In Port Fontaine, the heavy rain had started late enough to spoil no plans—the restaurants were all already empty, the shops closed, even the fairy lights in the trees were dark as Jenner drove up the Promenade to Stella Maris. The smaller pastel houses along the commercial strip gave way to the big white mansions, many now deserted as their owners made the annual summer pilgrimage to their cooler homes in East Hampton or Edgartown or Kennebunkport. To his left, the Gulf was vast and black and empty, the waves sliding onto an empty beach, silent and cold.

Between the slow swoop of the windscreen wipers, Jenner’s headlights lit up the open gates of Stella Maris; the security team was gone, the fish-eye CCTV lens still and unseeing. Jenner parked on the carriage circle in front of the house; the driveway was empty.

He sat, seat belt still fastened, listening to the hushed rustle of rain on his roof, feeling the exhaustion eat his bones like acid.

Deb would be clean now, in a hospital bed in the small urgent-care center in Bel Arbre. He’d helped her into the reception and rung the bell. She’d hugged him, her arms tightening around his neck when he first started to pull back. She shook her head and murmured, “Please, please, just call the sheriff, Jenner.” But he couldn’t do that.

He’d turned to look at the Mexicans waiting out on the road in their pickup, and she felt him start to turn, and held onto him; she knew they were taking him back to his car and that she couldn’t stop him.

She told him to be careful and kissed him on the mouth, a soft, sad kiss, and then he pulled back, away from her. When he turned to look back through the glass doors, the nurses were running to her.

Jenner moved his seat back, pulled the Beretta out, and lay it across his lap, feeling the seriousness of its weight.

He looked up at the house, golden and bright in the floodlights. He saw no movement, but they’d be in there now, both of them. They’d have heard his car, seen his headlights.

He walked down the path, down the steps past the pool to the lower terrace. He stood at the white balustrade, looked out over the dock, where the swamp boat was now moored.

The house looked huge from the bottom of the garden, coffered by rectangles of light pouring from the windows. Jenner climbed the steps, remembering the first time he’d seen it, how perfect it had seemed, how luxurious, every man’s dream.

He crossed the broad veranda, stripped of its furniture, now a barren plaza of rain-slick marble; he went in through the open sliding doors that led to the ground-floor breakfast room.

Lucy Craine’s passport lay on the low glass coffee table; behind the table, the garbage bags had been flung onto a couch. Jenner opened them to check; the money was still there.

The kitchen tile was clinical white. The room was larger than most restaurant kitchens, with glass-fronted SubZero fridges and wall-mounted ovens and undercabinet wine coolers and an eight-burner Wolf range; a child could dogpaddle in the huge soapstone sinks.

Jenner stepped out into the back of the huge entrance hall. The floor was a checkerboard of large black and white marble tiles that gleamed under the light of an enormous crystal chandelier.

He heard the sound of muffled speech from upstairs, movement, too, as someone passed rapidly back and forth between rooms. Jenner lifted the Beretta and climbed the wide stairs, the conversation louder as he neared the landing.

On the second floor, his footsteps were silent in the deep pile of the carpet. The sound was clearer now, and Jenner recognized the rhythm and crackle of a police radio scanner; Craine was listening in on the sheriff’s frequency, monitoring the situation up at the farm.

The sound came from the half-open door of the master bedroom, just off the stairwell. Jenner stood in the doorway, the Beretta in his hand.

There was an open carry-on bag on a large four-poster bed. Craine stood in the middle of the room, back to the doorway, packing his beautiful handmade shirts into the bag. His pistol, a small Walther, lay on his bureau next to the chattering scanner.

“Craine.”

The man straightened slowly and glanced toward the dresser.

“Don’t,” Jenner said. “I’m not the world’s best shot, but at this distance I won’t miss.”

Craine raised his hands and turned slowly to face Jenner. He was smiling slightly.

“I like you, Jenner! You’ve got…gumption!”

“More importantly, I have a Beretta.”

“Yes,” Craine said. “Yes, you do.”

He backed over to the bed and sat. “Do I have to keep my arms up?”

“Suit yourself.”

Craine lowered his arms. “You know, you can still walk away from this a wealthy man.”

“It’s too late for that.”

Craine laughed. “Good God, doctor! It’s never too late for money!”

“Your granddaughter is dead because of you.”

Craine’s smile slackened a little, and a tremor of emotion passed through the man’s face; it could have been real. “You can have no possible idea of what a nightmare this has been for me.”

He paused a second, then said, “But of course, you have to understand I had no way of knowing what would happen there tonight.”

Maggie Craine said, “What would happen where?”

They both turned. She stood shivering in the doorway, hair wet, skin flushed; in her hand, she held Lucy’s passport. There was something ominous, fevered in her expression.

Jenner turned to Craine and said, “Tell her.”

Craine stood; he looked at his daughter but stayed silent.

“Tell her or I will.”

“Where is she? Where’s Lucy? For the love of God, what did you do?”

Craine said, “Maggie, listen…You need to pull yourself together. This is hard on all of us.”

“Where’s my daughter?” She was shaking violently now, the words chattering out of her mouth.

Craine looked at Jenner. “Doctor, my daughter needs help. I think we should get her to a hospital.”

The scanner crackled, and an urgent voice said, “Sheriff, this is Weeks. We’re in the basement now…” The voice grew hesitant. “You maybe oughta see this. We have the body of a young female, a girl. She’s pretty charred up, but…I’m sorry, sir, but she’s a skinny little thing, and with the backpack, I’m pretty sure we got Lucy Craine here.”

Maggie howled, “NO! You fucking bastard! How could you! How could you?”

Craine shook his head helplessly. “Maggie, I didn’t know what was going to happen. I just wanted to…”

“You wanted to what? You wanted to WHAT??? What were you doing with her in the basement?”

He smiled thinly. “I just took her to the farm for a nice evening with her papaw.”

Maggie pulled the pistol out of her purse so quickly Jenner had no time to react. She fired once. There was a spray of red from Craine’s neck; the string went out of his spine and he collapsed vertically, folded into himself and on down to the floor. He lay there, gasping, eyes open but not moving, blood pulsing rhythmically out of the hole in his neck.

Jenner dropped to his knees, threw his gun aside, and said, “Jesus Christ! Jesus!”

He hovered helplessly over Craine, saw the blood pumping out. He covered the hole with his hands—he had to do something. He pressed firmly, feeling the shredded muscle beneath the skin ripple under his fingers.

Over his shoulder, he said, “I think it hit his spinal cord. Please, call 911, Maggie. Please, they can help him.”

“Move, Jenner.”

Hands pressing firmly on the wound, Jenner looked up at her. She was pointing the gun at him.

“Move now. Don’t make me.”

“If I let go now, he’ll die, Maggie. You’ll be a murderer.”

“Let go, Jenner. It’ll be on me.”

“This is a death penalty state, Maggie. He’s not worth it.”

She lifted the gun slightly and fired. A shower of pulverized veneer and mahogany erupted from the dresser by Jenner’s shoulder.

“Let go.” She pointed the gun at Jenner.

Jenner looked down at Craine, at the blood welling over his fingers, the muttering lips. He couldn’t make himself lift his fingers up, couldn’t just let him die like that. He said, “I…I don’t think I can.”

Maggie stepped closer, leaned over Jenner, pointed the weapon down, and fired two more shots into her father’s face.

“You can now.”