“More like two and a half years,” Salazar said. “But I know she did roughly a hundred overnighters the first year. That’s a million right there. I’m thinking she might have pulled in two to two and a half million by the time she wanted out.”

  Shocked, Bree said, “That’s real money.”

  The detective agreed and said it was what had gotten her interested in the case. She’d gone to Paula Watkins, who denied knowing anyone named Katherine and said that Molly had just not worked out. How Molly had paid off her loan was anyone’s guess, she said.

  Salazar visited Duchaine and asked the same questions. The fashion designer acted as if she had no idea who Molly was when the detective showed her a recent picture. When Salazar showed her one from Molly’s modeling portfolio, Duchaine recognized her and was dismissive, said she’d hoped a little nip and tuck and some pearly whites would have changed things for her.

  “She told me, ‘Marketing tests don’t lie,’” the detective said. “Then she cut our meeting short. I tried to get Molly to set up a meeting with Katherine, but Katherine’s line was suddenly disconnected. And then Molly started ducking my calls.”

  “Bought off?” Bree asked.

  “That’s my suspicion,” Salazar said. “I never got to ask her.”

  “Why not?”

  The detective groaned and struggled to her feet. “She took off, went back to North Carolina. Her family said she was flush with cash and acting wild. It’s probably what got her killed.”

  Bree had feared that possibility. “Murdered?”

  “Three months after she got home,” Salazar said as she started to waddle again. “Shot at two in the morning outside her apartment building. Police down there have no witnesses and no leads. And here we are. Tell me about this lawsuit that was dismissed and sealed.”

  Bree gave her the highlights. The two young women and the young man had been lured to New York the same way Molly had, with promises of modeling jobs. Once there, they were told they needed to get plastic surgery and see a cosmetic dentist. After the procedures, they still weren’t hired for modeling jobs, and so, saddled with debt and alone, they were leveraged into the sex ring.

  “But the young man was lucky,” Bree said. “A Russian named Victor offered him work as a gay prostitute, and he was about to say yes when a relative died and left him a lot of money, enough to pay off his debt. But he was still angry and joined the suit.”

  “You talk to the attorney?”

  “I’ve got calls in to her,” Bree said.

  “Let me know what she says,” Salazar said. “I suspect there may be a lot of others like him and Molly.”

  “I agree, but I’m still confused about the why, you know?” Bree said. “Why would someone like Duchaine get involved in a racket like this? She’s a billionaire.”

  “Unless she isn’t,” the detective said. “Lots of rich people claim they are, but who can really check unless they own a publicly traded company? Duchaine’s brand has always been privately held.”

  Bree thought for several moments. “I went to her flagship store on Fifth today and there were not a lot of customers.”

  “That right?” Salazar said. “Well, there you go, then. Cash flow may not be what it used to be. Think about it: If Duchaine needs cash and can make a million a year off Molly, why wouldn’t she want fifty or a hundred girls just like her?”

  Chapter

  21

  Washington, DC

  After dinner, Nana Mama went up to her room to read and I told Jannie I’d do the dishes so she could chill and rest before her big race tomorrow. When I finished in the kitchen, I found Jannie and Ali in the front room engrossed in a show about doctors.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  Jannie looked up in awe and said, “It’s a documentary series called Lenox Hill, about a hospital in New York where they deliver babies and operate on brain tumors.”

  Ali said, “And they really show the brain operations, Dad!”

  “Really?” I said, wondering if it was appropriate for him.

  Ali nodded. “Not everyone makes it, which is sad.”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “Listen, I’ve got to get some work done tonight, so you’re on your own for bedtime. Jannie?”

  “Ten sharp,” she said. “And don’t worry, Dad, I’ve got this.”

  “I have no doubt. See you both in the morning. Love you.”

  “Love you too, Dad,” they both said, their eyes back on their show.

  I climbed up to the attic, which I’d long ago converted into a small office. I often went up there just to think, but that night, when I flipped on the light and weaved around stacks of old case files, I was on a mission.

