Triple Threat

Game

One Year Ago

The worst fear is the fear that follows you into your own home.

Fear you lock in with you when you latch the door at night.

Fear that cozies up to you twenty-four hours a day, relentless and arrogant, like cancer.

The diminutive woman, eighty-three years old, white hair tied back in a jaunty ponytail, sat at the window of her Upper East Side townhouse, looking out over the trim street, which was placid as always. But she herself was not. She was agitated and took no pleasure in the view she’d enjoyed for thirty years. The woman had fallen asleep last night thinking about the She-Beast and the He-Beast and she’d awakened thinking about them. She’d thought about them all morning and she thought about them still.

She sipped her tea and took some small pleasure in the sliver of autumn sunlight resting on her hands and arms. The flicker of gingko leaves outside, silver green, silver green. Was that all she had left? Minuscule comforts like this? And not very comforting at that.

Fear…

Sarah Lieberman hadn’t quite figured out their game. But one thing was clear: Taking over her life was the goal—like a flag to be captured.

Three months ago Sarah had met the Westerfields at a fundraiser held at the Ninety-second Street Y. It was for a Jewish youth organization, though neither the name nor appearance of the two suggested that was their religious or ethnic background. Still, they had seemed right at home and referred to many of the board members of the youth group as if they’d been friends for years. They’d spent a solid hour talking to Sarah alone, seemingly fascinated with her life in the “Big Apple” (John’s phrase) and explaining how they’d come here from Kansas City to “consummate” (Miriam’s) several business ventures John had set up. “Real estate. That’s my game. Ask me again and I’ll tell you the same.”

They’d had dinner at Marcel’s the next night, on Madison, with John dominating the five-foot-tall woman physically and Miriam doing the same conversationally, flanking Sarah in a booth in the back. She’d wanted her favorite table, which had room for three (yet was usually occupied by one) at the window. But the Westerfields had insisted and, why not? They’d made clear this was their treat.

The two were charming, informed in a Midwest, CNN kind of way, and enthusiastically curious about life in the city—and about her life in particular. Their eyes widened when they learned that Sarah had an apartment on the ground floor of the townhouse she owned on Seventy-fifth Street. Miriam asked if it was available. They’d been looking for a place to stay. The Mandarin Oriental was, Miriam offered, too expensive.

The garden apartment was on the market but was priced high—to keep out the riff-raff, she’d said, laughing. But she’d drop it to fair market value for the Westerfields.

Deal.

Still, Sarah had learned about the world from her husband, a businessman who had successfully gone up against Leona Helmsley at one point. There were formalities to be adhered to and the real estate management company did their due diligence. They reported the references in the Midwest attested to the Westerfields’ finances and prior history.

There was, of course, that one bit of concern: It seemed a bit odd that a fifty-something-year-old mother and a son in his late twenties would be taking an apartment together, when neither one seemed disabled. But life circumstances are fluid. Sarah could imagine situations in which she might find herself living with a family member not a husband. Maybe Miriam’s husband had just died and this was temporary—until the emotional turbulence settled.

And Sarah certainly didn’t know what to make of the fact that while the garden apartment featured three bedrooms, when she and Carmel had brought tea down as the two tenants moved in, only one bedroom seemed to be put to that purpose. The other two were used for storage.

Odd indeed.

But Sarah thought the best of people, always had. The two had been nice to her and, most important, treated her like an adult. It was astonishing to Sarah how many people thought that once you reached seventy or eighty you were really an infant.

That you couldn’t order for yourself.

That you didn’t know who Lady Gaga was.

“Oh, my,” she’d nearly said to one patronizing waitress. “I’ve forgotten how this knife works. Could you cut up my food for me?”

For the first weeks the Westerfields seemed the model tenants. Respectful of landlady and premises, polite and quiet. That was important to Sarah, who’d always been a light sleeper. She didn’t see much of them.

Not at first.

But soon their paths began to cross with more and more frequency. Sarah would return from a shopping trip with Carmel or from a board meeting or luncheon at one of the nonprofits she was involved with and there would be Miriam and John on the front steps or, if the day was cool or wet, in the tiny lobby, sitting on the couch beside the mailboxes.

They brightened when they saw her and insisted she sit with them. They pelted her with stories and observations and jokes. And they could be counted on to ask questions relentlessly: What charities was she involved in, any family members still alive, close friends? New to the area, they asked her to recommend banks, lawyers, accountants, investment advisors, hinting at large reserves of cash they had to put to work soon.

A one-trick puppy, John pronounced solemnly: “Real estate is the way to go.”

It’s also a good way to get your balls handed to you, son, unless you’re very, very sharp. Sarah had not always been a demure, retiring widow.

She began to wonder if a Nigerian scam was looming, but they never pitched to her. Maybe they were what they seemed: oddballs from the Midwest, of some means, hoping for financial success here and an entrée into a New York society that had never really been available to people like them—and that people like them wouldn’t enjoy even if they were admitted.

Ultimately, Sarah decided, it was their style that turned her off. The charm of the first month faded.

Miriam, also a short woman though inches taller than Sarah, wore loud, glittery clothes that clashed with her dark-complexioned, leathery skin. If she didn’t focus, she tended to speak over and around the conversation, ricocheting against topics that had little to do with what you believed you were speaking about. She wouldn’t look you in the eye and she hovered close. Saying, “No, thanks,” to her was apparently synonymous with, “You betcha.”

“This big old town, Sarah,” Miriam would say, shaking her head gravely. “Don’t… you get tuckered out, ‘causa it?”

And the hesitation in that sentence hinted that the woman was really going to say “Don’t it tucker you out?”

John often wore a shabby sardonic grin, as if he’d caught somebody trying to cheat him. He was fleshy big, but strong, too. You could imagine his grainy picture in a newspaper above a story in which the word “snapped” appeared in a quote from a local sheriff.

If he wasn’t grumbling or snide, he’d be snorting as he told jokes, which were never very funny and usually bordered on being off-color.

But avoiding them was gasoline on a flame. When they sensed she was avoiding them they redoubled their efforts to graze their way into her life, coming to her front door at any hour, offering presents and advice… and always the questions about her. John would show up to take care of small handyman tasks around Sarah’s apartment. Carmel’s husband, Daniel, was the building’s part-time maintenance man, but John had befriended him and took over on some projects to give Daniel a few hours off here and there.

Sarah believed the Westerfields actually waited, hiding behind their own door, listening for the sound of footsteps padding down the stairs—and ninety-four-pound Sarah Lieberman was a very quiet padder. Still, when she reached the ground-floor lobby, the Westerfields would spring out, tall son and short mother, joining her as if this were a rendezvous planned for weeks.

