“I’m still shocked you did. Walk away, I mean.”

  “Not as shocked as I was.”

  He’s very good in the kitchen, with an imaginative flair for cooking. What he doesn’t know is that he’s not nearly as good as I am. One of the many secrets I haven’t shared with him.

  But not for long.

  When Ben arrives, he immediately tells me how good the house smells.

  “So, what’s for dinner? You’ve failed to mention that.”

  “Beef Wellington.”

  I’ve already poured the wine, and hand him a glass of Caymus, a Napa Valley cabernet far more expensive than what I usually spend on wine, no matter what the occasion. It just seems worthy of the meal I’m preparing.

  I see genuine surprise in his eyes.

  “You are making beef Wellington?”

  “Don’t sound so shocked, Dr. Kalinsky.”

  “I just know how difficult it is to get beef Wellington right.”

  “You mean because of the chopping and dusting of the steak with the flour, frying it just right in oil, then slow-cooking the whole thing with the perfect blend of red wine and garlic and mushrooms and onions, before topping it with a puff pastry that only the bravest home cooks ever think about attempting? That kind of difficult, doc?”

  He stares at me. “Who are you? Somebody must have taught you to cook.”

  “Martin.”

  “Who’s Martin?”

  “My second ex-husband.”

  I take a healthy sip of my wine.

  “That sonofabitch,” I say.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  DR. BEN KALINSKY MAKES the fair point that until this moment I’ve never talked about either of my ex-husbands, other than to jokingly refer to them as Thing One and Thing Two before I change the subject.

  I counter now by reminding him that he never talks about his ex-wife.

  He grins. “Who?”

  I check on dinner. We’ve still got some time. Rip has taken his usual spot at our feet.

  “Tell me about Martin.”

  Back at the Meier Clinic, I promised Fiona that I’d do a better job of opening myself up. I do that now, for the man I told Fiona I loved even more than either of the men I’d married.

  So I tell him.

  About the time I decided that even with my career beginning to take off after a couple of high-profile cases, I needed a new hobby. I considered learning to play the piano. I chose cooking classes instead. A Manhattan culinary studio called Home Cooking on Grand Street. The teacher, as gorgeous as his accent, was Martin Elian.

  He was going to be famous someday, he said, when he finally had enough money to open his own restaurant.

  “Maybe even as famous as you are going to be,” he told me.

  I sip my wine, say to Ben, “I could tell you a little more about browning the puff pastry just right.”

  “I want to hear about the chef.”

  “Brigid was taking the class, too. I was sure he’d go for her. Martin was a few years younger than both of us, but she’s always been the pretty one. Trust me when I tell you this: he was prettiest.”

  “And swept you off your feet, the romantic French bastard.”

  “Did he ever.”

  Martin and I were married six months later. By then he’d opened a bistro in the West Village and both of our professional lives were taking off. I still thought we were happy.

  That made one of us.

  “No happily-ever-after, obviously,” Ben says.

  “Unhappily, no.”

  The marriage lasted three years. Really, it only went bad over the final six months. He eventually drifted into an affair with his sous chef at the new, bigger place he’d opened on the Upper West Side. But he had already moved out by then.

  Moved out and moved on.

  “I wanted to blame it on our careers, but even I knew that was a cliché. It wasn’t careers, plural. It was just one. Mine. He said being a lawyer was all I needed. I told him he was wrong. He said that maybe he knew me better than I knew myself. Before he walked out, I told him I could change if he’d give me a chance; I hated how needy and desperate I sounded, almost like another person. He told me that I was incapable of changing. And left. And nearly broke my goddamn heart in the process.”

  I sip more wine. “You want to know why I don’t cook? Because it reminds me too much of him.”

  Ben doesn’t say anything. He somehow seems to know that isn’t the end of the story.

  It isn’t.

  “He told me he still loved me and probably always would love me. But that I was incapable of living with anybody.”

  “Anybody meaning him, the master chef.”

  “Anybody meaning anybody,” I say.

  I reach for my glass and realize it’s empty. I reach for his glass and take a sip.

  “And none of that is the worst part,” I say. “The worst part is what he said to me on the day he moved out.”

  No going back now.

  Tell him all of it.

  Now or never.

  “He told me that losing the baby was probably the best thing for both of us.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  ONLY JIMMY AND BRIGID knew about the miscarriage, one month into my second trimester, in what also turned out to be the last trimester of my marriage to Martin.

  Now Dr. Ben Kalinsky knew, too, and knew about how after the miscarriage I found out I could no longer have children.

  It was going to be a boy.

  Going to be the son my father never had, as badly as he’d wanted one.

  I finally announce when we sit down for dinner that I’m through talking about Martin Elian for tonight and maybe until the end of time. The dinner, by the way, is a complete triumph in Ben’s estimation, not just the beef but the sides of potato-fennel gratin and the honey-glazed carrots.

  “Please tell me this isn’t one of his recipes.”

  “Ina Garten!” I say.

  Before we change the subject, Ben says he’d like to make one final observation about Martin.

  “Because of what he said about you having lost the baby, I fully intend to punch his teeth through the back of his head if I ever meet him.”

