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rumbling growl as the car stopped.
    “Dammit. I have to go. Etienne, if you called the cops on me, you’re a dead man.”
    “I don’t call the cops, ever. This is shit. Go, Samantha. I will take care of things.”
    “Yeah, right.” Her mind flying with scenarios about who might have talked and why, Sam hung up the phone. She raced into her bedroom, grabbed up the backpack she always kept under her bed, and hurried back into the living room. The computer still sat there, requesting whether she would like to subscribe, for the reasonable price of $12.95 per year, to the newsletter dedicated to following the private life and business practices of Richard Addison.
    She yanked the plug out of the wall, lifted the casing off the CPU, and pulled out every circuit board and wire that wasn’t soldered down. Shoving them into her pack, she kicked the crap out of the rest of the unit, then took another minute to make a check of the windows around the perimeter of the house. It looked clear, and she slipped out the back door. Hopping her neighbor’s fence, she hiked herself onto Mrs. Esposito’s roof, wincing as the motion pulled at the wound on her thigh, and ran.
    She’d left the Honda parked in the Food for Less market two blocks away, and she reached it just as a police helicopter, a news helicopter close behind it, powered overhead in the direction of her house. Her former house. Starting the car, she drove another mile and a half before she pulled into a lot crowded with hamburger and pizza and Cuban food restaurants. The pay phone worked, though she wouldn’t vouch for its cleanliness. Dropping in a quarter, she dialed Stoney’s number.
    “Yeah?”
    “Jorge?” she said in a thick accent. “Está Jorge alle?”
    She heard his intake of breath. “Look, lady, I keep telling you, there’s no Jorge here. No está aqui. Comprende?”
    “Comprendo.” Her hands shook as she hung up the phone, and she clenched them together. They’d found Stoney, or at least were keeping an eye on him. A close eye. Which meant they’d probably try to trace her call. Cursing, she hurried back to the car and headed north. How in the hell had the police found their trail so fast? She knew she hadn’t left prints, and even if Addison had managed to give a good description of her, they had nothing to match it to. She believed Etienne when he said he hadn’t turned her in—that wasn’t his style. The cops’ arrival, though, hadn’t surprised him, either. Someone had talked, and they’d implicated both her and Stoney. She narrowed her eyes. No one played her for a fool. No one who didn’t regret it later.
    This was out of control. Rich people had things stolen from them all the time. That was why they’d invented insurance. What rich people didn’t have, however, were people trying to blow up their houses, and perhaps even them. Damn Etienne. She remembered Addison’s face as she’d hit him, the startled look that had replaced the mild amusement in his gray eyes. He had to know she hadn’t tried to kill him. Just the opposite. She’d saved his life.
    Samantha’s heart jumped. He was the only witness to her involvement in any of this, as far as she knew. Etienne might have said he’d take care of things, but in her experience, that meant only things that concerned his own ass. If he followed his usual pattern, he would disappear for a few weeks and emerge counting his cut. Which was fine, except that it left her with a shitload of trouble. And so she needed Addison. She needed to convince him that she was innocent—or relatively so, anyway. Someone needed to take the blame for this fiasco, and she didn’t intend for it to be her. It looked as though she was going in over the wall, after all.

Four
    Thursday, 9:08 p.m.
    “This is ridiculous,” Richard said, hanging up the phone after his conversation with the chief of the Palm Beach Police Department. “It’s been two bloody days, and still all they’ll say is that they