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This one’s for Jay and Jen
who’ve grown up to be amazing people.
I love you both more than words can say;
you are the joy in my life.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Prologue
Thank God for October.
Right through the end of September, Boston had been so ungodly hot that she’d come close to melting into a puddle on the sidewalk. But October, Kaye Winslow decided as she cruised Comm Ave in search of a parking space, was as close to perfection as it was possible to be. The days still warm, the nights comfortably cool, the sky a vivid blue, unmarred by summer’s haze, patches of it visible through an overhead canopy of green smudged here and there by daubs of brilliant red and gold.
Luck was with her. She spied a parking space on the opposite side of the street. At Dartmouth, she took an illegal left at the red light, cutting off a delivery van, whose driver blared his horn in token protest. She circled the pedestrian mall and reversed direction, swooping with practiced ease into the empty parking space in blatant disregard of the sign not ten feet away designating it for Back Bay residents only.
Kaye cut the engine, checked her reflection in the rearview mirror and rubbed a splotch of lipstick from her front tooth. Flinging her meticulously streaked blond hair over her shoulder, she gathered up her Gucci briefcase and slid smoothly from the BMW’s soft leather upholstery.
The house stood half a block away, a grand old pile of bricks and mortar situated on Boston’s most elegant thoroughfare. Commonwealth Avenue was the city’s finest jewel, a broad, tree-lined, old-world-style boulevard, bisected by a strip of lush green that rendered it unique in this city of narrow, congested streets. It was one of the most prestigious addresses in Boston. As her associates were fond of saying, location, location, location.
The Worthington house—and calling it a house was a great understatement—had been built by Gerald Worthington in 1886 and handed down through several generations of the Worthington family. When the reigning matriarch had died six months ago and rumors had flown that the heirs were interested in dumping the place and splitting the cash, the Boston real estate world had perked up and taken notice. There wasn’t a broker out there who wouldn’t have gladly sacrificed an appendage to get his or her hands on the property. By some miracle, it had been Kaye Winslow the Worthington heirs had called when they were ready to put the place on the market.
Selling this house, with its six-point-five-million-dollar price tag, would show the world that Winslow & DeLucca was capable of standing its ground against the big agencies: ERA, Coldwell Banker, Century 21. This sale, with a motivated seller and the right buyer, would cement her reputation as a major league player, and then she’d finally be able to put her farce of a marriage to Sam Winslow behind her.
Thinking about her soon-to-be-ex-husband always caused tiny frown lines to bracket her mouth, and Kaye made a conscious effort to relax her facial muscles. At thirty-three, she was too young to be getting wrinkles. But Sam knew just which buttons to push, and he pushed them with clocklike regularity. Two years they’d been married. Two years during which she’d catered to his every whim; two years when she’d been there on his arm, the consummate hostess, the perfect little faculty wife; two years of playing the loving stepmother.
Enough was enough. Sam’s usefulness had come to an end. Kaye had gotten what she wanted from him: respectability. As his wife, she’d gained the kind of acceptance she’d spent her entire life seeking. But now that she’d built a name for herself as a respected member of the real estate community, she didn’t need him anymore. It was time to slough him off like an old skin. Time for a new beginning, a new life. One that didn’t include Professor Sam Winslow or his crazy, anorexic daughter.
Kaye walked up the granite steps and unlocked the massive double front doors, letting herself into a sweeping two-story foyer. With its brass wall sconces and its majestic, winding staircase, both fanciful and uncommon in a Back Bay home of this vintage, the foyer never failed to take her breath away. Right now, it was bathed in light as bright afternoon sunshine poured through the antique leaded panes of the fanlight above the door.
As the clicking of her heels on the hardwood floor echoed through all that empty space, she walked from room to room, raising window shades to let in the light. The house possessed the stuffy feel that all houses seemed to acquire when they’d been closed up for any time, as though the lack of bodies moving about left the air too still and stagnating. She set down her briefcase on the kitchen island, flipped it open and took out the secret weapon she always carried. A quick spray here, another quick spray there, and she transformed stuffy into deliciously subtle vanilla. She knew all the tricks for making a house appealing, had learned most of them from her mentor, Marty Scalia, the man who’d taken her under his wing and taught her everything he knew about real estate. A few of them, including the vanilla spray, she’d figured out on her own.
