new Packard in the garage. John and Julie got engaged. Saul got polio at the age of ten. Puppies were born in a closet. There was a wedding in the backyard. And a cousin, Roy Lloyd Frank, had gone off to war.
Justine closed the cabinet door.
She had a good life. No question about it. She had a home of her own and a good job, and her life was the way she wanted it.
Just today, she’d brought in a new case: a twenty-four-year-old fashion model had inherited a fortune from her now-dead eighty-year-old billionaire boyfriend. And the dead man’s family wanted Private to investigate the woman.
This was a plum job, a nine-to-five kind of case. There would be no shooting. No mobsters. No one would get shoved off a cliff. She was going to enjoy this case and until she had the time to rest, work would fill her days in a fine and satisfying way.
When the doorbell rang, Justine angrily jerked her head toward the front door. Rocky ran to the living room, threw his front legs up against the door, and whined.
He knew who was ringing the bell and she did too.
It was after ten. It was a weeknight. The man at her door couldn’t open up and he couldn’t settle down. He was a good boss, but in every other way, he was a waste of her time.
Damn it.
Her phone rang.
She said, “What is it, Jack?”
“Let me in, Justine. Please.”
She clicked the phone off, went to the living room, and shouted through the door, “Jack. Go home. I mean it. I don’t want to see you.”
Her phone rang again.
She pressed the button and held the phone to her ear, slid down the wall, and sat on the floor. And she listened to him telling her what she already knew.
“Two weeks ago we were on track, Justine. I made a bad mistake, a backslide, that I deeply regret. But we were making our way back to each other after a long time apart. We were building on all of it, everything we know about each other. There is nothing we can’t work out. You can’t turn your back on love, Justine, not ours. Please, sweetheart. It’s just me. Let me in.”
“Oh, Jack,” she said into the phone.
He loved her. Jack still loved her.
And damn it, damn it, damn it. She still loved him.
Acknowledgments
We’re grateful to Captain Richard Conklin of the Stamford, Connecticut, PD and Elaine M. Pagliaro, forensic science consultant, MS, JD, for sharing their valuable time and expertise. Thanks too to our researcher, Ingrid Taylar, and to Lynn Colomello and Mary Jordan for their unflagging support.
LET THE KILLING BEGIN.
FOR AN EXCERPT,
TURN THE PAGE.
WEDNESDAY, JULY 25, 2012, 11:25 P.M.
THERE ARE SUPERMEN and superwomen who walk this earth.
I’m quite serious about that, and you can take me literally. Jesus Christ, for example, was a spiritual superman, as was Martin Luther, and Gandhi. Julius Caesar was superhuman as well. So were Genghis Khan, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Adolph Hitler.
Think scientists like Aristotle, Galileo, Albert Einstein, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. Consider artists like da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Vincent van Gogh, my favorite, who was so superior it drove him insane. And above all, don’t forget athletically superior beings like Jim Thorpe, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, and Jesse Owens, Larisa Latynina, and Muhammad Ali, Mark Spitz, and Jackie Joyner-Kersee.
Humbly, I include myself on this superhuman spectrum as well, and deservedly so, as you shall soon see.
In short, people like me are born for great things. We seek adversity. We seek to conquer. We seek to break through all limits, spiritually, politically, artistically, scientifically, and physically. We seek to right wrongs in the face of monumental odds. And we’re willing to suffer for greatness, willing to embrace dogged effort and endless preparation with the fervor of a martyr, which to my mind are exceptional traits in any human being from any age.
At the moment I have to admit that I’m certainly feeling exceptional, standing here in the garden of Sir Denton Marshall, a sniveling, corrupt old bastard if there ever was one.
Look at him on his knees, his back to me, and my knife at his throat.
Why, he trembles and shakes as if a stone has just clipped his head. Can you smell it? Fear? It surrounds him, as rank as the air after a bomb explodes.
“Why?” he gasps.
“You’ve angered me, monster,” I snarl at him, feeling a rage deeper than primal split my mind and seethe through every cell. “You’ve helped ruin