If they steamed up to her on the street outside the townhouse, they attached themselves like leeches and no amount of “Better be going” or “Have a good day now” could dislodge them. She stopped inviting them into her own two-story apartment—the top two floors of the townhouse—but when they tracked her down outside they would simply walk in with her when she returned.

Miriam would take her groceries and put them away and John would sit forward on the couch with a glass of water his mother brought him and grin in that got-you way of his. Miriam sat down with tea or coffee for the ladies and inquired how Sarah was feeling, did she ever go out of town, did you read about that man a few years ago, Bernie Madoff? Are you careful about things like that, Sarah? I certainly am.

Oh, Lord, leave me alone…

Sarah spoke to the lawyer and real estate management agent and learned there was nothing she could do to evict them.

And the matter got worse. They’d accidentally let slip facts about Sarah’s life that they shouldn’t have known. Bank accounts she had, meetings she’d been to, boards she was on, meetings with wealthy bankers. They’d been spying. She wondered if they’d been going through her mail—perhaps in her townhouse when John was sitting on the couch, babysitting her, and his mother was in Sarah’s kitchen making them all a snack.

Or perhaps they’d finagled a key to her mailbox.

Now, that would be a crime.

But she wondered if the police would be very interested. Of course not.

And then a month ago, irritation became fear.

Typically they’d poured inside after her as she returned from shopping alone, Carmel Rodriguez having the day off. Miriam had scooped the Food Emporium bags from her hand and John had, out of “courtesy,” taken her key and opened the door.

Sarah had been too flustered to protest—which would have done little good anyway, she now knew.

They’d sat for fifteen minutes, water and tea at hand, talking about who knew what, best of friends, and then Miriam had picked up her large purse and gone to use the toilet and headed for Sarah’s bedroom.

Sarah had stood, saying she’d prefer the woman use the guest bathroom, but John had turned his knit brows her way and barked, “Sit down. Mother can pick whichever she wants.”

And Sarah had, half-thinking she was about to be beaten to death.

But the son slipped back to conversation mode and rambled on about yet another real estate deal he was thinking of doing.

Sarah, shaken, merely nodded and tried to sip her tea. She knew the woman was rifling through her personal things. Or planting a camera or listening device.

Or worse.

When Miriam returned, fifteen minutes later, she glanced at her son and he rose. In eerie unison, they lockstepped out of the apartment.

Sarah searched but she couldn’t find any eavesdropping devices and couldn’t tell if anything was disturbed or missing—and that might have been disastrous; she had close to three quarters of a million dollars in cash and jewelry tucked away in her bedroom.

But they’d been up to no good—and had been rude and frightening. It was then that she began to think of them as the He-Beast and She-Beast.

Sycophants had given way to tyrants.

They’d become Rasputins.

The Beasts, like viruses, had infected what time Sarah had left on this earth and were destroying it—time she wanted to spend simply and harmlessly: visiting with those she cared for, directing her money where it would do the most good, volunteering at charities, working on the needlepoints she loved so much, a passion that was a legacy from her mother.

And yet those pleasures were being denied her.

Sarah Lieberman was a woman of mettle, serene though she seemed and diminutive though she was. She’d left home in Connecticut at eighteen, put herself through college in horse country in Northern Virginia working in stables, raced sailboats in New Zealand, lived in New Orleans at a time when the town was still honky-tonk, then she’d plunged into Manhattan and embraced virtually every role that the city could offer—from Radio City Music Hall dancer to Greenwich Village Bohemian to Upper East Side philanthropist. At her eightieth birthday party, she’d sung a pretty good version of what had become her theme song over the years: “I’ll Take Manhattan.”

That steely spirit remained but the physical package to give it play was gone. She was an octogenarian, as tiny and frail as that gingko leaf outside the parlor window. And her mind, too. She wasn’t as quick; nor was the memory what it had been.

What could she do about the Beasts?

Now, sitting in the parlor, she dropped her hands to her knees. Nothing occurred to her. It seemed hopeless.

Then, a key clattered in the lock. Sarah’s breath sucked in. She assumed that somehow the Beasts had copied her key and she expected to see them now.

But, no. She sighed in relief to see Carmel return from shopping.

Were tears in her eyes?

“What’s the matter?” Sarah asked.

“Nothing,” the woman responded quickly.

Too quickly.

“Yes, yes, yes… But if something were the matter, give me a clue, dear.”

The solid housekeeper carried the groceries into the kitchen, making sure she didn’t look her boss’s way.

Yes, crying.

“There’s nothing wrong, Mrs. Sarah. Really.” She returned to the parlor. Instinctively, the woman straightened a lace doily.

“Was it him? What did he do?”

John…. The He-Beast.

Sarah knew he was somehow involved. Both Marian and John disliked Carmel, as they did most of Sarah’s friends, but John seemed contemptuous of the woman, as if the housekeeper mounted a campaign to limit access to Sarah. Which she did. In fact several times she had actually stepped in front of John to keep him from following Sarah into her apartment. Sarah had thought he’d been about to hit the poor woman.

“Please, it’s nothing.”

Carmel Rodriguez was five feet, six inches tall and probably weighed 180 pounds. Yet the elderly woman now rose and looked up at her housekeeper, who’d been with her for more than a decade. “Carmel. Tell me.” The voice left no room for debate.

“I got home from shopping? I was downstairs just now?”

Statements as questions—the sign of uncertainty. “I came back from the store and was talking to him and then Mr. John—”

“Just John. You can call him John.”

“John comes up and, just out of nowhere, he says, did I hear about the burglary.”

“Where?”

“The neighborhood somewhere. I said I didn’t. He said somebody broke in and stole this woman’s papers. Like banking papers and wills and deeds and bonds and stocks.”

“People don’t keep stocks and bonds at home. The brokerage keeps them.”

“Well, he told me she got robbed and these guys took all her things. He said he was worried about you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, Mrs. Sarah. And he didn’t want to make you upset but he was worried and did I know where you kept things like that? Was there a safe somewhere? He said he wanted to make sure they were protected.” The woman wiped her face. Sarah had thought her name was Carmen at first, as one would think, given her pedigree and appearance. But, no, her mother and father had named her after the town in California, which they dreamed of someday visiting.

Sarah found a tissue and handed it to the woman. This was certainly alarming. It seemed to represent a new level of invasiveness. Still, John Westerfield’s probing was constant and familiar, like a low-grade fever, which Carmel had her own mettle to withstand.

No, something else had happened.

“And?”

“No, really. Just that.”

Sarah herself could be persistent too. “Come, now…”

“He… I think it was maybe a coincidence. Didn’t mean anything.”

Nothing the She-Beast and the He-Beast did was a coincidence. Sarah said, “Tell me anyway.”

