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carving in Patrick’s duster pocket, but she wasn’t in the mood to just take it. For a brief, petty moment, she wanted to make him give it up. Patrick, who had everything. Looks, intelligence, money, stability. A life of privilege in an upscale community with parents who indulged him and his brother shamefully.
    As opposed to his aunt, who had no inheritance, no living parents with deep pockets, and a hole in her pocketbook big enough to require two jobs to fill it.
    And yet, here was Patrick lifting family heirlooms in the middle of the night four weeks away from Christmas. Molly guessed that she was going to get to talk to her brother Martin during the holidays whether she wanted to or not.
    In the meantime, she crowded Patrick a little so he was caught between her and the wall of police Dee represented. No matter what else was going on here tonight, she needed to immediately impress on Patrick that the road he’d chosen was now closed.
    â€œI’m not going to press charges this time,” she said and saw Patrick go white all over again. “As long as I get the carving.”
    â€œYou wouldn’t press charges,” he insisted, the bravado a little thin in that young voice. “I’m family.”
    Molly scowled. “I don’t care if you’re my mother. You don’t steal things
without suffering consequences. Don’t your parents take you to church? They’re Catholic, for God’s sake. They should have dosed you up with enough guilt and responsibility for you to be in therapy. God knows they were.”
    Her answer was a stiffening of the spine. A darting of the eyes toward the policeman, who wasn’t family. Well, Molly thought disparagingly, he’s certainly learned that all-important Burke lesson. Hold firm to the family facade.
    â€œYou said this time,” Dee prodded, so he could get back to what really interested him.
    Molly nodded. “Take a good look at this face, Dee. ’Cause if you catch him again, he’s all yours.”
    â€œBut Aunt Molly—!”
    She lifted a finger and fleetingly thought how fond her mother had been of that gesture. “You and I will discuss it after this nice gentleman gets back on his beat.”
    Molly got silence, a flash of rage, a hint of disdain and tears. But Patrick kept quiet, and in the end, reached into his coat pocket.
    Even Dee sucked in a breath when he saw what Patrick pulled out. Molly didn’t blame him. Most people didn’t really notice the workmanship on the jade figurines her father had collected, because he’d bunched them all on five shelves of glass like a display at a discount store. But one by one, they did, indeed, take the breath away.
    This figurine was a deep lapis blue, alive with the light rippling along the lines of the tiny creature like water. Exquisite. And at least six hundred years old. Molly accepted it with good grace and walked it in to replace it carefully along with its companions on the backlit shelves.
    â€œOne final thing,” she said to her now-impatient nephew as they rejoined Dee. “Do your parents know where you are?”
    His laugh was way too old for that beautiful face. “You kiddin’? They’re on a fact-finding mission to China. They won’t know I’m gone for two solid weeks. And by then …” Molly saw the flicker in his eyes, the reshuffling of thought. The halfhearted shrug. “I could be dead.”
    He was right, of course. His parents were true Burkes, born to serve and succeed. His father was the new Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs or Fiscal Responsibility or something, and his mother was the perfect Washington wife, delivered up of the heir and spare, and semiemployed in a job
that wouldn’t interfere with or outshine her husband, after whom she tagged like a patient, well-groomed dog.
    Which meant that Molly would have to call Patrick’s nanny or boarding school, or whoever was