  I sat down at my desk and picked up Electric by Thomas Tull. My plan was to skim through the book, looking for the kinds of discrepancies or holes his editor said I might spot.

  Except Tull had this compelling, propulsive narrative style that sucked me in and made the story come alive with three-dimensional characters who were constantly surprising me and twists I never saw coming. He also had a knack for interpreting the evidence and describing the way each of the murders must have happened.

  Tull opened the book with the fourth victim, the one he’d known personally.

  A year after an unwanted divorce had left her heartbroken and alone, Emily Maxwell was looking forward to her customary hot bath after a day on her feet seeing to the needs of Boston readers. She was usually home in her apartment in Cambridge’s Ward Two neighborhood by six thirty in the evening, and after she fed her Siamese cat, Jimbo, and ate, she’d take her bath.

  That evening, Emily picked up a Caesar salad with salmon at the Whole Foods near work. After feeding the cat, she ate the salad and had a glass of white wine before filling the tub. She checked the locks on her doors and then the thirty-nine-year-old felt safe enough to pour herself a second glass of wine and go to her bathroom for what she called a “full decompression session.”

  The music went on first, a playlist on her iPod that featured soft-rock hits by bands like the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, tastes she’d inherited from her parents. She connected the iPod to a black JBL portable speaker plugged into the wall about two feet from the tub and sang, “You can go your own way!” as she climbed into the hot water.

  Poor Emily Maxwell would not get out of the tub alive. Somewhere between seven thirty and nine o’clock that evening, the plugged-in speaker entered the tub water and sent one hundred and ten volts of electricity shooting through the bookstore clerk.

  As the speaker dropped, Emily must have had a moment of clarity and horror before the current blazed through the electrochemical machine that was her body, short-circuiting her broken heart.

  “The Boston PD said Emily’s death was an accident,” Tull wrote, “but my gut said it was murder.”

  My cell phone rang. Bree.

  “How’s New York?” I asked.

  “Making headway, actually,” she said. I heard the sounds of a restaurant in the background. “But having a dinner here isn’t half the fun it would be with you.”

  “Well, I wish I were there,” I said. “Where are you eating?”

  “La Grenouille,” she said. “My target often eats here, but not tonight.”

  “What are you having?”

  “Haven’t ordered yet, but I’m thinking the saffron lobster bisque to start, then the oxtail in burgundy sauce, and a lemon tart with meringue for dessert.”

  “You’re liking this whole expense-account thing.”

  “I am.” She laughed. “One of the best perks of this job. How was your day?”

  I told her in general terms about the visit from Thomas Tull’s editor and her contentions about the author and his previous three books.

  “You’re going to read them all?” Bree said. “They’re doorstops, aren’t they?”

  “Close,” I replied.

  “Anything jump out at you yet?”

  I looked at the cover of Electric. “Maybe. He sells it as pure nonfiction, but some of the details and the way he describes the murders seem fictionalized to me, or at least speculative.”

  “How so?”

  “At times, he kind of zooms in and puts you right there in the scene as the crime unfolds. But of course, that can’t be an exact replication.”

  “I wouldn’t think so,” Bree said. “He’s probably extrapolating from the available evidence, and that’s always a somewhat subjective call.”

  “I’m going to take a look at the other books before I snooze. Got to be up early for Jannie’s race.”

  “She excited?”

  “Actually, she’s calm, cool,” I said. “Nana, Ali, and I will be nervous wrecks. And Damon’s coming!”

  “Oh, a family reunion without me.”

  “I’m FaceTiming you the race.”

  “Not the same, but it will have to do.”

  “I’ll call you when they’re heading to the blocks,” I promised. “Around eleven a.m.”

  “Oh, here comes my waiter. Love you.”

  “Love you too,” I said. I hung up and glanced at the wall clock before picking up Tull’s second book.