“Then he said,” the woman offered, choking back a sob, “if I didn’t tell him, he wouldn’t be able to protect you. And if those papers got stolen, you’d lose all your money. I’d lose my job and… and then he said my daughter might have to leave her high school, Immaculata.”

“He said that?” Sarah whispered.

Carmel was crying harder now. “How would he know she went there? Why would he find that out?”

Because he and his mother did their homework. They asked their questions like chickens pecking up seed and stones.

But now, threatening Carmel and her family?

“I got mad and I said I couldn’t wait until the lease is up and his and his mother went away forever! And he said oh, they weren’t going anywhere. They checked the law in New York and as long as they pay the rent and don’t break the lease they can stay forever. Is that true, Mrs. Sarah?”

Sarah Lieberman said, “Yes, Carmel, it is true.” She rose and sat down at the Steinway piano she’d owned for nearly twenty years. It had been a present from her second husband for their wedding. She played a few bars of Chopin, her favorite composer and, in her opinion, the most keyboard-friendly of the great classicists.

Carmel continued, “When he left he said, ‘Say hi to your family for me, Carmel. Say hi to Daniel. You know, your husband, he’s a good carpenter. And say hi to Rosa. She’s a pretty girl. Pretty like her mother.’ ” Carmel was shivering now, tears were flowing.

Sarah turned from the piano and touched the maid on the shoulder. “It’s all right, dear. You did the right thing to tell me.”

The tears slowed and finally stopped. A Kleenex made its way around her face.

After a long moment Sarah said, “When Mark and I were in Malaysia—you know he was head of a trade delegation there?”

“Yes, Mrs. Sarah.”

“When we were there for that, we went to this preserve.”

“Like a nature preserve?”

“That’s right. A nature preserve. And there was this moth he showed us. It’s called an Atlas moth. Now, they’re very big—their wings are six or eight inches across.”

“That’s big, sí.”

“But they’re still moths. The guide pointed at it. ‘How can it defend itself? What does it have? Teeth? No. Venom? No. Claws? No.’ But then the guide pointed out the markings on this moth’s wings. And it looked just like a snake’s head! It was exactly like a cobra. Same color, everything.”

“Really, Mrs. Sarah?”

“Really. So that the predators aren’t sure whether it would be safe to eat the moth or not. So they usually move on to something else and leave the moth alone.”

Carmel was nodding, not at all sure where this was going.

“I’m going to do that with the Westerfields.”

“How, Mrs. Sarah?”

“I’ll show them the snake head. I’m going to make them think it’s too dangerous to stay here and they should move out.”

“Good! How are you going to do that?”

“Did I show you my birthday present?”

“The flowers?”

“No, this.” Sarah took an iPhone from her purse. She fiddled with the functions, many of which she had yet to figure out. “My nephew in Virginia gave it to me. Freddy. He’s a good man. Now, this phone has a recorder in it.”

“You’re going to record them, doing that? Threatening you?”

“Exactly. I’ll email a copy to my lawyer and several other people. The Westerfields’ll have to leave me alone.”

“But it might not be safe, Mrs. Sarah.”

“I’m sure it won’t be. But it doesn’t look like I have much choice, do I?”

Then Sarah noticed that Carmel was frowning, looking away.

The older woman said, “I know what you’re thinking. They’ll just go find somebody else to torture and do the same thing to them.”

“Yes, that’s what I was thinking.”

Sarah said softly, “But in the jungle, you know, it’s not the moth’s job to protect the whole world, dear. It’s the moth’s job to stay alive.”

Present Day

“You want me to find somebody?” the man asked the solemn woman sitting across from him. “Missing person?”

The Latina woman corrected solemnly, “Body. Not somebody. A body.”

“Excuse me?”

“A body. I want to know where a body is. Where it’s buried.”

“Oh.” Eddie Caruso remained thoughtfully attentive but now that he realized the woman might be a crackpot he wanted mostly to get back to his iPad, on which he’d been watching a football—well, soccer—match currently underway in Nigeria. Eddie loved sports. He’d played softball in his middle school days, Little League and football, well, gridiron, in high school and then, being a skinny guy, he’d opted for billiards pool in college (to raise tuition while, for the most part, avoiding bodily harm). But the present sport of his heart was soccer.

Okay, football.

But he was also a businessman and crackpots could be paying clients, too. He kept his attention on the substantial woman across his desk, which was bisected by a slash of summer light, reflected off a nearby Times Square high-rise.

“Okay. Keep going, Mrs. Rodriguez.”

“Carmel.”

“Carmel?”

“Carmel.”

“A body, you were saying.”

“A murdered woman, a friend.”

He leaned forward, now intrigued. Crackpot clients could not only pay well. They also often meant Game—a term coined by sportsman Eddie Caruso; it was hard to define. It meant basically the interesting, the weird, the captivating. Game was that indefinable aspect of love and business and everything else, not just sports, that kept you engaged, that got the juices flowing, that kept you off balance.

People had Game or they didn’t. And if not, break up.

Jobs had Game or they didn’t. And if not, quit.

Another thing about Game. You couldn’t fake it.

Eddie Caruso had a feeling this woman, and this case, had Game.

She said, “A year ago, I lost someone I was close to.”

“I’m sorry.”

The iPad went into sleep mode. When last viewed, a winger for Senegal had been moving up through the markers, to try to score. But Caruso let the sleeping device lie. The woman was clearly distraught about her loss. Besides, Senegal wasn’t going to score.

“Here.” Carmel opened a large purse and took out what must’ve been fifty sheets of paper, rumpled, gray, torn. Actual newspaper clippings, too, which you didn’t see much, as opposed to computer printouts, though there were some of those, too. She set them on his desk and rearranged them carefully. Pushed the stack forward.

“What’s this?”

“News stories about her, Sarah Lieberman. She was the one murdered.”

Something familiar, Caruso believed. New York is a surprisingly small town when it comes to crime. News of horrific violence spreads fast, like a dot of oil on water, and the hard details seat themselves deep in citizens’ memories. The Yuppie Murderer. The Subway Avenger. The Wilding Rape. Son of Sam. The Werewolf Slasher.

Caruso scanned the material fast. Yes, the story came back to him. Sarah Lieberman was an elderly woman killed by a bizarre couple—a mother and son pair of grifters from the Midwest. He saw another name in the stories, one of the witnesses: that of the woman sitting in front of him. Carmel had been Sarah’s housekeeper and Carmel’s husband, Daniel, the part-time maintenance man.

She nodded toward the stack. “Read those, read that. You’ll see what I’m talking about.”

Generally Caruso didn’t spend a lot of time in the free initial consulting session. But then it wasn’t like he had much else going on.

Besides, as he read, he knew instinctively, this case had Game written all over it.