She tucked the spray back into her briefcase and returned to the foyer, to take a last look at herself in the mirror there. Power suit. Check. Hair. Check. Makeup. Check. Everything was in order. The doorbell rang, and Kaye glanced at her Rolex. Two-thirty, just as scheduled. Promptness always garnered extra points with her. Pasting on a professional smile, she opened the door to greet her client.
Her smile wobbled and faltered at sight of the man who stood on the top step, his hands shoved into the pockets of his lightweight jacket. Shit, she thought frantically, her stomach instantly balling into a hard knot. Oh, shit. She’d thought she was rid of him, thought she’d given him what he’d wanted and that he would go away. Thought she’d made it abundantly clear that they had nothing more to say to each other, that she’d made a mistake, and now she was trying to rectify it.
Apparently, she’d failed to make him understand. “What are you doing here?” she demanded.
“You know what they say, Kaye.” He smiled, but there was little humor in it. “Sooner or later, the chickens always come home to roost.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that you and I need to talk.”
“I have nothing to say to you. Get out of here. I have a client due any minute.”
“This won’t take long. Are you letting me in, or do I have to strong-arm my way into the house?”
“If you don’t leave, I’ll call the police.”
“I don’t really think you’ll do that. Too many awkward questions to answer. All I want is five minutes of your time. If you don’t let me in, I could make things pretty nasty for you. I could screw up that rosy future you have planned. I could screw up a whole lot of things.”
Glancing past his shoulder at the empty sidewalk, Kaye tried to figure out a way to stall him until reinforcements arrived. But her client was nowhere to be seen. They were alone, the two of them, and if she refused to talk to him, he could destroy her life. He’d have no qualms about it. He was the only person she’d ever known who had fewer scruples than she did.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
“Five minutes,” she snapped. If he scented fear in her, like a wild animal he would chew her up and spit her out. “And if my client shows before then, you leave. Understood?”
Arrogance propelled his smile, and she wanted to slap it from his face. “I thought you’d see it my way,” he said.
Kaye opened the door wider and her visitor stepped across the threshold. Hands flat against the door as she closed it, she took a deep, calming breath. This would all work out. If she was careful, if she used the right words, she could talk her way out of anything. After all, she was Kaye Winslow. She possessed the gift of gab, the power of persuasion. It was what had allowed her to rise so quickly from a nothing little secretary to a respected real estate broker, somebody in whom people like the Worthington heirs were willing to place their trust. As long as she remembered that, as long as she kept a cool head and made no missteps, her carefully constructed little world wouldn’t come crashing down on her head.
Raising her chin in a gesture of defiance, she turned and crossed her arms. Back pressed firmly against the closed door, she said, “I’m listening. Start talking.”
One
Doug Policzki was late for the party.
Here on Comm Ave, where town houses routinely carried seven-figure price tags, the presence of a half-dozen emergency vehicles had brought out the neighbors. They stood in small, hushed clusters, chatting quietly and casting nervous glances toward the house. One of the local TV stations had already caught wind of the situation. If this had been Dorchester, where kids were shot dead on the street daily—black kids, of course—the media wouldn’t have bothered to show up. Murder in Dorchester wasn’t news. But to nobody’s surprise, murder in this staunch bastion of WASP prosperity was deemed newsworthy. Policzki recognized the on-air reporter, a striking redhead who stood with shell-pink compact in hand, checking her makeup before the camera started rolling. She glanced up, met his gaze and studied him for a little longer than was necessary before she decided he was nobody of any importance, and returned to checking her makeup.
The house was impressive, one of those brick and stone monstrosities that the wealthy had built before the turn of the last century as a stronghold against the plebeian masses. He paused to gaze up at it for a moment before he showed his ID to the uniform whose job it was to keep away anybody who didn’t know the secret password. “Policzki,” he said. “Homicide.”
