Her attorney said, “We’re here as a courtesy, Detectives.”

  Salazar was having none of it. “Did you want your client to come in under a subpoena? Or in handcuffs?”

  French stiffened. “I’m saying that Ms. Duchaine is here to help in any way she can. She’s devastated and horrified by what happened.”

  A tear trickled from under the fashion designer’s glasses and dribbled down her cheek.

  “No doubt,” Thompson said. “And if your client won’t mind taking off the shades?”

  Though she appeared to be grieving, Duchaine had not lost her flair for the dramatic; she tore off the glasses and said in a hoarse voice, “What can you tell me? Did Paula suffer? Ari? Were they afraid before they passed?”

  Salazar said, “Ms. Watkins was shot at close range between the eyes in the dark. I don’t even think she felt fear before she died. Mr. Bernstein may have been frightened, but I do not believe he suffered.”

  Duchaine’s lower lip trembled and more tears ran. Her attorney handed her a tissue, and she dabbed at her swollen eyes.

  “Who would do such a thing to them?” she whispered. “And why?”

  Detective Thompson said, “Who? We think they were professional killers. And why? We were hoping you could help us with that.”

  The fashion icon’s lips drew back as she gazed wide-eyed at her hands, as if trying to see through them into some unknowable universe. “I have been asking myself why since I heard,” she said quietly. “I can’t come up with one good answer.”

  Salazar said, “Why weren’t you at the party, Ms. Duchaine?”

  Sounding bewildered, she said, “Can you imagine if I’d gone?”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  Frances Duchaine shifted uncomfortably. “I’d rather not say.”

  “That won’t work. This is an investigation into a mass murder, Ms. Duchaine. Why weren’t you there?”

  Duchaine’s jaw tightened and she glanced at French, who nodded.

  “I had hosted a large fundraiser at my estate in Greenwich and I was tired. But it was more than that. I…I was recently diagnosed with Crohn’s disease and I was having a flare-up all yesterday afternoon.”

  In the observation booth, Bree studied the fashion icon, who seemed embarrassed. She glanced at the only other two people in the booth: Blaine Roy, chief of detectives for NYPD, and Ellen Larkin, Salazar’s supervising lieutenant.

  “My sister has it,” Lieutenant Larkin said. “Times you can’t drag her off the pot.”

  Chief Roy’s nostrils flared. He asked Bree what she thought.

  “Plausible but convenient,” Bree said.

  In the interrogation room, Salazar said, “We’d love to talk to the doc who diagnosed you.”

  “Dr. Leeann Webb at Lenox Hill,” Duchaine said without hesitation. “I called her yesterday around five. She gave me a new prescription. I have it all documented.”

  “We’d like to see those documents,” Salazar said. “Crohn’s disease. That’s brought on by stress, right?”

  Duchaine shook her head. “The flare-ups can be, but not the disease itself.”

  “You were feeling stressed yesterday?”

  The fashion icon nodded. “I had a ridiculous amount of design work due.”

  “Nothing to do with finances?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t think about finances. That was Paula’s job. And Ari’s.”

  In the observation booth, Bree said, “Don’t let her have a pass on that.”

  As if hearing her through the mirror, Detective Salazar said, “You do grasp your financial situation, though, correct?”

  The fashion icon looked at her attorney. “What’s she asking?”

  French looked at Salazar, seeming puzzled. “What financial situation is that?”

  The detective rubbed her belly before saying, “By several accounts, your company has experienced a seventeen percent decline in revenues in the aftermath of a massive expansion of your retail arm. Your company now carries a crushing debt load. You have balloon payments on over four hundred million dollars, which you are personally on the hook for, coming due in less than ninety days. Do you understand, Frances?”

  It was the first time Salazar had addressed Duchaine by her first name. The fashion mogul tried to act imperious. “I don’t have the foggiest what you’re talking about, Detective…whatever your name is.”

  “With all due respect, Frances, you are either a liar or a fool.”

