Between a neat pile of manilla folders and another of precisely stacked documents, lies a single red rose…in a pool of something that looks like blood.

  In the end, in some ways, at least, it was easier than expected.

  Burglary 101. These days, you can learn to build a nuclear bomb on the Internet. Disabling a fancy alarm system and getting into a locked house is a cakewalk compared to that.

  At first, Tildy seemed far too inebriated to put up a fight. That delightfully fortuitous fact was instantly apparent in her unsteady gait and the potent liquor fumes on her breath.

  How highly unusual to see the sophisticated, controlled Matilda Harrington incapacitated in any way.

  That it happened last night, of all nights, is clearly a sign that it was meant to be.

  True, she did eventually recover her senses enough to resist…

  And she caught you off guard when she almost escaped, didn’t she?

  Yes. Live and learn.

  Now you know you can’t let that happen again, with the others. You have to be prepared for anything, anything at all. You can’t linger, savoring the moment, no matter how much you’d like to do that. The birthday girl will always have to be incapacitated as quickly as possible.

  Too bad. It would be fun to see the guest of honor go from surprised to frightened to full-blown hysterical.

  Of course, there will be plenty of opportunity, when laying the groundwork, to tease and taunt the others.

  But when the big day arrives and you finally come face-to-face with each of them, you just can’t afford to prolong the interaction. It’s too risky.

  Oh, well. In the end, Matilda Harrington didn’t escape, did she?

  No, she was meant to pay for her terrible sin with her life.

  And it was meant to happen just when it did, on her milestone birthday.

  The second blow to her head killed her—that much was obvious—but the party had to go on as planned. And there was supreme satisfaction in obliterating her beautiful, typically smug features until she was unrecognizable as the esteemed Matilda Harrington…

  As a human face, even.

  But that part is over, for now…

  Until next weekend, anyway.

  Next weekend, when the next birthday girl in line will find herself the guest of honor at a unique party indeed.

  CHAPTER 11

  Sergeant Quincy Hiles Jr. grew up in a low-income housing complex over in Roxbury, where he witnessed more than his share of violent crime in the first two decades of his life.

  That trend continued for the next three, but by then he was behind the wheel of the dark sedan with flashing red lights, rather than watching it pull up in front of the latest crime scene as he huddled with a somber, jaded cluster of sidewalk onlookers.

  Single mother Devorah Hiles had been elated when Quincy, the oldest of her five children, got into a local community college on a baseball scholarship. An agile six-two with a mighty swing, he was destined to be the next Ted Williams—or so she bragged to everyone in the ’hood.

  Then Quincy’s kid brother, DeQuann, became a neighborhood statistic, the ultimate cliché: gunned down a block from home in a drug deal gone bad.

  When Quincy dropped out of college the following semester to begin law enforcement training, his mother reacted with the same wailing, inconsolable grief she had over DeQuann’s death. Devorah didn’t understand why her eldest son would exchange a potential ticket out of their violent hell for a holster and, as she saw it, a target on his back.

  He wasn’t sure he understood it, either—or does even now. It was just something he had to do, without ever looking over his shoulder at what might have been.

  He took the same approach when his thirteen-year marriage to Bev became a casualty of his occupational hazards: long hours, rotating shifts, emotional detachment—so necessary on the job, but detrimental on the home front. Bev remarried in time for her new husband, a banker, to send both of Quincy’s daughters to private colleges.

  Forget what might have been. Now, with his law enforcement career winding down, about to put a down payment on a Clearwater Beach condo, Sergeant Quincy Hiles doesn’t look back. Ever.

  He’s coasting out the remainder of his career as a detective with the Boston Police Department Homicide Unit. His work takes him all over the city, often into less-than-desirable neighborhoods.

  Today, however, he finds himself in Area D, District D-4, encompassing Boston’s wealthy to upper-middle-class Back Bay and South End.

  Never here—neveranywhere —has the strapping detective seen anything likethis .

  In the elegant dining room of the Commonwealth Avenue town house, the mistress of the house sits at the table.

  Slaughtered.

  Everything in the vicinity is spattered with blood. The silk wallpaper, the oriental area rug, the furniture. Even the 14-foot tray ceiling is marred with droplets, indicating a series of violent, arcing blows.