The uniform waved him on. Policzki climbed over the yellow tape that had been used to secure the scene, and sprinted up the granite steps.
At the broad double door, another uniform glanced without interest at his ID and gave him a curt nod. Policzki opened the door and stepped inside the house. Above his head, a massive chandelier threw a million crystalline particles of light over a foyer bigger than Rhode Island. Brass wall sconces highlighted the most spectacular staircase he’d ever seen. Most Boston homes of this vintage had narrow stairways steep enough to test the hardiest Puritan constitution. Whoever had built this house had deviated from the norm, building a wide, graceful spiral that seemed to hang in midair of its own free will.
The rooms were empty. Following the echo of voices to the back of the house, Policzki took in the scene in a single, sweeping glance: the corpse that lay in a crumpled heap on the kitchen floor, one arm outflung, palm up as if pleading for mercy; the forensic tech who whistled tunelessly as he dusted the briefcase on the broad granite island for prints; the paunchy, middle-aged man in a Ralph Lauren suit who sat, seemingly forgotten, on a folding canvas stool, mopping his bald pate with a snow-white linen handkerchief.
Two women knelt beside the corpse, studying it with clinical detachment. As Policzki approached, Lorna Abrams said without looking up, “About time you got here.”
Policzki crouched beside the body and studied with interest the hole drilled into the dead man’s temple. Beneath the man’s head, a pool of blood had started to congeal on the slate floor. “No need to be testy,” he told his partner. “Our friend here’s already dead.”
Neena Bhatti, the doe-eyed assistant M.E., glanced at him, eyes alight with humor, and made a valiant, if unsuccessful, attempt to suppress a grin. “Hey, Doug,” she said.
He was always surprised to hear that nasal Queens accent coming from the lovely and exotic Bhatti. It was like expecting Princess Grace and getting Fran Drescher instead. “Neena,” he acknowledged. “What do we have here?”
“What we have here,” Lorna said briskly, “is a John Doe.”
Policzki raised an eyebrow. “No ID?”
“No wallet, no wedding band, not so much as a sticky label on his shirt that says, Hi. My name is Bruce.”
“As you can see for yourself,” Neena said, “it appears that he died from a single gunshot wound to the head. Small caliber. Nice, neat entry hole. Exit wound’s a little messier. The bullet tore off a chunk of his skull on its way out.”
“Nice visual,” Policzki said. “Any idea who he is?”
“Not a one,” Lorna said. “But the house is for sale. The guy over there in the corner? His name’s Philip Armentrout. He had a two-thirty appointment with Kaye Winslow, of Winslow & DeLucca Realty, to look the place over. He was running a little late, got here at approximately two forty-eight. The house was unlocked, so he walked in and found Mr. Doe here. What he didn’t find was Ms. Winslow.”
Policzki rocked back on his heels. “Any indication of where she might be?”
“Nope,” Lorna said cheerfully. “But the briefcase O’Connell’s dusting for prints belongs to her.”
Policzki glanced briefly in the direction she indicated and said, “So she was here at some point.”
“It sure looks that way.”
Which they both knew thrust Kaye Winslow into the unenviable position of prime suspect, a position she shared with Philip Armentrout, at least until the evidence cleared one or the other of them. Policzki had learned early in his career to take nothing at face value, to question everything, no matter how it looked on the surface. Just because Armentrout said he’d stumbled across the corpse didn’t mean he was telling the truth.
Doug gave the body another long, searching glance and said to Neena, “Do we have an estimated time of death?”
“Need I remind you that fieldwork is an inexact science? I can give you a more accurate assessment once we get Mr. Doe into the lab.”
“Ballpark?” Lorna asked.
“Couple of hours, tops. I’d say he died no more than a half hour before Mr. Armentrout found him.” Neena stood and pulled off her rubber gloves with a snap. “I’m done here.”
“Thanks,” Lorna said. To Policzki she added, “And I actually thought I might get home on time tonight.”
“With your vast experience, you of all people should know better than that.”
