I had one last look at Leanne Sullivan before I walked out to the tarmac. She dropped her hand in front of her, back of the hand toward me, and then extended her fingers forward. Shoo, she was saying. Be gone. Run home to the D.A., Mr. Becket. Explain how Jason Stockover has disappeared. Left his girlfriend, his restaurant, his fancy house. Tell the D.A. to stand in front of the microphones and tell people that. And think about what can happen whenever you look at that scar that's going to form on your neck.

HOUSTON, July 2008.

A U.S. CUSTOMS OFFICER NAMED MELINDEZ WANTED TO KNOW why I didn't have any luggage. I pointed to my neck, showed him the blood on my collar. The shirt was black, but he could still see it. "Girlfriend," I said.

He looked closely. Got halfway up from his seat. His eyes grew wide, then narrowed.

"I told her, 'That's it. You pulled that psycho stuff on me for the last time. I'm outta here.' "

"And you just took off?"

"Went right to the airport."

"Left all your things?"

"Wasn't worth it, man."

"Local girl?"

"h.e.l.l, no. Boston Irish."

Officer Melindez was unmoved.

"I figured, that's the way you want to be, you can just vacation by yourself."

"Oh," he said, as if everything suddenly made sense, and handed me back my pa.s.sport.

CAPE COD, July 2008.

WAS IT POSSIBLE THAT THE BEACHES OF CAPE COD COULD be more beautiful than those of Hawaii or Costa Rica? Maybe some. Maybe for two or three months of the year. Certainly this one seemed to be.

I parked in the public lot at Craigville Beach. I had to pay because I had not gotten around to getting my resident's beach sticker. It was only eleven o'clock in the morning, but it was a Sat.u.r.day, and already it was getting crowded. People had driven down from Boston-families, mostly. In the old days there would have been primarily Irish and Italian families. Now there were people from all sorts of places: Indian families, wearing their street clothes, the women going into the water with full skirts and dresses, a man sitting on the sand in a white shirt and pin-striped pants, dark socks, black shoes; Russians in teeny-tiny bathing suits, even the old men with big bellies; Brazilians, already in a party mood, already playing their music too loud.

I walked west, past The Beach Club, where rich people paid big money to sit with their own kind, have good-looking teenagers arrange their beach chairs and umbrellas. Then I walked past the private homes of even richer people, who had the advantage of Commonwealth laws dating back to colonial days when the government did not have enough money to fund docks and so encouraged people to build privately by allowing them to own the beach all the way down to the median low-tide mark.

The rich people were kind enough to let the rest of us walk across their property, twenty-six houses with at least half a mile of prime real estate that we had to cross until we got to the area on the point that the town owned. The town beach, with virtually no parking but clean white sand and clear blue water for those savvy enough to find it and energetic enough to get there.

I had a long towel over my shoulder, I was carrying a small cooler with green seedless grapes and a couple of beers, and I had a radio in my pocket in case I stayed long enough to listen to the Red Sox game. It was a precaution, really. I was not going to the beach to enjoy myself; I was going to think.

I had thought on the plane from Costa Rica to Houston and again from Houston to Boston and I had not liked my thoughts. Now I was hoping to sort them out.

After the last house there was a clear strand of sand extending all the way to a natural rock jetty. Behind the strand were long, waving sea gra.s.s and an occasional scrub pine covering rolling dunes, and on the far side of the dunes was the Centerville River, an estuary, really, seawater flowing in and out from the bay. If I went to the point there would be a hundred-yard channel and on the other side would be Dowses Beach in the village of Osterville. Land of the rich and famous. Home of the Gregorys.

I would not be able to see the Gregorys' compound from the point, it would be another mile along the coast, but I would be able to sense it, to feel it looming there, just beyond the trees, just around the bend of the sh.o.r.eline on the other side of the channel. And I would be able to feel their presence: the Senator and his kids and his sisters and their kids and his late brothers' kids. All of them, leading the lives to which the rest of us aspired.

But I did not go that far. I ducked into a hollow in the dunes and set up my little camp. Others had found this spot before. There were the remnants of a fire, burnt black logs, and while I was clearing them out of the way I came across a used condom. I took a stick and flicked it into the sea gra.s.s behind me. A seagull thought it was food and made a dive for it, then rose again, squawking in indignation.

I took off my T-shirt and spread it on the ground next to my towel. I put my watch on top of it, along with my car keys, my wallet, and the little radio. I slathered on some sunscreen in a rather haphazard manner and then tossed the tube onto the shirt. It bounced and went into the sand, and I left it there. This little hollow was mine. I could sit here and look out over a berm of sand at the beach, the water, the boats on the bay, the people walking by, and no one would even know I was here unless they looked closely. George Becket, in a nice sequestered place. He's there and he's not there. I cracked a beer and sat on the towel with one arm around my drawn-up knees.