  The corpse is propped in a chair at the head of the long oval cherry table, which is decorated as if for a little girl’s birthday party. Pink paper goods, noisemakers.

  A pointy party hat is garishly tilted on the woman’s blood-soaked flaxen hair above a skull that was brutally bashed with a heavy object.

  Quincy would bet it was the antique pineapple-shaped cast iron doorstop that props open the swinging door to the kitchen.

  At a glance, there’s no blood on it, but he’s pretty sure forensic tests will reveal traces there.

  “What makes you say that?” asks Detective Deb Jackson, new on the job, as young and as blonde as the victim herself—but far less privileged.

  Then again, who isn’t? The Harringtons are worth tens of millions—a possible motive for the crime?

  “For one thing,” Quincy tells Deb, rubbing his close-cropped, gray-flecked black beard, “that doorstop just looks as though it’s out of place. It seems like it should be closer to the hinge, and maybe pushing the door up against the wall.”

  Right now, the door is caught a few feet out, in midswing, at an angle. In a house this meticulously kept, that feels wrong; a potential red flag to a seasoned detective.

  To a newbie like Deb, not so much.

  “It’s partly my own gut instinct,” Quincy tells her with a shrug. “I could be wrong. I bet I’m not, though.”

  “But how do you—”

  He cuts her off with a brusque, “You’ll learn. Takes awhile.”

  He turns his attention back to the macabre scene.

  Uniformed investigators—cops, forensics, the medical examiner—bustle around him, snapping pictures, dusting for prints, filling out paperwork.

  The table is set for five, with paper party plates and cups, and pink plastic cutlery. In the center of the table is an untouched rectangular cake. Pink wax candles have melted into white frosting and pale pink icing that reads Happy Birthday. In darker icing, which isn’t icing at all, are the words DEAR TILDY.

  “Blood,” Quincy declares, noting the letters’ dark, congealed, maroon appearance.

  “Hers?”

  “Probably. We won’t know until we test it.”

  Deb nods. To her credit, she doesn’t look the least bit squeamish. Good. This is one hell of a career kickoff case. If she can handle this, she can handle anything.

  She’s a pretty little thing, the type of woman you’d expect to be more at home wearing a pageant banner than a police badge. At least, Quincy would—based solely on looks and first impressions.

  But so far, she’s proven him wrong. She’s gutsy, and smart, and he almost wishes she had come along sooner, for both their sakes. Not just because she’s infinitely more charming than that brute Don Kopacynski, his last rookie partner, but because she has a lot to learn—from Quincy. And with three months to go until retirement, he’s not exactly in a patient, passionate-about-his-work phase of life.

  No, I’m more in theGet Me the Hell Out of Herephase, he thinks wryly. But he’s not shirking. He’ll work this case the way he’s worked every other homicide, with dogged determination to get the killer off the street.

  Deb points at the box clutched in the body’s outstretched hands that rest on the table, helping to prop her upright. “What do you think that is?”

  Quincy notes the pink wrapping paper and coordinating bow.

  “It’s anyone’s guess,” he replies. “But I’d be willing to bet it’s not something you’d want as a gift onyour birthday.”

  Deb barely cracks a smile. “I’d be willing to bet you’re right. Too bad we won’t know for awhile,” she adds, well aware that they can’t touch the evidence until the initial investigation is complete, and forensics and the medical examiner have done their thing.

  Time now to speak to the lone witness.

  “Hey, McGraw, where’s the housekeeper who found the body?” he asks one of the uniformed officers.

  “Connelly took her out back to get some air. She kept fainting.”

  “Let’s go,” Quincy tells Deb.

  As they make their way through the kitchen, he notes the stark, elegant, monochromatic décor.

  “I bet that fancy stove hood costs more than you and I put together make in a month,” he comments to Deb.

  “Yeah, but I’ll take my cozy little apartment over this place any day. There’s no warmth or personality here. This kitchen looks like a magazine picture.”

  She’s right.

  And the dining room looks like a horror show.

  The staged scene suggests a serial killer, but Quincy doubts the victim was chosen randomly.

  It really is her birthday.

  The initial attack probably took place in the blood-spattered hallway opening into the dining room.

  The blow to her head would have left her…if not dead, then at least unconscious and very close to it. Her hands and arms are free of any self-defensive wounds that would indicate she fought back.