  Her attorney stood. “That’s enough.”

  “Not by a long shot, Counselor,” Salazar said firmly. “Sit down or we’ll start looking into your role in all of this.”

  “My role in all of what?” French demanded.

  “A criminal enterprise inside Duchaine Inc. that’s engaged in human trafficking here in the city and over state lines to underpin the company’s and Frances’s rotting finances. Those are city, state, and federal offenses, Counselor, with extreme penalties.”

  Chapter

  55

  Katrina French lost most of her color and sank back into her seat.

  “What?” the attorney said and glanced at Frances Duchaine, who seemed equally shocked.

  Detective Thompson, who had been silent for several minutes, sat forward and jabbed a finger at Frances Duchaine. “Tell her.”

  “Tell her what?” the fashion icon demanded.

  “That you lured young women and men to New York with promises of careers in modeling and fashion,” he said. “Then you hoodwinked them into debt and gave them one way out—prostitution. All so you could go on making pretty dresses.”

  Duchaine had recoiled from the assault and looked to her attorney for support. “Katrina, I honestly have no idea what this is about.”

  In the observation booth, Bree said, “Sure you do.”

  In the interrogation room, Thompson said, “Don’t lie, Ms. Duchaine. There are lawsuits over this that were sealed. I’ve interviewed young women and men who were caught up in your web. I believe them.”

  Salazar said, “We’re searching Paula Watkins’s computers, Ari Bernstein’s computers, and the computers of everyone who died last night. We have also been granted a warrant to look at your personal and corporate computers, Frances. We’re going to find evidence you were involved.”

  Duchaine lashed out. “You will not! I had nothing to do with whatever you are alleging. Nothing!”

  “C’mon, Ms. Duchaine,” Detective Thompson said wearily. “You had to have known what last night was about. The after-party? Paula’s sex-slave auction?”

  “What after-party?” she said, sounding bewildered. “What auction? No. Paula would never be involved in such a thing.”

  “Well, we believe she was involved up to her eyeballs,” Salazar said. “Why else would she invite Russian and Irish mob bosses to her home? Why invite a sheikh known to traffic in underage sex slaves?”

  In the observation booth, Bree shifted, thinking that last bit was a stretch.

  But it got through to Duchaine, who looked rattled. “They were there?”

  Thompson said, “They were, and they died. Maybe they got Paula killed. Maybe the whole sordid party and the sordid people involved got Paula and Ari and nine other people murdered by professionals.”

  Duchaine’s attorney said, “I think we’ve heard enough. Ms. Duchaine says she had no knowledge of this crazy scheme you allege happened and she’s confident you’ll find no evidence of—”

  Detective Salazar spoke right over the lawyer. “We think Paula crossed someone, Frances. Someone dangerous. Someone ruthless.”

  Duchaine seemed to shrink a little. “Like who?”

  “Maybe a rival crime boss,” Thompson said. “Maybe a Middle Eastern government.”

  He let that hang a moment before adding, “Or maybe someone less obvious. Maybe someone who thought things had gone too far. Someone who decided to end the sex ring and stop the slave auction before it could happen.”

  Bree could feel a crackling tension in the short silence that followed.

  Then Salazar leaned forward in her chair and said, “Someone who wasn’t at the party. Someone like you, Frances. Are you behind the killings? Did you order them?”

  Katrina French threw an arm across Duchaine’s chest and said, “Don’t answer that question, Frances. Don’t answer any of their questions. We are done here.”

  Chapter

  56

  Washington, DC

  Although Sampson and I had been impressed by Thomas Tull’s calm, collected answers to our tougher questions, we’d given him a hard no on being a fly on the wall.

  He’d wanted to know if we’d mind him asking the DC police chief, and we’d told him to go right ahead. Afterward, we spoke with Chief Michaels, who said he thought the exposure might be good for the department, especially if we caught the Family Man killer. But when we explained why Tull was a suspect, he agreed that until we cleared the writer, he would get no access whatsoever.

