“It’s not as impregnable as you think. I bribed a lobster man. It was really quite simple.” He puffed again on his cigarette and thought briefly of Elaine. She hated cigarettes; she used to complain about his stinking up the house. Then he banished the thought of her, the vision, the reality. He couldn’t afford any sentimentality. “Bartholomew Wakefield could easily do the same.”

Crockett’s eyes, more black than blue in the night air, bored into Mac, but Mac merely flicked ashes onto the gleaming bare floor. “Tell me about this man who calls himself Bartholomew Wakefield. Do you know him?”

Another thin smile. Another “Perhaps.”

“I want the truth, Stevens,” Crockett demanded, as imperious as ever. “I know you were in Vienna in ‘56, I know you got Balaton out of Hungary. Goddammit, I’m not some stupid old fool! I want to know who Ashley and David Wakefield are—who this uncle of theirs is. I want to know what happened to my daughter.” He erupted into spasmodic coughing and with a trembling hand reached for the crystal glass of water at his side. He managed to choke out, “And the jewels—I want to know what they mean. Did this Bartholomew Wakefield seduce my daughter? Did he steal from her? Damn you both to eternal hell if you’ve lied to me all these years.”

“If anyone lied to you,” Mac said without emotion, “it was Judith—and yourself. Maybe these are questions you should have asked thirty years ago.”

“My daughter was dead. What did I have left?”

Mac looked at him without sympathy. “Her children.”

Crockett’s thin gnarled hands, blue veins bulging, shot out from under the blankets and gripped the arms of the chair. Mac thought the old man would try to come after him, but instead he bellowed, “How the hell was I supposed to know she had children? She refused to see me. She didn’t want me to know.” He coughed loudly; or perhaps it was just a cover for his anguish. “My God, didn’t she know she could have come to me?”

In the silence that followed, Mac crushed his cigarette butt under his shoe, on the polished floor. Andrew Balaton seemed to be trying to remove himself to another place, another time; he pretended to have no interest in the dialogue between MacGregor Stevens and the chairman of Crockett Industries. But Mac knew that was definitely not the case. Perhaps even more than he, Balaton was riveted to every word being said.

Through sheer force of will, J. Land Crockett regained his composure, and his eyes grew cold—endless dark pits of bitterness and anger. “If I’d let an autopsy be performed, I’d have known she’d given birth recently—and nothing would have stopped me from finding her child. Her twins. My God.” He shut his eyes, steeling himself against another uncontrolled outburst of emotion. “I never would have stopped.”

“We were both robbed,” Andrew said unexpectedly, his voice calm and quiet, as if discussing the latest profit-and-loss figures.