  But the killer didn’t stop there.

  The blood smears on the polished hardwood and area rug mark the trail where the mortally wounded woman was dragged to the table.

  There, her face was brutally hacked with some sort of cleaver or ax, obliterating any recognizable features.

  A classic case of overkill.

  And it, combined with the birthday timing, suggests one thing to a seasoned homicide detective like Quincy Hiles: In all probability, whoever murdered Matilda Harrington knew her—and hated her.

  A squad car is parked out front of Brynn’s house on Tamarack Lane when she arrives home after dropping both Caleb and Ashley at their respective schools.

  Both children seemed initially unsettled about the dead bird on the kitchen counter, while little Jeremy was oblivious, of course.

  A shaken Brynn and Garth passed it off as a freak accident.

  “It must have gotten into the house somehow,” Garth told them, “and it was flying around and it crashed into the cupboards and died.”

  “But there’s so much blood,” Caleb said.

  Yes. And it didn’t come from the bird.

  But Brynn wasn’t about to tell him that. Instead she said, “Remember how much Jeremy’s forehead bled when he knocked it on the corner of the coffee table that time?”

  That seemed to appease Caleb.

  Ashley said very little about the dead bird. She didn’t even scream when she saw it, just stopped short in the doorway and stared.

  She did ask, “Are you going to just leave it there?”

  “For now,” Garth told her somewhat tersely, and she dropped the subject.

  They were planning to call the police as soon as the kids were safely out of the house. Brynn broke a school-day rule and served them cereal in the living room, in front of the television. She was relieved when it was time to hustle them out the door.

  “Call now,” she whispered urgently to Garth, who was on the phone, still trying to arrange for someone else to cover his morning lecture.

  He just scowled.

  He must have called right away, though, because Brynn has been gone only about fifteen minutes.

  Clearly, the Cedar Crest force didn’t send out their most hardened detective to solve this particular case.

  The lone officer—probably a rookie—is blond, handsome and clean-shaven—if he’s old enough to shave, Brynn thinks, as wryly as she can under the circumstances.

  She finds him standing in the kitchen with Garth, surveying the heap of red feathers and darkened, congealed blood. Jeremy is back in his booster seat, an array of dry Cheerios scattered before him and on the floor.

  “This is my wife, Brynn,” Garth informs the young cop as she comes into the room. “Brynn, this is Officer Demuth.”

  They shake hands. Hers, she knows, is ice cold, and not just because of the raw, damp autumn chill outdoors.

  With Caleb and Ashley gone, she’s free at last to express the anxiety she’s kept bottled up all morning, threatening to explode at any given moment.

  First the sleepless night, then the explosive argument with Garth, then the dead cardinal…

  A cardinal. It can’t be a coincidence…can it?

  No.

  Especially not today.

  Her eyes go to the homemade construction-paper calendar on the wall. Today is Tildy’s thirtieth birthday. Brynn realized it first thing this morning and planned, in the back of her mind, to give her a call.

  Now she definitely will…and not just to say Happy Birthday.

  “I was telling your husband that birds do find their way into homes, Mrs. Saddler,” Officer Demuth says, “but—”

  “I just want you to know this was no accident,” she cuts in, turning away from the calendar. Her stomach lurches as her gaze falls on the sickening site on the counter, and she swallows hard. “Somebody broke into the house sometime in the night and left that here.”

  “Brynn, that’s obvious,” Garth speaks up before Demuth can respond. “That’s what he was about to say. Why don’t you just let him do the talking?”

  All right, so she stated the obvious. Still, Garth doesn’t have to make her look like a blabbering fool. Embarrassed, she flashes a scowl at her husband.

  Demuth says, “Again, birds do get into homes, but it looks like this one has a broken neck…not an injury that would bleed. Anyway, I think we’re all aware that the amount of blood makes it obvious that someone planted this here, correct? And that the blood didn’t come from the bird?”

  Brynn nods.

  “Mrs. Saddler, you were home here all night, correct?”

  She nods again, wondering if Garth has already mentioned thathe wasn’t.

  “Did you see or hear anything unusual?”

  She thinks back to her restless hours on the couch. She thought she heard something a few times, but she figured that was just Garth coming home.

  Now, she shivers at the thought that someone could have been prowling around the next room as she lay on the couch.