# # #

Here’s Eddie Caruso: A lean face revealing not unexpected forty-two-year-old creases, thick and carefully trimmed dark blond hair, still skinny everywhere, except for a belly that curls irritatingly over the belt hitching up Macy’s sale Chinese-made somewhat wool slacks. A dress shirt, today blue of color, light blue like the gingham that infected the state fairs Caruso worked as a boy to make money for cars and dates and eventually college.

Rhubarb pie, cobbler, pig shows, turkey wings, dunk-the-clown.

That was where he came from.

And this is where he is: not the FBI agent he dreamed of being, nor the disillusioned personal injury lawyer he was, but a pretty good private investigator, which suits his edgy, ebullient, Game-addicted personality real well.

The actual job description is “security consultant.”

Nowadays, everybody cares about security. They don’t about investigating. Why should they? A credit card and the Internet make us all Sam Spades.

Still, Eddie Caruso likes to think of himself as a PI.

Caruso has a scuffed, boring, nondescript office in a building those same adjectives apply to, Forty-sixth near Eighth—decorated (office, not building) with close to twenty pictures he himself has taken with a very high-speed Canon of athletes in action. You’d think he was a sports lawyer. The building features mostly orthodontists, plastic surgeons, accountants, one-man law firms and a copy shop. That’s one great thing about New York: Even in the Theater District, the Mecca of all things artistic, people need teeth and boobs fixed up, their taxes paid and resumes exaggerated. Next door is a touristy but dependable restaurant of some nebulous Middle Eastern/Mediterranean affiliation; it excels at the grilled calamari. Caruso, who lives in Greenwich Village and who often walks the three miles to work (to banish the overhang of gut), likes the five-story bathwater-gray building, the location, too. Though if the city doesn’t stop digging up the street in front of the building Caruso may just write a letter.

Which he’ll never get around to, of course.

Now, Eddie Caruso finished reading the account of the murder, well, skimming the account of the murder, and pushed the material back toward Carmel.

Yep, Game…

Sarah Lieberman’s story had indeed interested Caruso, as Mrs. Rodriguez here had suggested. Sarah’s itinerant younger days, a bit of a rebel, her settling into life in New York City quite easily. She seemed to be irreverent and clever and to have no patience for the pretense that breeds in the Upper East Side like germs in a four-year-old’s nose. Caruso decided he would have liked the woman.

And he was mightily pissed off that the Westerfields had beat her to death with a hammer, wrapped the body in a garbage bag, and dumped her in an unmarked grave.

It seemed that mother and son had met Sarah at a fundraiser and saw a chance to run a grift. They recognized her as a wealthy, elderly vulnerable woman with no family, living alone. A perfect target. They leased the apartment on the ground floor of her Upper East Side townhouse and began a relentless campaign to take control of her life. She had finally had enough and one morning in July, a year ago, tried to record them threatening her. They’d caught her in the act, though, and forced her to sign a contract selling them the townhouse for next to nothing. Then they zapped her with a Taser and bludgeoned her to death.

That afternoon Carmel returned to the townhouse from shopping and found her missing. Knowing that the Westerfields had been asking about her valuables and that Sarah was going to record them threatening her, the housekeeper suspected what had happened. She called the police. Given that—and the fact that a routine search revealed the Westerfields had a criminal history in Missouri and Kansas—officers responded immediately. They found some fresh blood in the garage. That was enough for a search warrant. Crime scene found the Taser with Sarah’s skin in the barbs, a hammer with John’s prints and Sarah’s blood and hair, and duct tape with both Sarah’s and Miriam’s DNA. A roll of garbage bags, too, three of them missing.

The clerk from a local spy and security shop verified the Taser had been bought, with cash, by John Westerfield a week earlier. Computer forensic experts found the couple had tried to hack into Sarah’s financial accounts—without success. Investigators did, however, find insurance documents covering close to seven hundred thousand dollars in cash and jewelry kept on her premises. Two necklaces identified as Sarah’s were found in Miriam’s jewelry box. All of the valuables had been stolen.

The defense claimed that drug gangs had broken in and killed her. Or, as an alternative, that Sarah had gone senile and went off by herself on a bus or train.

Juries hate lame excuses and it took the Lieberman panel all of four hours to convict. The two were sentenced to life imprisonment. The farewell in the courtroom—mother and son embracing like spouses—made for one real queasy photograph.

Carmel now said to Eddie Caruso, “I kept hoping the police would find her remains, you know?”

John’s car had been spotted several days before Sarah disappeared in New Jersey, where he was reportedly looking at real property for one of his big business deals, none of which ever progressed past the daydreaming phase. It was assumed the body had been dumped there.

Carmel continued, “I don’t know about her religion, the Jewish one, but I’m sure it’s important to be buried and have a gravestone and have people say some words over you. To have people come and see you. Don’t you think, Mr. Caruso?”

He himself didn’t think that was important but he now nodded.

“The problem is, see, this is a simple death.”

“Simple?” The woman sat forward, brows furrowing a bit.

“Not to make little of it, understand me,” Caruso added quickly, seeing the dismay on her face. “It’s just that it’s open and shut, you know? Nasty perps, good evidence. No love children, no hidden treasure that was never recovered, no conspiracy theories. Fast conviction. With a simple death, people lose interest. The leads go cold real fast. I’m saying, it could be expensive for me to take on the case.”

“I could pay you three thousand dollars. Not more than that.”

“That’d buy you about twenty-five hours of my time.” On impulse he decided to waive expenses, which he marked up and made a profit on.

Before he went further, though, Caruso asked, “Have you thought this through?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it was a terrible crime but justice’s been done. If I start searching, I may have to ask you things--you’ll have to relive the incident. And, well, sometimes when people look into the past, they find things they wish they hadn’t.”

“What could that be?”

“Maybe there’d be no way to recover the body, even if I find it. Maybe it was… let’s say disrespected when it was disposed of.”

Carmel had not considered this, he could tell. Clients rarely did. But she said, “I want to say a prayer at her grave, wherever it is. I don’t care about anything else.”

Caruso nodded and pulled a retainer agreement from his credenza. They both signed it. Also, on whim, he penned in a discounted hourly rate. He’d seen pictures of her three children when she’d opened her purse to get her driver’s license number for the agreement. They were teenagers and the parents were surely facing the horror of college expenses.

You’re a goddamn softy, he told himself.

“All right,” he said to her. “Let me keep these and I’ll get to work. Give me your home and mobile numbers.”

A hesitation. “Email please. Only email.” She wrote it down.

“Sure. Not call?”

“No, please don’t. See, I mentioned to my husband I was thinking about doing this and he said it wasn’t a good idea.”

“Why?”

She nodded at the news clippings. “It’s in there somewhere. There was a man maybe working for the Westerfields, the police think. Daniel’s worried he’d find out if we started looking for the body. He’s probably dangerous.”