  “And you a man of peace.”

  “Do you ever see him?”

  “Never.”

  “Do you still hate him?”

  “I have long since decided he’s no longer important enough to hate.”

  After we’ve finally cleaned up the kitchen and loaded the dishwasher and treated ourselves to a shared glass of Hennessy, we’re leaning against the kitchen counter and Ben pulls me into a kiss.

  “So why did you finally show off your cooking skills?”

  “Because doing that made me happy tonight. Mostly because you’re not him.”

  We’re in the bedroom a few minutes later making love. Ben has already announced he can’t spend the night, because of a ridiculously early surgery. When he’s gone, I lie there in the dark, listening to Rip snore, thinking about how much I told Ben tonight, and how much I left unspoken, embarrassed to tell him how even after the divorce I would go up to the Upper West Side sometimes and stare through the window of Café Martin, hoping for a glimpse of him.

  Hating him and loving him at the same time.

  But then I go to a much happier place, thinking about Ben Kalinsky again, everything we’ve shared tonight, how easy things are between us, the opposite of the theme-park ride that my relationship with Martin Elian was, even in the good times. I think about all this even as I worry, constantly, that the only reason that I’ve found someone I can live happily with—making a liar out of Martin Elian—is that I know it’s probably not going to last.

  As if cancer has hedged my bets for me before I can do that for myself.

  I did open up to Ben Kalinsky, in a way I haven’t opened up to any man, not even Jimmy Cunniff, in a long time. Or maybe ever. Somehow it felt easier, safer, opening myself up, even a little bit, with Fiona Mills, a perfect stranger.

  Tonight was different. This was me telling my secrets to the man I really am in love with and realizing in the process—maybe—that I needed more than my work to make me feel alive.

  For an hour tonight, the kind of precious hour Fiona spoke of, I didn’t feel the need to be tough-guy Jane. I wasn’t Jane Effing Smith. I opened a door and let Ben Kalinsky in.

  And honored my promise to Fiona in the process.

  When I finally fall asleep, I dream about my mother again. She’s still young, like we’re sisters, and we’re walking on the beach, smiling and holding hands.

  Behind her, hanging outside the window, is her hummingbird feeder, swaying slightly in the breeze.

  This time a bird is there.

  She turns to see it and smiles, not looking as if she’s sick or dying.

  She looks happy, watching the bird suspended in midair next to the feeder, as if frozen in time, and memory, from before she got sick.

  The last thing I remember before I fall asleep is her staring at the feeder, the glass looking as shiny and new as it was the day my father built it for her.

  She’s smiling and reaching for the bird, as if wanting to put it in the palm of her hand, when my phone wakes me up.

  JIMMY.

  “We got two more bodies,” he says.

  “Who?”

  “Another mother-daughter deal.”

  I realize I’m already standing next to my bed.

  “Who, Jimmy?”

  “Elise Parsons and her kid,” he says. “The other Elise.”

  “How?”

  “Two each in the head.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  JIMMY IS WAITING FOR me on the street in front of the mansion in North Haven. The late Carl Parsons, the guy I called Gramps to his widow, had built the home for his wife and their daughter with a spectacular view of Noyac Bay and Shelter Island.

  The place is actually just a couple of miles from Jimmy’s own house. Couple of miles. Like a different world.

  Carl’s view of the water, I’m sure, is much better.

  There is a police cruiser with lights flashing just inside the gated entrance, then more cruisers leading up to the house. Somehow Jimmy, who seems to know all police in the area, has gotten word to the cop acting as gatekeeper at the end of the driveway that I should be allowed through. When I get near the front door, I notice a black Dodge Charger Pursuit with a State Police license plate.

  Jimmy is leaning against the cruiser as if it and this crime scene are his.

  “Considering our client’s romantic history with at least one of the deceased, it’s probably a good thing the state has turned him into a shut-in,” I say.

  “Both of the deceased,” Jimmy says.

  I nod at the house. “How did you find out what happened?”

  Jimmy shrugs. “People like talking to me. Or maybe it’s the free drinks I hand out to cops like I’m handing out flyers.”

  Cops keep walking out the front door with evidence bags. Somehow, even as they walk slowly over to the black East Hampton Police Department van parked in front of the garage, there is an urgency to it all. An intensity. A focus. The bags go into the van and the cops turn around and go back into the house. Jimmy says it all the time. Murder is still the main event.

  “So if our horny client has an airtight alibi, why am I here, exactly?”

  “Because half the town saw one of the victims bitch-slap you at the benefit. And because it got around pretty quickly that before you walked out, you told the late Elise Parsons that if she ever tried anything like that ever again, her face would need more than filler.”

  “I was joking!”

  “Ha ha,” Jimmy says. “You funny.”

  I now see a cop that I don’t recognize. Tall guy, Top Gun aviator jacket, Ray-Ban sunglasses, coming straight for us after he removes his surgical gloves and booties. Long black hair. He appears to be vain enough to have taken some of the gray out, though there’s more gray than black in his beard stubble, like it’s a mismatched set.

