Like most multimillionaires and billionaires—save for me and Warren Buffett—Vic Bronson felt compelled by virtue of his wealth to build a home that required its own access road and zip code. To that end, Bronson had cleared four acres of pristine woodland in the affluent northwest Detroit village of Franklin to accommodate a twelve-thousand-square-foot reinforced-concrete-and-steel monstrosity that included ten bedrooms, an indoor Olympic-sized swimming pool, game and video entertainment suite, indoor basketball court, two professional kitchens, conference room, security suite and a hermetically sealed, environmentally regulated computer server network.

The helipad on top of the house was still under construction.

In fact, much of the house was still under construction, including the modest twenty-eight-hundred-square-foot guesthouse, which, one might assume, would be used for visits from any of his five adult and two teenage children (by three ex-wives), who were, not unlike his semen, spread across the US, Canada, Mexico and Europe.

My original intent was recon—to observe who came and went over several evenings, take pictures, have Lucy run them through her facial recognition software and see if any winners popped up.

Itching at the back of my mind was the thought that Bronson was being used as a cutout. Unwittingly participating in the execution of someone else’s agenda.

Francine Evers, Authentico’s accountant, hadn’t been able to positively ID the remains of the man fished out of the water treatment tank.

“She said he looked like the guy who came into their office,” Bobby Falconi had told me earlier. “But she said something was off about the man on the slab. Honestly, August, she’s got these thick trifocal glasses, so—”

“And Jackie?”

“Oh, she was damned sure the body was this guy Sloane,” Bobby said. “But after a two-second viewing, she and her lawyer shot outta here like they were late for tea with the queen. Nice gastrocnemii, though.”

“Is that, like, coronerspeak for ‘legs,’ Bobby?”

I was fairly sure Sloane—the real Sloane—was either waiting in smoke and fog calculating a new approach vector or, worst-case scenario, in the wind with probably close to $10 million culled from some very bad people. In the latter case, whoever he really worked for was likely to whirl up a shitstorm looking for Sloane, their money and anybody who had even slightly brushed up against his shadow.

That would include me.

Once I was on the perimeter of Bronson’s property, though, the prospect of lying prone in snow, felled trees and construction equipment held very little appeal for me. I’d had enough of lying prone in either bug-infested heat or bone-chilling cold as a marine sniper. Plus someone somewhere had put a target on my back. My planned recon evolved into my sitting on a long, curving white leather sofa in Vic Bronson’s master bedroom, sipping an impossibly delicious malt whiskey and waiting for old Vic himself to get out of the shower.