Glad you mentioned it, Caruso thought wryly. “Okay, I’ll email.” He rose.

Carmel Rodriguez stepped forward and actually hugged him, tears in her eyes.

Caruso mentally bumped his fee down another twenty-five, just to buy her a little more of his time.

When she’d gone he booted up the iPad just to see what he’d missed sportswise. The match was over. Senegal had won five zip.

Five?

A BBC announcer, beset by very un-BBC enthusiasm, was gushing, “Some of the most spectacular scoring I have ever seen in all my years—”

Caruso shut the device off. He pulled the stack of clippings closer, to take more notes—and to read up in particular on the Westerfields’ possible accomplice.

He was reflecting that in all his years as a privately investigating security consultant, he’d been in one pushing match that lasted ten seconds. Not one real fight. Caruso did have a license to carry a pistol and he owned one but he hadn’t touched his in about five years. He believed the bullets had turned green.

He wondered if he would in fact be in danger.

Then decided, so be it. Game had to come with a little risk. Otherwise it wasn’t Game.

# # #

Senior NYPD detective Lon Sellitto dropped into his chair in his Major Cases office, One Police Plaza. Dropped, not sat. Rumpled—the adjective applied to both the gray suit and the human it encased—he looked with longing affection at a large bag from Baja Express he’d set on his excessively cluttered desk. Then at his visitor. “You want a taco?”

“No, thanks,” Caruso said.

The portly cop said, “I don’t get the cheese or the beans. It cuts the calories way down.”

Eddie Caruso had known Sellitto for years. The detective was an all right guy, who didn’t bust the chops of private cops, as long as they didn’t throw their weight around and sneak behind the back of the real Boys in Blue. Caruso didn’t. He was respectful.

But not sycophantic.

“You’ll guarantee that?” Caruso asked.

“What?”

“No beans, so you’re not going to fart. I don’t want to be here if you’re gonna fart.”

“I meant I don’t get the refried beans. I get the regular beans, black beans or whatever the hell they are. They’re lot less calories. ‘Fried’ by itself is not a good word when you’re losing weight. ‘Refried’? Think how fucking bad that is. But black beans’re okay. Good fiber, tasty. But, yeah, I fart when I eat ‘em. Like any Tom, Dick and Harry. Everybody does.”

“Can we finish business before you indulge?”

Sellitto nodded at a slim, limp NYPD case file. “We will, ‘cause sorry to say, the quote business ain’t going to take that long. The case is over and done with and it wasn’t much to start with.”

Out the window you could catch a glimpse of the harbor and Governor’s Island. Caruso loved the view down here. He’d thought from time to time about relocating but then figured the only real estate he could afford in this ‘hood would come with a view even worse than his present one in Midtown, which was a few trees and a lot of sunlight, secondhand--bounced off that Times Square high-rise.

The detective shoved the file Caruso’s way. The Sarah Lieberman homicide investigation. “That was one fucked-up twosome, the perps.” Sellitto winced. “They ick me out. Mother and son, with one bed in the townhouse. Think about it.”

Caruso would rather not.

Sellitto continued. “So your client wants to know where the Dysfunctional Family dumped the body?”

“Yep, she’s religious. You know.”

“No, I don’t.”

“I don’t either. But that’s the way of it.”

“I looked through it fast.” Sellitto offered a nod toward the file. “But the best bet for the corpse is Jersey.”

“I read that in the Daily News. But there were no specifics.”

Sellitto grumbled, “It’s in the file. Somewhere near Kearny Marsh.”

“Don’t know it.”

“No reason to. Off Bergen Avenue. The name says it all.”

“Kearny.”

Sellitto’s round face cracked a smile. “Ha, you’re funny for a private dick. Why don’t you join the force? We need people like you.”

“Marsh, huh?”

“Yeah. It’s all swamp. Serious swamp.”

Caruso asked, “Why’d they think there?”

“Ran John Westerfield’s tags. They had him at a toll booth on the Jersey Turnpike. He got off at the Two-Eighty exit and back on again a half hour later. Security footage in the area showed the car parked in a couple places by the Marsh. He claimed he was checking out property to buy. He said he was this real estate maven. Whatever maven is. What’s that word mean?”

“If we were in a Quentin Tarantino movie,” Caruso said, “this’s where I’d start a long digression about the word ‘maven’.”

“Well, it isn’t and I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

Sellitto definitely had Game.

Caruso flipped through the smaller folder inside the bigger one. The smaller was labeled John Westerfield. Many of the documents were his own notes and records, and a lot of them had to do with real estate, all the complex paperwork that rode herd on construction in Manhattan: foundation-pouring permits, crane permits, street-access permissions. Interestingly—and incriminatingly—these were all multimillion-dollar projects that John couldn’t possibly have engaged in without Sarah Lieberman’s money.

“Good policing. When was Westerfield in Jersey?”

“I don’t know. A couple days before she disappeared.”

“Before? Was there a toll record of him being there after she disappeared.”

“No. That’s where the grassy knoll effect comes in.”

“The…?”

“Dallas. Kennedy assassination. The other gunman.”

“I don’t believe there was one. It was Oswald. Alone.”

“I’m not arguing that. My point is that the Westerfields probably did have an accomplice. He’s the one who got rid of the body. In his car. So there was no record of Westerfield returning to Jersey.”

“Yeah, my client mentioned there might’ve been somebody else. Why would he be the one who dumped the body, though?”

Sellitto tapped the file. “Just after they killed her—Crime Scene knew the time from the blood--the Westerfields were seen in public so they’d have an alibi. They would’ve hired somebody to dump the body. Probably somebody connected.”

“Organized crime?”

“What ‘connected’ means.”

“I know that. I’m just saying.”

Sellitto said, “We think some low-grade punk. The Westerfields had connections with mob folks in Kansas City and they must’ve tapped some affiliate here.”

“Like Baja Fresh. Mobster franchises.”

Sellitto rolled his eyes, maybe thinking Caruso wasn’t as clever as he’d first thought. The detective said, “The Westerfields stole three-quarters of a million from Mrs. Lieberman, cash and jewelry. They would’ve paid this guy from that.”

Caruso liked it that Sellitto called her Mrs. Lieberman. Respect. That was good, that was part of Game. “Any leads to him?”

“No, but he was after-the-fact and nobody in the DA’s office gave a shit really. They had the doers. Why waste resources.” Sellitto finally gave in. He opened the lunch bag. It did smell pretty good.

Caruso began, “The couple—”

“They’re mother and son, I wouldn’t call ‘em a couple.”

“The couple, they say anything about the third guy?”

Sellitto looked at Caruso as if he’d gotten stupid himself. “Remember, it was gangbangers who killed her. Or she decided to take a cruise and forgot to tell anybody. To the quote couple, there was no third guy.”