She rolled her eyes. “Right. Thanks for setting me straight. I have to get somebody out there to talk to the neighbors. Find out if anybody saw or heard anything. Then we’ll try to locate Ms. Winslow. If we don’t find her lickety-split, we’ll have to issue an APB. She could be the perpetrator. Or…” Lorna paused, met Policzki’s eyes and shrugged.
The message that passed between them was unspoken, but clear. If Winslow wasn’t the perpetrator, chances were good that she was either dead or in serious trouble. “Want me to talk to Armentrout?” he said.
“Have at it. After that, you can check Winslow’s ID for next of kin.”
While Lorna headed outside to rally the troops, Policzki considered how best to address Philip Armentrout. The gentleman in question sat hunched over, his elbows braced on his knees, his head hung low between his shoulders. Obviously not a happy camper. Straightforward and sincere seemed the most appropriate route. “Mr. Armentrout?” Policzki said.
Armentrout looked up, focused on his face, recognized that this was yet another stranger, and scowled. “When can I leave?” he said.
“I’m Detective Policzki. Mind if I ask you a few questions?”
“I already answered questions. Twice. Don’t you people ever talk to each other? This is ridiculous. I already told you everything. I’m a busy man. I have work to get back to.”
Policzki hunched down in front of him, balancing on the balls of his feet. “I understand how busy you are,” he said. “And I realize this has inconvenienced you. But it won’t take long, and when we’re done, you can get back to your busy life. Unfortunately…” he paused, and in the silence he heard the rasp of a zipper as one of the EMTs maneuvered the DOA into a body bag “…the victim over there won’t be able to do that.”
Armentrout winced and closed his eyes. Sighing, he said, “Fine. What do you want to know?”
“Why don’t you tell me everything that happened, starting with the time you arrived?”
“We had a two-thirty appointment. I was twenty minutes late because my one o’clock meeting ran over. I got here about ten of three, knocked on the door. Nobody answered. It was unlocked, so I let myself in. I figured the Winslow woman was somewhere in the house and hadn’t heard me knock. I called her name a couple of times, came down the hallway and around the corner and saw this guy’s feet sticking out from behind the kitchen island. Hell of a shock.”
“I imagine it was. What did you do then?”
Armentrout rubbed the back of his neck with a beefy hand. His eyes were a little bloodshot. “I walked around to check. I thought somebody’d passed out or something, and maybe needed medical attention. I didn’t realized the guy was dead until I saw the blood.”
“How’d you know he was dead?”
Armentrout gave Policzki a long, level look. “I wasn’t born yesterday. It was pretty obvious.”
Fair enough. “What did you do when you realized he was dead?”
“I got the hell out. If there was a killer on the premises, I wasn’t about to hang around and wait to become his next victim. I hightailed it out of there and called 911 from the park across the street. I waited there until the cops arrived.”
“All right. Did you, at any time, touch anything?”
“Just the doorknob.”
“Were you acquainted with the victim? Was he anybody you’d met before?”
Armentrout shook his head. “I figured he was one of Kaye Winslow’s associates. I don’t know who the hell he is. Maybe she can tell you.”
She probably could, Policzki thought, if they could just locate her. “All right, Mr. Armentrout,” he said, “I think we’re done. I’ll need verification of your whereabouts earlier this afternoon, and a number where I can reach you in case I have more questions.”
“Verification of my—what the hell, am I a suspect?”
“It’s routine, sir. You’re the person who found the body. In the absence of a smoking gun or a signed confession, we have to consider you a suspect until we can rule you out. Hopefully that’ll happen sooner rather than later.”
“I don’t believe this.” Armentrout fished in his pocket for his wallet. He pulled out a business card and shoved it into Policzki’s hand. “I go out to look at a house and end up in the middle of a mess like this. My whole goddamn afternoon’s been screwed up. You’d better believe I’ll be crossing this mausoleum off my list of possibilities.” Glowering, he slid the wallet back into his pocket. “Matter of fact, I wouldn’t buy a house in Boston if somebody paid me to take it off their hands. Not after this insanity. Maybe I’ll find something in Newton or Andover. I hear Lexington’s nice.”
