“Because that was one hell of a bad hop,” Keegan went on. “If that patrol car hadn’t come up the hill, there’d be no way to link my old .38 to the crime. I’d be safe as houses right now. Nobody would give me a second look. That was some damned bad luck for me.” And only for him.

“Crime?” Eve said, as though that single word had been the only one she’d heard. Again, she seemed to be struggling to keep up. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

Keegan went to the dim penumbra of light at the curtain’s edge. He put his eye to the gap and looked out on the quad with its shimmering pool and its floodlit palms. All those neighbors behind their lit curtains were going about their business. It was just a hot night in August, with TV shows and TV dinners, and maybe a cold bottle of Schlitz to unwind. In another hour, they’d call it a day with a cool shower and go off to bed with a fan spinning in the window. What workaday bliss they were living, and they didn’t even know it.

Keegan turned from the window and found Eve watching him from where she sat on the corner of his mattress. Her face was blank and blameless, her wide eyes clear of any trace of cynicism. What did Moore see in that face that Keegan was blind to? She was as unworldly as a cloistered child. It couldn’t be an act—though, to be fair, good actors were a dime a dozen in this town.

“I think I saw Simon Catling on TV,” he told her. Of all the notions churning in his mind, how was that the one that bubbled to the surface? “I’m beginning to think he’s just some two-bit actor hired to string me along.” He thought of the plump envelope riding on the limo seat beside him. Was it just a prop? If he’d torn it open, would he have found stacks of paper cut from some old phone book?

Eve watched him from where she sat, but she didn’t speak. There was a trace of pity in her expression now. He must sound like a raving nutjob. She nodded for him to come over and patted the mattress beside her. Her dark eyes glimmered in her blanched face. “Come sit down, Jim,” she said. Her voice was calm but pleading. “Please. You’re scaring me. You’re not making sense.”

Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. It didn’t help that, in this closed-off room, he felt like he was being smothered with an electric blanket.