“So I go searching in Jersey. Where exactly is this Kearny Marsh?”

Sellitto nodded at the file.

Caruso took it and retreated to a corner of Sellitto’s office to read.

“One thing,” the detective said.

Caruso looked up, expecting legalese and disclaimers.

The detective nodded at the bowl of black beans he was eating. “Stay at your own risk.”

# # #

Hopeless.

Eddie Caruso stood about where John Westerfield’s green Mercedes had been parked as the man had surveyed the area, looking for the best place to hide a body.

There was no way he could find where Sarah Lieberman had been buried.

Before him were hundreds of acres of marshland, filled with brown water, green water, gray water, grass, cattails and mulberry trees. A trillion birds. Gulls, ducks, crows, hawks and some other type—tiny, skittish creatures with iridescent blue wings and white bellies; they were living in houses on poles stuck at the shoreline.

New Jersey housing developments, Eddie Caruso reflected. But he didn’t laugh at his own cleverness because he was being assaulted by suicidal and focused mosquitos.

Slap.

And in the distance the crisp magnificence of Manhattan, illuminated by the midafternoon sun.

Slap.

The water was brown and seemed to be only two or three feet deep. You could wrap a body in chicken wire, add a few weights, and dump it anywhere.

He wasn’t surprised searchers hadn’t found her brutalized corpse.

And there was plenty of land, too—in which it would be easy to dig a grave. It was soupy and he nearly lost his Ecco.

He wiped mud off his shoe as best he could and then speculated: How much would it cost to hire a helicopter with some sort of high-tech radar or infrared system to detect corpses? A huge amount, he guessed. And surely the body was completely decomposed by now. Was there any instrumentation that could find only bones in this much territory? He doubted it.

A flash of red caught his eye.

What’s that?

It was a couple of people in a canoe.

New Jersey Meadowlands Commission was printed on the side.

Eddie Caruso’s first thought was, of course: Meadowlands. May the Giants have a better season next year.

His second thought was: Shit.

This was government land, Caruso realized.

Meadowlands Commission…

John Westerfield claimed he’d come here to look into a real estate deal. But that was a lie. There’d be no private development on protected wetlands. And using the toll road, which identified him? He’d done that intentionally. To lead people off. Not being the brightest star in the heavens, he and his mother had probably figured they couldn’t get convicted if the body was never found. So they’d left a trail here to stymie the police.

In fact, they’d buried Sarah Lieberman someplace else entirely.

Where…?

Eddie Caruso thought back to the police file in Lon Sellitto’s office. He believed he knew the answer.

# # #

An hour and a half later—thank you very much, New York City traffic—Caruso parked his rental illegally. He was sure to incur a ticket, if not a tow, here near City Hall since it was highly patrolled. But he was too impatient to wait to find a legal space.

He found his way to the Commercial Construction Permits Department.

A slow-moving clerk with an impressive do of dreadlocks surrounding her otherwise delicate face looked over his requests and disappeared. For a long, long time. Maybe coffee breaks had to be taken at exact moments or forfeited forever. Finally, she returned with three separate folders.

“Sign for these.”

He did.

“Can I check these out?”

“No.”

“But, the thing is—”

She said reasonably, “You can read ‘em, you can memorize ‘em, you can copy ‘em. But if you want copies you gotta pay and the machines say they take dollar bills but nobody’s been able to get it to take a dollar bill in three years. So you need change.”

“Do you have—”

“We don’t give change.”

Caruso thanked her anyway and returned to a cubicle to read the files.

These were originals of permits issued to three construction companies that were building high-rises on the Upper East Side not far from Sarah Lieberman’s townhouse. Caruso had found copies of these in John Westerfield’s police file, the one that Sellitto let him look through. They’d been discovered in the man’s desk. John had claimed to be involved in real estate work, so who would have thought twice about finding these folders? No one did.

But Eddie Caruso had.

Because why would John Westerfield have copies of permits for construction of buildings he’d had nothing to do with?

There was only one reason, which became clear when Caruso had noted that these three permits were for pouring foundations.

What better way to dispose of a body than to drop it into a pylon about to be filled with concrete?

But which building was it? Eddie Caruso’s commitment to Carmel Rodriguez was to find out exactly where Sarah Lieberman had been buried.

As he looked down at the permits he suddenly realized how he could find out.

He copied the first pages of all three permits, after getting change from another customer because, yeah, his dollars’d all been rejected by the temperamental Xerox machine. Then, returning to the cubicle, he carefully—and painfully—worked the industrial-sized staples from the paper and replaced the originals with the copies.

This was surely a misdemeanor of some kind, but he’d developed quite an affection for Mrs. Carmel Rodriguez (he had dropped his rate by another twenty-five dollars an hour). And, by the by, he’d come to form an affection for the late Mrs. Sarah Lieberman, too. Nothing was going to stop him from learning where the poor woman was resting in peace.

To his relief, the clerk missed the theft, and with a sincere smile Caruso thanked her and wandered outside.

Lord be praised, there was no ticket and in a half hour he was parked outside the private forensic lab he sometimes used. He hurried inside and paid a premium for expedited service. Then he strolled down to the waiting room, where to his delight, he found a new capsule coffee machine.

Eddie Caruso didn’t drink coffee much and he never drank tea. But he loved hot chocolate. He had recipes for eighty different types and you needed recipes—you couldn’t wing it. (And you never mixed that gray-brown powder from an envelope with hot water, especially envelopes that contained those little fake marshmallows like dandruff.)

But the Keurig did a pretty good job, provided you chocked the resulting cocoa full of Mini-Moo half and half, which Eddie Caruso now did. He sat back to enjoy the frothy beverage, flipping through a Sports Illustrated, which happened to describe the Nigeria-Senegal match as the Game of the Century.

In ten minutes, a forensic tech—a young Asian woman in a white jacket and goggles around her neck—joined him. He’d been planning on asking her out for some time. Three years and four months, to be exact. He hadn’t been courageous, or motivated, enough to do so then. And he wasn’t now.

She said. “Okay, Eddie, here’s what we’ve got. We’ve isolated identifiable prints of six individuals on the permit documents from the city commission you brought me.”

Technicians were always soooo precise.

“Two of them, negative. No record in any commercial or law enforcement database. One set are yours.” She regarded him with what might pass for irony, at least in a forensic tech, and said, “I can report that you are not in any criminal databases either. It is likely, however, that that might not be the case much longer if the police find out how you came to be in possession of an original permit, which by law has to remain on file with the city department in question.”

Precise…

“Oh,” Eddie said offhandedly, “I found ‘em on the street. The permits.”

No skipped beats. She continued, “I have to tell you none are John Westerfield’s.”

This was a surprise and a disappointment.

