He remembered Alicia telling him how two people she’d hired to get involved in her will problems had wound up dead. Did Benny the Torch raise the tally to three?

Only one way to find out.

2.

2.

Alicia had just hung up with the hospital lab—no results yet on Hector’s cultures, but the little guy was hanging in there despite more fever spikes;—when Raymond’s voice came over the intercom. “That fellow named Jack to see you,” he said. “He doesn’t have an appointment but says it’s important.” A faint murmur in the background, then: “Check that—he says it’s ‘urgent.’“

Alicia’s first instinct was to send him away. He’d blown her off two days ago, so as far as she was concerned, they had nothing left to talk about.

But the word “urgent” got to her. It wasn’t one she’d associate with Jack. If he said this was urgent, he probably meant it.

Oh, hell. “Send him in.”

A few seconds later, Jack slipped past the door and closed it behind him.

“Did you hire Benny the Torch?”

He hadn’t sat down, hadn’t even said hello. But the name “Benny” made Alicia disregard all that.

He knows! But how could he?

“What are you talking about?” was the. best her startled brain could come up with.

“He was found dead this morning. Someone burned him alive last night. Any connection between him and what you asked me to do?”

“Oh, no!” she gasped. “Not again!”

Jack dropped into the chair. “Okay. That answers my question.”

She felt his stare as she fought a surge of guilty nausea.

That twitchy little man… burned alive…

Finally he said, “I thought you weren’t going to go running off looking for somebody else. I thought you were going to think about it.”

“I didn’t have to look,” she said. Her voice sounded dull and far away. She felt as if she were listening to herself from another room. “I already had his name. My God… I killed him…”

“You didn’t kill him. But I think you may have a point about the short life span of people who get involved in this. Everyone but you. And that’s what I don’t understand.”

“I do,” she said, shaking herself and forcing herself to focus. “I read the will yesterday.”

“About time. And it clears up all the mysteries?”

“No. Not by a long shot. But it does explain why I’m still alive.”

Her mind flashed back to yesterday, and the crawling sensation as she read that man’s words, as she tried to fathom what he’d been thinking when he’d drawn it up.

“Which is?”

“Thomas is not next in line for the house.”

Jack’s eyebrows lifted as he nodded slowly. “Very interesting. And who is?”

“Not who. What. Greenpeace.”

“The nature folks?” He laughed. “The ones who sail around ramming whalers?”

“The same.”