“If he’s got another chamber of horrors, it hasn’t turned up yet. One thing’s for sure: Nothing went on at his house or Nora’s. Not a speck of nasty at either.”

I said, “Why sully the home front when you’ve got a special place set aside for your hobbies. These people are all about splitting.”

“Speaking of hobbies, any theory about why Meserve and the Gaidelases were the only specimens they preserved?”

“The neck wound says they thought of preserving Michaela,” I said. “Went so far as to insert a cannula in her neck then changed their minds. No way to get inside their heads, but the Gaidelases and Meserve fit some kind of fantasy. If I could finish the file— ”

“There’s nothing in there about the past, Alex. Just more ugly. I’m stuck with this, but you’re not. Go home and forget about all of it.”

I said, “Any luck decoding the scrambled disk?”

He ran his tongue over cracked, dry lips, scratched his scalp, rubbed his face. He’d shaved carelessly and a patch of white fur ran along his jaw. His eyes were hooded and weary. “You’ve developed a hearing problem?”

I repeated the question.

“You never let go,” he said.

“That’s why you pay me the big bucks.”

“The disk is decoded and loaded in Room Four. I’ve been watching it for the last hour. Hence, my sage advice about going home.”

“No sense postponing the inevitable,” I said.

“What’s inevitable?”

“I was at the scene when you found the shelter. Someone’s going to subpoena me. Either the D.A. or Stavros Menas.”

“Both Dowds tried to hire Menas but Nora got him and she wasn’t feeling sisterly. Brad’s looking for new representation.”

“Money talks and she’s got the mike.”

“Minus the millions Brad skimmed,” he said. “Most of which seems to have gone into the car collection and a little island he bought off the coast of Belize two months ago. And one more luxury purchase, three weeks ago: jet card for a Gulfstream V, twenty-five hours. That’s three hundred fifty grand for a plane with international range. Wanna take bets on there being an offshore bank account somewhere south of the equator? The estate lawyers who appointed him trustee are gobbling Prilosec and the new court-appointed lawyers are licking their chops. We’re talking years of litigation, there goes the rest of the estate.”

I said, “Planning his escape, those brochures were for real. Then he got clever and planted them in Nora’s nightstand.”

“Too clever,” he said. “Sitting in that Range Rover, using Billy’s land. Dutiful caretaker of his sibs, meanwhile he’s screwing them, literally and financially. Think he was planning to take Nora with him or go it alone?”

“Unless she knew about the island I’d say alone. Is anyone protecting Billy’s interests?”

“The court-appointed lawyers claim to be.”