George Becket, watching the world go by. George Becket, filled with information about other people's lives. Lives lived in exotic places, lives that seemed good until you probed. Lives like mine.

Nine people had been at the Gregory compound that night in May many years ago. Peter, Ned, Jamie, Cory, McFetridge, Jason, Leanne, Patty, and, I had to believe, Heidi.

Cory left that night. Heidi was dead the next day. That left seven. McFetridge and Patty, I had learned what I could from them. I could not say the same for Leanne. I could not say anything about Jason.

I had gone to see Jason and he had fled. Why? Why not just talk to me, the way McFetridge had? And how had he known I was coming? I had gone there only by serendipity. I was supposed to see Peter in San Francisco. Supposed to see Peter through Barbara's estranged husband, Tyler. Who was supposed to be in Sausalito waiting for me. But who wasn't there after all. Who had been replaced by slippery Billy, who had sent me off to Tamarindo.

Maybe it wasn't serendipity after all.

Here, George, as long as you're looking, why don't you go to another country? I'm sure you'll see someone there. Except the guy who isn't there any longer. But look who you found. Someone else you were searching for. Someone who nearly killed you for asking questions.

Is that what really happened?

Sitting by myself, with nothing but the occasional sound of seagulls and the background noise of waves washing into sh.o.r.e, I tried to figure out Leanne Sullivan. Who, if it wasn't Chuck Larson, had tapped into her patriotic fervor? Could it be one of the other Gregory henchmen? Pierre Mumford? The monster of the m.u.f.fin house? He had seemed more a protector than a manipulator. Had it been Jason himself? An a.s.signation on the beach, a phone call-even a weekend together afterward-was that enough to cause her to give up her life in Ma.s.sachusetts and move to Hawaii?

And what life? I didn't know. Was she a salesclerk? A Pilates instructor? A bank teller? A phlebotomist? An insurance adjuster?

And what was in it for Jason? Preppie Jason and the rough, tough girl from Roslindale. Leanne Sullivan, said by Howard Landry to be sporting the Eighth Wonder of the World, and I had not even noticed. Of course, she had been wearing baggy cotton white pants the first time I saw her and she had been covered by the tails of a man's dress shirt the second time. A muscular girl with a flat belly-could she have had hidden what Howard said she had? And what it did for Howard Landry, a small-town police detective whose pa.s.sions were fishing and beer, would that have been enough for Jason Stockover, Mr. La-de-da?

Was Jason like Paul McFetridge, the Paul I used to know? Not so much Mr. La-de-da as Mr. I've Got Everything? Mr. Of Course You'll Do This For Me. Here, love, go off to Hawaii and live with Howard for a while. Then come back. I've got this nice little place in Central America, and I'll be waiting for you.

Hard to figure.

How do you get someone like Leanne to live with a man like Howard? For years. Was it possible she really did love him? Jason and then Howard and then Jason again. Maybe Bob the Exterminator in between.

Maybe she didn't love any of them. In which case, who was she doing all this for? The Senator? Was that possible? The Senator was rumored to have a ravenous appet.i.te when it came to women, but I had never witnessed that myself. When would I have? I had seen him only the one time in Florida. And then I had spent the rest of my life doing his bidding.

Living in a nice place.

Sort of like Tamarindo. Or Kauai. Or Stanley, Idaho.

All nice places where the people involved never expected to live. People not guilty themselves. People guarding someone else's secret.

A leg appeared next to me. A very shapely leg attached to a small, very shapely foot. The owner of the leg had not approached from the beach, but from the dunes and trees behind me. It was possible. There was a path that led from the street, went through a thicket of pines and then forked, one way to the estuary, one way to the ocean. I saw the leg, I thought of the condom, I looked up.

Squinting into the sun, I did not make her out right away. A woman with a short white skirt, a yellow halter top, a broad-brimmed hat, sungla.s.ses with sharp edges. The sharp edges gave her away. I leaped to my feet.

"Thought you were in Hawaii," she said.

I glanced around to see if her husband was with her, to see if anybody was with her.

"Just got back."

Why was she looking at me that way? And how did she get so short? Was her body always that compact? I tried to remember if I had ever stood next to her before. I certainly had never seen her when she wasn't wearing something frumpish, something designed to make her look like wallpaper.

It was possible, just possible, that she was not wearing a bra under that halter top. No, that wasn't possible. Not Mitch White's wife. I didn't know where to look. I tried the sand.