  Chapter

  22

  Certain aspects of Noon in Berlin echoed Electric.

  Early on, for example, the killer left little or no evidence at the scenes. And the police bungled the initial investigations before Tull entered the picture, retraced their steps, and found previously unknown clues or hidden aspects of the victims’ lives that opened up a new avenue for the probe and gained him insider status.

  Noon in Berlin, however, was written in a completely different tone than the first book. And the story was an unexpected tale of eroticism and savagery that shocked me again and again in the hundred pages I read that night.

  Tull wrote that he’d learned of the story while he was on tour for the German-language debut of Electric.

  The Berlin victims had all died as couples—illicit lovers, in fact, some straight and some gay, all of whom had had their trysts at noon in various hotels and pieds-à-terre around the German capital.

  The first couple was discovered in a one-bedroom apartment in southeast Berlin not far from Treptower Park. Edgar Bruner was found naked, gagged, and tied to the four posts of the bed. His Russian mistress, Katya Dubosholva, was collapsed on top of him and also naked. Each had been shot in the neck with a tranquilizer dart from a gun normally used by veterinarians, wild-game biologists, and the like to subdue dangerous animals. Tull wrote that “each dart at that crime scene contained enough tranquilizer to take down a bull elephant.”

  Apparently, within a second of being shot, the mistress had fallen on top of her lover, pinning him, before she died of a heart attack. Then her lover was shot. At close range.

  The second couple in the series, both suburban women, were married to men and had children. They were killed in an apartment in west Berlin, not far from Tiergarten and the zoo, shot with the same kind of tranquilizer dart as the first couple as they lay beneath the sheets.

  Tull was allowed to observe the investigation in part because of the success of Electric. He learned that the Berlin police had focused heavily on CCTV cameras, trying to spot the killer on the way to and from each apartment. When that proved fruitless, the lead investigator, Inspector Ava Firsching, began to focus on the tranquilizer and its origin.

  Her rationale was simple and smart. Inspector Firsching figured the killer had to have access to drugs normally used to tranquilize large animals. She and Tull went to the Berlin Zoo and talked to veterinarians and handlers. They learned that tranquilizer darts often contain benzodiazepines, a class of drugs that depress the nervous system.

  “Administered at proper doses,” Tull wrote, “these drugs will not kill humans or animals. But increase the doses or combine them with alcohol or opiates, and the risk of death rises dramatically. In toxicology screens that Inspector Firsching ordered, the German national crime lab found high doses of the benzodiazepine midazolam mixed with higher doses of the opiate fentanyl. The lethal cocktail caused almost immediate cardiac and respiratory failure.”

  Firsching and Tull believed the killer might be someone who had access to the drugs—a zoo worker, perhaps. That accusation caused an uproar, and the zoo administrators denied that any of their drugs had gone missing.

  Two weeks passed with no additional murders. Then a heterosexual couple was found dead in an empty farmhouse in a rural area south of Berlin. The victims were both naked with plastic bags over their heads and cords around their necks. German investigators at first announced that the divorced housewife and her married lover had died of hypoxia during a bout of mutual “autoerotic asphyxiation.”

  Even though there was no sign of struggle and the deaths did not involve tranquilizer darts, Inspector Firsching and Tull did not believe these two deaths were accidental.

  “The different method of death was less important,” Tull wrote. “It was the time frame and motive that mattered. The noon hour. The illicit trysts.”

  Firsching and Tull turned out to be correct, of course. But was this one of those illogical leaps that Suzanne Liu had described to me?

  I made a note of it and glanced at the clock—it was close to midnight. I yawned and set the book down, figuring I’d continue reading in the morning. But as I shut off the light and started down the stairs, I admitted that I would get little, if anything, done until after Jannie’s big race was over.

  I climbed into bed, reached out to shut off the light, and saw I’d received a text from Bree. It kept me smiling long after the room went dark.

  I love you, baby. Wish you were here in my nice five-star hotel bed!