  Which was why that Thursday evening we were hunkered down in an unmarked squad car up the street from the town house in Georgetown that Tull had leased.

  A late-model midnight-blue Audi RS 7 was parked in front of the town house’s green door. The building was dark but for a single light shining in a second-floor window.

  “How long are we going to give it?” Sampson asked.

  It was a pleasant spring night. We had the windows open. I said, “Ordinarily, I’d be down for midnight at least, but Bree texted that she’s on her way back from New York. I’d like to see her before she goes to sleep.”

  “And Willow’s babysitter can only stay till ten thirty,” Sampson said. “So, ten?”

  “Ten it is,” I said.

  Fifteen minutes later, a fit woman in her forties with short dark hair walked up to Tull’s place; she was wearing a worn leather jacket, jeans, and cowboy boots, and she carried a heavy messenger bag over one shoulder.

  She dug in the bag, retrieved a large manila envelope, put it in Tull’s mail slot, and continued on. She passed us without looking our way and disappeared around the corner.

  “Who’s she?” Sampson asked.

  “No clue.”

  A few moments later, the light in Tull’s second-story window went out.

  The writer left the town house soon after; he climbed into his stylish four-door coupe and pulled out, heading north. Sampson put the squad car in gear and followed Tull at a comfortable distance.

  “We have a license plate number?” I asked.

  “New York plate S-C-R-B-L-R,” Sampson said. “Like scribbler?”

  “Got it,” I said. He took a left and then another, heading south.

  Tull was soon on local-access K Street heading east. It was a moonless night, which somehow made the headlight glare worse as we approached Twenty-Seventh.

  The writer put on his left blinker, indicating he was going to take the Rock Creek Parkway heading north. We were six cars back when the light changed.

  Driving down the on-ramp at thirty miles an hour, Tull merged into light traffic on the parkway, a four-lane thoroughfare surrounded by woods and divided by a strip of trees and azalea bushes. Tull accelerated to fifty.

  Sampson followed suit, passing two cars. Approaching the M Street exit, we were three cars behind him in the right lane.

  Then the writer pulled over into the left lane and got up alongside a black Porsche 911 Turbo Carrera. I still had my window down, so I heard the roar of huge high-horsepower engines before both vehicles went screaming up the parkway.

  “Stay with him!” I shouted, and Sampson stomped on the gas.

  Chapter

  57

  Tull’s stylish little German coupe turned out to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a sleek but conservative-looking car with a raging monster of an engine.

  The Porsche 911 tried to accelerate with the RS 7, but within the first three seconds, Tull opened a gap of twenty yards, then thirty. We were much farther behind when both high-performance vehicles hit the brakes and downshifted before the tight right and a sweeping left curve below Dupont Circle.

  They vanished from sight.

  “He had to have hit a hundred there,” Sampson said. “I should put the bubble up and pull him over.”

  “Just keep him somewhere in range,” I said, gritting my teeth as John hit the brakes and we went through the curves.

  After we came out of the second one, the parkway straightened for more than a mile. We could see the rear lights of the Audi and the Porsche a good four hundred yards ahead, weaving in and out of traffic.

  “He’s nuts,” Sampson said, pounding the gas pedal. “He’s going to hit someone.”

  “Or they’re going to hit him,” I said as we sped forward, gaining some ground when both vehicles hit the brakes before a big right turn north of Montrose Park.

  I caught only glimpses of what happened next.

  The parkway ahead of the sports cars was near empty. Both drivers took advantage of that, the 911 in the right lane and the RS 7 in the left, burying their accelerators. The cars became a blur.

  “That’s it—they are going to kill people,” I said. “Put the bubble up.”

  Sampson did as we entered the turn north of Montrose Park. He flipped on the siren and accelerated again.

  “I don’t know if I can catch up,” Sampson said as I peered ahead, trying to pick out the rear lights of the Porsche and the Audi as we raced through the densest woods along the parkway.