"He said you went to talk to Detective Landry."

Where had she come from? She lived in Dennis, to the east. They had their own beaches in Dennis.

"h.e.l.lo?" She had a canvas bag over her shoulder. It dropped to the sand, exactly where my eyes were focused. Apparently she was going to stay.

"Yes," I said. "Well, it's because of that guy Bill Telford."

"Anything New."

"Yes." I tried looking at the sea. There were a couple of groups of people down at the water's edge. Maybe she had come with one of them. Except she had come up to me from behind.

"What did you learn?"

What did I learn? What did she know? What was I supposed to tell my boss's wife? "Not much."

She pushed me. She put her open hand on my bare chest and gave me a slight shove. "C'mon, George. There's some reason why you stayed as long as you did. By the looks of you, you must have been mauled by tiger sharks."

She was talking about my bruises, my splinter marks, my black-and-blues, and the cut on my neck.

Her hand went to my elbow and stayed there. It was a cool hand, and it was making me sweat. I went from looking at the sea to looking at the sky to looking at her. She was having no trouble looking at me. Jesus, Stephanie White was doing a woman thing on me. "You know," she said, her hand staying where it was, "you have Mitch quite worried."

"About what?" I wiped my mouth. I kept not looking at her yellow top. I wanted to sit down.

"He says your friend is going to run against him. Mitch is afraid you're not quite as loyal as he would like a member of his office to be."

"Mrs. White-" Her hand squeezed my elbow tighter and I stopped. Perspiration was beginning to bead along my hairline.

"Oh, it's Mrs. White now, is it? I'm not so much older than you that you have to call me that, am I?"

If she had enough confidence to play men like she was playing me, what in G.o.d's name was she doing with a dweeb like Mitch? "Stephanie-"

"That's better." She may have moved an inch or two closer to me. It was getting harder and harder not to look directly into her face.

"I don't know if you're aware of this, but your husband and I aren't exactly friends. He's stuck with me because someone called in a favor-"

"The Senator."

"Yes."

"And you know, of course, that Mitch owes his own job to the Senator."

"I'd say that's the common belief here on the Cape."

"Mitch was a staff attorney on the Senate Judiciary Committee down in D.C., did you know that?"

"I've been told that, yes."

"Were you also told he got the Senator out of a jam?"

"I figured it was something like that."

"Sort of like you did."

It was time for me to look away again. The wind, I saw, was beginning to pick up on the water. Tiny waves were being formed. I knew the pattern. They would get bigger.

"Which means"-her fingers moved, encircling my arm a little higher than the elbow and then pulling me toward her-"the two of you ought to be working in common interest, don't you think?"

"Stephanie, do you know what I do for your husband? Do you know how long I've been doing it?"

"What I know is that Buzzy Daizell used to sleep with your wife."

The touch on my arm was no longer cool. Now it was like the handcuffs that had been put on me in Costa Rica. "Maybe that's why we're no longer married," I said.

"Is it? Because I saw you and her go into the bathroom of my house that time. I thought, man, what kind of couple is this? They go screw in someone else's bathroom? They couldn't even wait till they got home?"

Screw. Stephanie White, my boss's wife, said "screw." I didn't know where she had come from, why she was dressed this way, why she was addressing me the way she was. I didn't know what to say.

"She had issues." I spoke over the top of her head. Over her hat. "She liked bathrooms."

"I started thinking about you differently then. I started wondering what you were really like, George."

I apparently gave something away because Stephanie's mouth twisted. Did her hand squeeze me again? I pulled my arm away, just in case. "You thought I liked my wife having s.e.x with other guys?"

"I thought maybe you had an open marriage." From the way she tilted her head, I gathered I was to understand she was casting no judgments.

Stephanie, the sharp-featured ice queen, was open-minded about open marriages. Stephanie, who was married to a guy with a preposterous mustache and a wardrobe full of short-sleeved white shirts. What was she doing? What was she offering the swinger in her husband's bas.e.m.e.nt? The perspiration rolled down my sides.

"And then it occurred to me that maybe that wasn't it at all. Maybe you didn't know what was really going on."

I felt a strange relief when she said that. My body temperature seemed to drop two or three degrees in an instant. "So you're telling me now in case I'm supporting Buzzy against your husband."

"Because if you are, George, his affair with your wife is going to come out. And I suspect it won't just be him who's embarra.s.sed."

"Are you threatening me, Mrs. White?"

"I'm just saying, George, there are reasons why we should work together."

"You've got my secret. Tell me yours."

It was her turn to be surprised. Or at least to act it. "What makes you think I have one?"

"I think Mitch does."