  He’s talking on his phone, which he now puts away. Grinning underneath the shades as if the best part of his day is about to begin.

  Even from a distance I can see that he’s trying too hard to be cool.

  Way too hard.

  Like he felt he was going through life with the top down.

  One of those.

  “The reason they asked me to call you, Janie, as I believe you’re about to find out, is that they’ve got some questions,” Jimmy says.

  I’m listening to Jimmy, but my eyes are on the guy in the Ray-Bans and Tom Cruise jacket, who has now made his way over to us and hears the last thing Jimmy said.

  “Guess who the questions are for?” the guy asks.

  THIRTY

  LOOKS-WISE HE REMINDS ME a little of my ex-husband Martin. But once he opens his mouth his accent isn’t French, it sounds more like 200 proof Queens, New York.

  “Wow, I don’t get to meet a lot of famous people,” he says before he even introduces himself.

  “You need to set the bar a lot higher than me when it comes to famous.”

  “Is that false modesty I hear?”

  “Is there any other kind? And by the way, I don’t believe I caught your name.”

  “I’m Danny Esposito. Homicide investigator, State Police. I work out of our office at the Republic Airport, over in East Farmingdale.”

  “I know where the airport is.”

  “’Course you do. You went to junior high school in Patchogue, right? Before you moved back to the city?”

  “You’ve done your homework.”

  “Like I said, you’re famous and I like to know as much as I can about famous people. I was the same way with my favorite ballplayers growing up.”

  “We seem to have locked that in at this point, your opinion about my celebrity status.” My smile is so thin I barely feel my lips move. “I assume you want to talk about something other than that.”

  “Well, now that you mention it,” he says, “it might have something to do with that scene you and the mother and the daughter had the other night, them now being deceased and all.”

  “You find that out in between getting the call on the murders and making it out here from East Farmingdale?”

  He rubs his chin. His look must require some tending to get it just right, that sweet spot between a couple of days’ growth and an actual beard.

  “I’ve been following your exploits since the first Jacobson trial. I even sat in the gallery.” He shrugs. “Anyway, now it turns out that as you were leaving the benefit, people heard you threaten Elise Parsons. The mom. Something about knocking the Botox out of her face. Did that happen?”

  “You obviously know it did.” I nod. “Are we skipping right past the part where she hit me?”

  He grins and points a finger at me. “Right before you threatened to harm her if she ever came near you again.” Still grinning, he asks, “So did she?”

  “Did she what?”

  “Come near you again?”

  I look over at Jimmy. There have been enough times in his life when he was the one asking questions at crime scenes. His eyes tell me to answer Esposito without going out of my way to antagonize him. It will only keep us here longer and neither one of us wants that.

  “I never saw Elise again after the benefit. It was part of a much broader plan to never see her ever again, period.”

  Esposito takes off the sunglasses and puts them on top of his head. Maybe thinking he’s showing off his blue eyes. I don’t have the heart to tell him he’s wasting his time with me.

  “Are we really doing this, investigator? Is that a real title, by the way?”

  “Call me Danny.”

  “I’m not a suspect here, Danny. We both know that. So why are we still even having this conversation?”

  “How about we go with you being a person of interest. You like that better?”

  “We know I’m not one of those, either.”

  He smiles what I’m sure he thinks is a flirty smile. “You are to me.”

  “I’ve got a question for you, if you don’t mind?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “This whole vibe you’ve got going, the pose, the come-on—does it actually work with other women?”

  “More than you’d think, actually.”

  “Good boy,” I say.

  I look at Jimmy again and jerk my head in the direction of the street.

  “Maybe I need to call a good lawyer,” I say to Danny Esposito, and head down the driveway without looking back, knowing the hotshot from the state cops is watching me all the way down the hill, maybe starting to understand how far out of his league he is.

  Or not.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Jimmy

  JIMMY THINKS HE BRIEFLY saw Edmund McKenzie at the benefit after Jane left, but there were a few hundred people between them and by the time Jimmy made his way across the room, McKenzie—if it really was him—was nowhere in sight.

  And is still nowhere to be found.

  But if Jimmy is going to find out who jumped him and tied him up at his house, he knows he needs to find McKenzie. And if the guy Jimmy thinks of as Joe Too is working for McKenzie, or with him, why is he?

  Loose ends.

  They’d always driven him crazy and still do.

  Jane is working on filing a motion to get Jacobson’s trial date moved up. It’s unspoken between them, but Jimmy knows why, of course he knows why. She doesn’t want to start something she can’t finish. If she had her way the trial would start the day after tomorrow.

  But he can’t help her with that. Can’t find this chump McKenzie, at least for the time being, no matter how many calls he makes. So he tells Jane that until further notice he’s going to work the Parsons case like it’s theirs. He can’t just sit around. It will drive him even crazier than a loose end. Even if Jacobson isn’t a suspect, he’s connected to more dead women.

  What are the odds?

  Once you start doing the degrees-of-separation thing, Jacobson is connected, some form or fashion, to all of it. The Gates murders. The Carson murders. Joe Champi. Who’s obviously connected to the guy who broke into Jimmy’s house with his slugger of a girlfriend.