There was a long, silent pause, as if she had snapped all the chains of the men in the room.

She shook her head. “Why did you even pretend to go along with it, Isaac?”

As she stared at him, the trust was gone from her eyes. And in its place, there was a cold regard that he imagined people in laboratories wore as they watched the results of petri-dish cultures.

There would be no talking to her, no denying the shift he’d made. And maybe that was for the best. They had no business being together anyway—and that was before he layered on his professional pursuit of excellence in the field of deading up people.

Isaac got his Merry Maid on and headed for hall. “I need to move the body.”

“Don’t you turn away from me,” she barked out.

He heard Grier coming behind him as if she had every intention of yelling at him some more, so he stopped short and pivoted around just as he got to the archway. As she pinwheeled to keep from running into his body, he pegged her in the eyes.

“Stay here. You don’t want to see—”

“Fuck. You.” She shoved past him, marching by until—“Oh . . . God . . .” She choked off the word, her hand coming up to her mouth.

Bingo, he thought grimly.

Fortunately, her father was on it, going over to her and gently maneuvering her out of eyeshot.

Cursing himself and everything about his life, Isaac continued down the hall, more determined than ever to take care of the problem . . . except his urgency took a time-out as he came up to the body.

A cell phone was in the corpse’s hand and the thing was sending a message; the little screen on the phone was glowing with a picture of an envelope going into a mailbox over and over again.

Okay. Time to back the bus up, here: Guys who had no frontal lobe geeeenerally speaking didn’t reach out and touch something with their T-Mobile.

A little glowing check mark appeared, indicating success.

“Isaac, you’re going to need more than a dustpan to handle that.”

At the sound of Jim’s voice, he looked over his shoulder. And had to blink a couple of times. The man was standing in the dark part of the hall, well away from the light that came through the arches of the study and library . . . but he was illuminated, a glow surrounding him from head to foot.

Isaac’s heart did a couple of jumping jacks in his chest cavity. Then seemed to take a little breather.