  Chapter

  23

  Manhattan

  Bree slept in a little that Saturday morning. Around eight, she went out for a run in Central Park, where she followed much the same route she’d taken the afternoon before with Detective Salazar.

  After a shower, she ordered a room-service breakfast, sat at the desk, and wrote down the different angles she wanted to explore in the Duchaine case. Bree still had not received a return call from the attorney in North Carolina, and she made a note to try again before she left the hotel.

  She also wanted to know what Wall Street analysts could tell her about the true financial health of Frances Duchaine’s companies, but she realized most analysts did not work weekends. Bree decided to go down that road first thing Monday morning. In the meantime, what about the people around Duchaine? People like Paula Watkins, the fashion designer’s close business associate, who Salazar said lured young, attractive people with dreams of model superstardom to New York. And the mysterious Katherine and Victor, who lured them with promises of rescue from disappointment and economic ruin—who were they? How had the fashion designer found them?

  What were the traits of someone like Katherine or Victor? Bree wondered. She jotted down several that came to mind.

  Cold, she wrote. Calculating. High emotional intelligence. Amoral. Narcissist.

  A knock came at her door. Room service.

  Bree waited as her breakfast was wheeled over to the desk, then ate an excellent cheese omelet with roasted peppers and onions on the side. She was pouring herself a second cup of coffee when her personal cell phone rang. She glanced at it, expecting Alex, only to see it was her boss, Elena Martin.

  “Elena,” Bree said. “I was going to call. I made some headway yesterday.”

  “Good,” Martin said. “I’ll let you make a little more. Frances Duchaine is hosting a black-tie fundraiser tonight at her estate in Greenwich, Connecticut. I’ve finagled you a ticket. I trust you have a gown with you?”

  Bree laughed. “Uh, no, I was trying to travel light.”

  “Then go get yourself one and rent a limousine to take you there,” Martin said. “Don’t scrimp. You need to fit in with the kind of people who will be there, and the client is paying all your expenses.”

  “Okay. What do you expect me to do at this fundraiser?”

  “Mingle. Talk a little. Listen a lot. Observe the women in her world.”

  “I can do that,” Bree said.

  “I know,” Martin said. “We’re sending you new identity documents by courier. They’ll be at the front desk of your hotel by noon. The event starts at seven thirty. You want to be there at seven forty-five.”

  “With the main flow of arriving guests,” Bree said.

  “When you’ll get less scrutiny,” her boss agreed. “Good luck. Keep me posted.”

  Bree hung up and looked at her watch. It was nearly ten fifteen. She had fewer than ten hours to get a dress, get her hair done, and get to Greenwich before the crush of partygoers reached Duchaine’s estate.

  Bree grabbed her purse and her phone, put on her shoes, went downstairs, and asked the doorman to hail her a cab.

  “Destination, ma’am?”

  “Frances Duchaine’s store on Fifth Avenue,” she said and was soon on her way.

  It was raining lightly, which kept the crowds and traffic away. Ten minutes later, she was climbing out of the taxi in heavier rainfall.

  Inside the store, Bree saw many more customers browsing than she had the day before. Maybe the lack of customers yesterday was a onetime thing?

  But then Bree noticed that the flowers in the vase by the staircase looked a little droopy. So did the other flower arrangements positioned artfully throughout the store. Someone’s definitely cutting back, she thought, climbing past the second floor to the third and wishing she could find an analyst to talk to about Duchaine’s finances on a rainy Saturday morning in New York City.

  Bree had taken no more than three steps onto the floor where the fashion designer displayed her wedding dresses, ball gowns, and big-ticket limited-run creations when she heard a squeal of delight.

  “I knew you loved that dress with the brocade!” Marjorie cried, almost skipping to her side. “I’m right, aren’t I?”

  Bree smiled at the eager young woman. “You’re almost right. I have a sudden need for a gown immediately. As in tonight.”