He left in a huff, this short, self-important businessman whose schedule had been hopelessly derailed by his discovery of a dead body. Hell of an inconvenience, Policzki thought as he watched him go. A real shame that murder had disrupted the guy’s busy day.
The door slammed shut behind Armentrout. Across the room, O’Connell, the forensics tech, closed up his fingerprint kit. “That went well,” he said.
“Right,” Policzki said. “He didn’t pull a weapon on me, or threaten to have me fired, so I guess in the greater scheme of things, it could have been worse.”
“Oh, yeah. It could’ve been a lot worse.” O’Connell nodded in the direction of the black plastic bag the two EMTs were wheeling toward the front door. “You could’ve been that guy.”
The setting sun poured like honey through the closed windows of the lecture hall, infusing it with the ambience of a sauna. The dog days of summer were a thing of the past, but so was the air-conditioning that had rendered them tolerable. Cheap construction, minimal insulation and a simpleminded administration that insisted the heating system be turned on according to the calendar instead of the thermometer all conspired to ensure that learning take place in the most hostile environment imaginable. In the midst of this tropical paradise, Assistant Professor Sam Winslow sat reading the latest Dan Brown paperback while his art history students waded through the first exam of the semester. Fifty-eight heads leaned over fifty-eight blue books as fifty-eight pens scratched diligently against paper.
Sam had come to this job six years ago with the zealous idealism of a new convert. It had taken him awhile to accept the irrefutable truth that ninety-eight point eight percent of his students simply didn’t give a shit. Back Bay Community College wasn’t the kind of place that bred art majors. His classes were well attended because everybody who graduated from BBCC needed nine hours of humanities credit. They’d heard that Professor Winslow was an easy grader, and how hard, after all, could art history be? With a few notable exceptions—primarily those few students who signed up each semester for his introductory painting class—his students were here for one reason only: the three credits that would magically appear on their transcripts if they paid attention in class, showed up on exam days and regurgitated his words back to him in some kind of meaningful form.
This was what his life had come to: he trafficked in regurgitation. Not a particularly pretty realization, especially at four forty-five on a sticky Indian summer afternoon when the only thing he’d eaten since breakfast was a couple of purple Peeps that had been left to petrify on the table in the faculty lounge. Judging by their cardboard consistency, they’d been there for a while.
At a soft rap on the door, Sam glanced up from his book and saw the face of Lydia Forbes, Dean of Arts and Sciences and his immediate supervisor, framed in the tiny window. Setting down his book, he got up from his chair, crossed the room and, with a slow sweep of his gaze over the classroom—his students were supposed to be adults, but it didn’t hurt to give them the impression that he had eyes in the back of his head—he opened the door and stepped out into the corridor.
“Lydia,” he said, leaving the door open just a crack behind him.
“Sorry to interrupt, but you didn’t look busy.” Six feet tall in her conservative two-inch heels, Lydia met him nearly eye to eye. Thin almost to the point of emaciation, she wore a brown tweed suit, her gray hair pulled back in its customary severe chignon. Eyebrows that were a dark slash in her pale face gave her a look of perpetual surprise. The first time he’d met her, he’d thought she looked just like Miss Grundy, the schoolteacher from the Archie comics. It hadn’t taken him long to see that the outer package was merely professional camouflage for a woman with an infectious laugh, a bawdy sense of humor and a relentless addiction to unfiltered cigarettes. “Take a walk with me,” she said.
He glanced back at the classroom. Reading the uncertainty in his gaze, she said, “For Christ’s sake, Sam, pull that big stick out of your ass. They’re adults. Let them be responsible for their own actions.”
Sam latched the classroom door and fell into step with her, matching her leggy stride along the silent corridor and out into the crisp October afternoon. The sun’s rays, angling between brick buildings, bathed the entire scene in a muted pink glow. Lydia walked two steps from the entryway, fired up a Pall Mall and took a drag. Eyes closed in ecstasy, she exhaled a cloud of blue smoke and said without rancor, “Damn idiotic state laws.”