  We were going eighty when I caught sight of the split at the end of the road where Shoreham angles northwest and Beach Drive goes northeast. “That’s the Porsche going up Beach,” I said.

  “Where’s Tull?” Sampson said, hitting the brakes before the split.

  I caught a glimpse of taillights on Shoreham.

  “Cathedral Avenue,” I said. “I think that’s him.”

  Sampson took Shoreham and then Cathedral Avenue, a much narrower road that goes along the northwest side of Rock Creek Park. The road curves left entering the avenue, which features trees on the right and apartment buildings on the left.

  When we came out of the curve, I expected to see taillights ahead. But there were none.

  “Where the hell did he go?” Sampson demanded and slowed as we came up to Woodley Road, a left.

  We both looked up Woodley and saw only a minivan pulling out of North Woodley Place, heading west toward Connecticut Avenue. Sampson turned off the siren and bubble and sped north on Cathedral Avenue to where it crossed Connecticut.

  No Tull.

  We backtracked. Sampson took us the length of Woodley Place and then up an alley between homes, apartment buildings, and small parking lots closer to Connecticut Avenue.

  We shone police flashlights into every dark corner. Tull and his midnight-blue RS 7 were nowhere to be seen.

  “We lost him,” Sampson said, exasperated. “A goddamn writer at the wheel and we lost him.”

  Chapter

  58

  Bree looked exhausted when she finally came in the front door around eleven that evening. I’d been home less than twenty minutes and was still frustrated by our inability to stay with Tull.

  We’d contacted our bosses and tried to have an APB put out on the writer, but since he hadn’t done anything other than race the nameless Porsche driver, we were told we were on shaky grounds as far as cause.

  “Hey, baby,” I said, ditching my frustration and hugging her. “You look like you’ve been through a lot.”

  Bree hugged me tighter. “I feel like I’m back from another universe.”

  Between family and work, we’d had no time to talk and had communicated throughout the evening by text. I led her into the kitchen, where Nana Mama had left a pot of chicken stew warming for us. She and the kids had already gone to sleep.

  I got Bree a bowl of stew and a cold beer.

  “You’re an angel,” Bree said, sipping the beer and closing her eyes for a second.

  “You want to tell me about your day?” I said after she’d taken a few spoonfuls and another swig of beer. “Your interrogation? Duchaine’s?”

  Bree looked relieved to be asked and recounted in full her discussion with Detective Salazar and her partner and then the interrogation of Frances Duchaine.

  “Wow,” I said. “I didn’t see that coming. Do you think Duchaine ordered the hits?”

  “It’s almost all I’ve thought about since she stormed out of the interrogation room with her lawyer,” Bree said. “She claims she knew nothing about the sex trafficking, but how is that possible? I mean, I suppose she could have been willfully ignorant.”

  I nodded. “Knew something was off but didn’t want to put her nose in there and find out what Watkins was really up to.”

  “See no evil,” Bree said. “But I’m not buying it. Not totally. She had to have known the financial hole she was in. Right?”

  “I would think so. There’s only so far you can go in business when you’re a pure artist, not beholden to the market.”

  “Exactly. And look how huge she got. She knew.”

  “But did she order them killed?”

  Bree took another swig of beer, set the bottle on the table, and dropped the tension from her shoulders. “My gut says no. If it’s there, Salazar will find it. She’s good. Real good. But my gut still says no.”

  “So who else could have ordered the killings? And why?”

  After swallowing another spoonful of stew, she said, “I’ve got three possibles: Rivals of the two crime bosses who may have been cut out of the deal. Or rivals of that sheikh. I mean, if the Saudis can murder and cut up a journalist in their embassy, a mass murder over sex trafficking is not out of the question.”

  I thought about that and nodded. “You have to keep it on the table. And number three?”

  “The person who evidently hired me through that attorney in Cleveland,” she said. “Theresa May Alcott. The heir to the Alcott and Sayers soap fortune. Her granddaughter got caught up in the modeling scheme and ended up killing herself.”