“But I could identify one other person who touched the documents. We got his prints from military records.”

“Not criminal?”

“No.”

“Who is he?”

“His name’s Daniel Rodriguez.”

It took five seconds.

Carmel’s husband.

Sometimes when people look into the past, they find things they wish they hadn’t….

# # #

Whatever you call your profession, security or investigation, you need to be as professional as any cop.

Eddie Caruso was now in his office, number-crunching what he’d found, not letting a single fact wander away or distort.

Was this true? Could Daniel Rodriguez be the third conspirator, the one who’d actually disposed of Sarah Lieberman’s body?

There was no other conclusion.

He’d worked in Sarah’s building and would have been very familiar with John and Miriam Westerfield. And they had known that Daniel, with three girls approaching college age, would need all the money he could get. He was involved in the trades and would know his way around construction sites. He probably even had friends in the building whose foundation was now Sarah Lieberman’s grave.

Finally, Daniel hadn’t wanted his wife to pursue her plan to find out where Sarah’s body was. He claimed this was because it was dangerous. But, thinking about it, Caruso decided that was crazy. The odds of the other guy finding out were minimal. No, Daniel just didn’t want anybody looking into the case again.

And whatta I do now? Caruso wondered.

Well, there wasn’t much choice. All PIs are under an obligation to inform the police if they’re aware of a felon at large. Besides, anybody who’d participated, however slightly, in such a terrible crime had to go to jail.

Still, was there anything he could do to mitigate the horror that Carmel and their daughters would feel when he broke the news?

Nothing occurred to him. Tomorrow would be a mass of disappointment.

Still, he had to be sure. He needed as much proof of guilt as a cop would. That’s what Game required: resolution, good or bad. Game is never ambiguous.

He assembled some of his tools of the trade. And then decided he needed something else. After all, a man who can toss the body of an elderly woman into a building site can just as easily kill someone who’s discovered he did that. He unlocked the box containing his pistol, nothing sexy, just a revolver, the sort you didn’t see much anymore.

He found the bullets, too. They weren’t green. Which meant, Eddie Caruso assumed, that they still worked.

# # #

The next day Caruso rented an SUV with tinted windows and spent hours following Daniel. It was boring and unproductive, as 99 percent of tailing usually is.

On the surface, round Daniel Rodriguez was a harmless, cheerful man, who seemed to joke a lot and seemed to get along with the construction crews he worked with. Eddie Caruso had expected—and half-hoped—to find him selling crack to school kids. If that had been the case, it would have been easier to report him to the police.

And easier to break the news to his wife and daughters? Caruso wondered. No. Nothing could relieve the sting of that.

Daniel returned home to his small but well-kept house in Queens. Caruso cruised past slowly, parked up the block and stepped outside, making his way to a park across the street, dressed like anybody else in the casual, residential neighborhood—shorts and an Izod shirt, along with sunglasses and a baseball cap. He found a bench and plopped down, pretending to read his iPad, but actually observing the family through the device’s video camera.

Apple had revolutionized the PI business.

The weather was nice and the Rodriguez family cooked out, with Daniel the chef and Carmel and their daughters his assistants. Several neighbors joined them. Daniel seemed to be a good father. Caruso wasn’t recording his words but much of what he said made the whole family laugh.

A look of pure love passed between husband and wife.

Shit, Caruso thought, sometimes I hate this job.

After the barbecue and after the family had been shuffled off to the house, Daniel remained outside.

And something set off an alarm within Caruso: Daniel Rodriguez was scrubbing a grill that no longer needed scrubbing.

Which meant he was stalling. On instinct, Caruso rose and ducked into some dog-piss-scented city bushes. It was good he did. The handyman looked around piercingly, making certain no one was watching. He casually—too casually—disappeared into the garage and came out a short time later, locking the door.

That mission, whatever it was, smelled funky to Caruso. He gave it two hours, for dark to descend and quiet to lull the neighborhood. Then he pulled on latex gloves and broke into the garage with a set of lock-picking tools, having as he often did at moments like this an imaginary conversation with the arresting officer. No, sir, I’m not committing burglary—which is breaking and entering with intent to commit a felony. I’m committing trespass only—breaking and entering with intent to find the truth.

Not exactly a defense under the New York State penal code.

Caruso surveyed the jam-packed garage. A systematic search could take hours, or days. The man was a carpenter and handyman so he had literally tons of wood and plasterboard and cables and dozens of tool chests. Those seemed like natural hiding places but they’d also be the first things stolen if anybody broke in, so Caruso ignored them.

He stood in one place and turned in circles, like a slow-motion radar antenna, looking from shelf to shelf, relying on the fuzzy illumination of the street light. He had a flashlight but he was too close to the house to use it.

Finally he decided: The most likely place one would hide something was in the distant, dusty corner, in paint cans marred with dried drips of color. Nobody’d steal used paint.

And bingo.

In the third and fourth he found what he suspected he would: stacks and stacks of twenties. Also two diamond bracelets.

All, undoubtedly, from Sarah’s safe deposit box. This was his payment from the Westerfields for disposing of the body. They hadn’t mentioned him, of course, at trial because he had enough evidence to sink them even deeper—probably enough to get them the death penalty.

Caruso took pictures of the money and jewelry with a low-light camera. He didn’t end his search there, though, but continued to search through all the cans. Most of them contained paint. But not all. One, on the floor in the corner, held exactly what he needed to figure out Sarah Lieberman’s last resting place.

# # #

“Come in, come in,” Eddie said to Carmel Rodriguez, shutting off the TV.

The woman entered his office and glanced around, squinting, as if he’d just decorated the walls with the sports pictures that had been there forever. “My daughter, Rosa, she plays soccer.”

“That’s my favorite, too.” Eddie sat down, gesturing her into a seat across from the desk. She eased cautiously into it.

“You said you found something.”

The PI nodded solemnly.

Most of Eddie Caruso’s work involved finding runaways, running pre-employment checks and outing personal injury lawsuit fakers, but he handled domestics, too. He’d had to deliver news about betrayal and learned there were generally three different reactions: explosive anger, wailing sorrow or weary acceptance, the last of which was usually accompanied by the eeriest smile of resignation on the face of the earth.

He had no idea how Carmel would respond to what she was about to learn.

But there was no point in speculating. It was time to let her know.

“This is going to be troubling, Carmel. But—”

She interrupted. “You told me there might be things you found that I might not like.”

He nodded and rose, walking to his other door. He opened it and gestured.

She frowned as her husband walked into the room.

The man gave her a sheepish grin and then looked back at the carpet as he sat next to her.

“Daniel! Why are you here?”

Caruso sat back in his office chair, which was starting to develop the mouse-squeak that seemed to return once a month no matter how much WD-40 was involved. He whispered, “Go ahead, Daniel. Tell her.”

