out and ran, but the flames were already smacking their lips, popping and belching as they picked over the remains. A hundred tiny fires glowed throughout the wreckage, spreading across the wooded lot. Reich felt the heat on his face. He coughed violently as he inhaled smoke. He smelled gasoline and wood, and above all that he recognized a foul odor he hadn't smelled in decades and had hoped he would never smell again.

Burnt human flesh.

Next to him, Pete began to disintegrate. His eyes widened in terrified disbelief, as if he'd been ushered into the belly of Hell to witness the conflagration. He moaned his daughter's name and the names of his grandchildren. He crumpled in the driveway and then ran, stumbling, directly for the fiery core where the house had been. Reich chased after him, knowing that Pete wouldn't stop; he would run into the fire and let it kill him. With a shout, he threw himself on his friend's back and drove Pete into the earth, holding him down while he cried and beat the ground. Reich winced, listening to the primal agony screeching out of Pete's throat, hearing it devolve into whimpers of despair.

When Reich got to his feet again, covered in dirt and ash, he saw Harris Bone.

Harris stood thirty feet away, silent, motionless, watching the work of the fire. His Buick was parked in the grass. Sparks flew around him like fireworks, landing in his hair and making black burn marks like cigarette holes on his clothes. He seemed oblivious to the presence of Reich or to the tortured desperation of his father-in-law. Reich approached Harris carefully, and as he did, he realized that the man reeked of gasoline, and his face was streaked with soot. Harris's eyes, reflecting the fire, were blank and devoid of emotion.

'What happened here, Harris?' Reich asked.

Harris Bone shook his head and murmured, 'I'm sorry.'

'Were they inside? Was your family inside?'

'I'm sorry,' he repeated, continuing to watch the fire as if it were something distant and detached.

Reich heard Peter Hoffman bellowing behind them. 'YOU DID THIS! YOU DID THIS!'

Before Reich could stop him, Pete had Harris on the ground. The old man had the younger man's throat in his grip, and he hammered his son-in-law's skull against the rocks as he squeezed off the air from his windpipe. Harris barely struggled to save himself. Reich grabbed Pete's shoulders and threw his friend bodily away and stood in his way to block him as he charged for Harris again.

'Pete, stop'.'

Crying, breathing hard, Pete backed off and stood with his hands on his knees. Reich took Harris and pulled him up by the collar of his shirt and held him. Without thinking, he made a fist with his left hand and crashed it into Harris's face, where he heard the snap of cartilage breaking. The man's nose erupted in blood, and Harris staggered back and sank to his knees.

Reich rubbed his knuckles, which were bruised and raw. He cursed himself under his breath for losing control. Pete watched him, saying nothing at all.

That was when Reich heard it. A tiny voice, hidden under the roar of the fire. 'Help me!'

He looked up with a sudden urgency.

'What the hell was that?' Reich asked. 'Did you hear that?'

Pete shook his head. A mile away, they both heard the sirens of the fire trucks growing louder.

'Someone's alive,' Reich told him.

He marched into the grass, dodging pockets of smoldering fragments blown from the house. He scoured the burnt yard, pushing through tall weeds. He listened but didn't hear the voice again.

'Hey!' he called. 'Hey, where are you?'

No one answered.

Reich tramped toward the woods on the west side of the house. He made his way around the burnt shell of the old garage, which had disintegrated except for one wall that seemed to defy gravity and cast a shadow into the meadow. He squinted, trying to see through the darkness. The field was a mess of brush and flowers, but just outside the spotty clusters of flames, he saw a flash of pink huddled amid stalks of Queen Anne's lace.

As he watched, the pink bundle moved. He saw a girl's face. Scared eyes. The fire was moving closer to her.

Reich ran.

'I don't want to hear you talking about the fire,' Reich told Peter Hoffman.

Pete nodded slowly. 'I hear you, Felix.'

'Mark Bradley didn't pay for what he did to Tresa, but he sure as hell is going to pay for what he did to Glory. So it's not going to help I anybody if you and me start dredging up the past.'

Reich smoothed his uniform and headed for his Tahoe, leaving Pete alone on the trail, looking out on the water. Before he could climb into his truck, he heard Pete calling after him.

'Felix?'

Reich stopped. 'What is it?'

'You know it doesn't matter what we say or don't say. Somebody's going to make the connection to the fire anyway.'

Reich said nothing. He knew Pete was right.

'They'll say it was Harris Bone who did this to Glory,' Pete went j on, and his voice was broken and old. 'They'll say he finally came back.'