He said nothing for a minute and Carmel asked pointedly, “Is this about Mrs. Sarah? Is this about what happened to her?”

The round-faced man nodded. “Okay, honey, Carmel—”

“Tell me,” the housekeeper said briskly.

“I haven’t been honest with you.” Eyes whipping toward her, then away. “You remember last year you told me the Westerfields wanted you to find Mrs. Sarah’s papers?”

“Yes. And when I said no they threatened, sort of threatened our daughter.”

“They did the same to me. They said they couldn’t trust you, you were too good. They wanted me to help them.”

“You?” she whispered.

“Yes, baby. Me! Only it wasn’t just find the papers. They…”

“What? What did they want?”

“Miriam told me Sarah didn’t have long to live anyway.”

“ ‘Anyway.’ What do you mean ‘anyway’?”

“She said Sarah had cancer.”

“She wasn’t sick! She was healthier than that bitch Miriam,” Carmel spat out.

“But they said she was. And she’d told them she’d cut us out of her will. We’d get nothing. They said, if I help them now, if she died now, they could make sure we had lots of money.”

“Helped them out.” Carmel eyed her husband coolly. “You mean, helped them kill her.”

“They said she was greedy. Why should she have so much and people like them, and us, have nothing? It was unfair.”

“And you didn’t tell me? You didn’t tell anybody they were dangerous?”

“I did tell somebody.”

“Who? Not the police, you didn’t.”

Daniel looked at Eddie Caruso, who picked up the remote control and hit ON.

The TV, on which a webcam sat, came to life with a Skype streaming image.

On the screen an elderly woman’s face gazed confidently and with some humor at the couple in the chairs and Eddie Caruso. “Hello, Carmel,” Sarah Lieberman said. “It’s been a long time.”

# # #

What Eddie Caruso had found in the last paint can in the Rodriguez’s garage was a letter from Sarah to Daniel with details of where she’d be spending the rest of her life—a small town near Middleburg, Virginia, with her widower nephew Frederick. Information about how to get in touch with her if need be, where she would be buried and the name of certain discreet jewelers whom he could contact to sell the bracelets Sarah had given him, along with suggestions about how to carefully invest the cash she’d provided, too.

He’d confronted the handyman this morning and while the letter seemed plausible, Caruso had insisted they both contact Sarah Lieberman this morning. She’d told them what had happened and was now telling the same story to her housekeeper.

The simple death he’d described to Carmel Rodriguez was anything but.

“I’m so sorry, Carmel… I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you. You remember that day in July, just a year ago? I was going to take the phone Freddy gave me and record them?”

“Yes, Mrs. Sarah.”

“After you left, I started to go down there. But I met Daniel on the stairs.” Her gaze shifted slightly, taking in the handyman. “He had me come back to my apartment and he told me what they’d just said—that the Beasts wanted him to help kill me. He said they had it all planned. There was nothing anybody could do to stop them.”

“Why not go to the police?” Carmel demanded.

Sarah replied, “Because at worst they’d get a few years in jail for conspiracy. And then they’d be out again, after somebody else. I started thinking about what I told you. Remember the moth?”

“The big moth you and your husband saw in Malaysia. With the wings that look like a snake.”

“That’s right. But I decided: One way to protect yourself is to disguise yourself as a snake. The other way is to be the snake itself. I fight back. I couldn’t kill them but I could make it look like they killed me. I didn’t ask Daniel to help me but he wanted to.”

“I was so mad at them and worried about you and about Rosa! John hinted that he’d been watching her, watching our daughter!”

Sarah said, “The Westerfields were very accommodating. John already had the Taser and the tape and the garbage bags.” She gave a wry laugh. “Think of all the money I’ll waste at Beacon Brothers funeral home here—that damn expensive casket. There are so many cheaper ways to go.”

Daniel said, “We pretended to forge a contract selling the building to them and then took all of the jewelry and cash Mrs. Sarah had in the apartment. She kept some and gave me a very generous amount.”

“And in my will I left Freddy here—” Sarah glanced to the side of the sun room she sat in, apparently where her other coconspirator, her nephew, sat. “—all my personal belongings. Probate took a little while but six months later everything was delivered here. Ah, but back to the scene of the crime, eh, Daniel?”

He winced and looked at Carmel. “When the Westerfields were out and you were shopping, we both went downstairs. I put on gloves and took one of John’s hammers and Mrs. Sarah cut herself. We got her blood on it and some hairs, too. And put some duct tape on her mouth for a minute and we added some of Miriam’s hairs. I rubbed her toothbrush on it, for the DNA. Sarah stuck herself with the sharp points on that Taser. We hid those things in their apartment, then I tried to hack into Mrs. Sarah’s banking accounts from Miriam’s computer.”

“I used to watch CSI,” Sarah said. “I know how these things work.”

“I left the city permits and maps in John’s office.” Daniel started to laugh then reined in when he saw his wife staring at him in dismay. “I was going to say it was funny because we thought the permits would be obvious. But the police missed those entirely; they thought she had been buried in New Jersey. But they missed it; it was Mr. Caruso who figured out about the foundations.”

Sarah said, “And I took the train down here. I’ve had to lead a pretty quiet life—they call it staying off the grid, right Freddy?”

A man’s voice, “That’s right, Aunt Sarah.”

“But I love it in Virginia. It’s so peaceful. I lived here a long time ago and I’d always thought I’d come back to spend my last years in horse country.”

Daniel now turned to Carmel. “I’m sorry, love. I couldn’t tell you!” Daniel said. “This was a crime, what Mrs. Sarah and I did. Putting those people in jail. I wanted to, I wanted to tell you a hundred times. I couldn’t let you get involved.”

Carmel was regarding her husband. “And the money… You said you were opening an account for the girl’s school… And you always had those fifty-dollar bills. I always wondered.”

Sarah said, “He risked a lot to save me. I was very appreciative.” Her voice faded. “And now I think it’s time for my nap. I’d invite you to come down but it’s probably not a good idea for either of you to visit a dead woman, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, Mrs. Sarah.”

“Good-bye, Carmel.”

Both women held their hands up in waves of farewell and Eddie Caruso, a good judge of timing, clicked the TV off.

Caruso said good-bye to the family, suspecting there would be more discussion of the events between husband and wife on the way home. He thought about lowering the bill yet more, but decided against it. After all, he’d done the job, and the case had had more or less a happy ending.

Even if it was entirely unexpected.

But that’s another thing about Game, maybe what really defines a person or event as Game or not: You never know ahead of time how it’s going to turn out.

Speaking of which…

Eddie Caruso propped up his iPad and typed on the keyboard. He was just in time to see Tottenham versus Everton. Fantastic.

You could never lose with Premier League football.

Well, soccer.