“Thanks,” she said, looking down at her orange Halloween T-shirt. “Goodwill. Two-ninety-nine.”

A distant thud echoed through the house. Archie and Susan jumped, and Cooper stood, gun raised toward the door.

Karim was the only one who hadn’t flinched. He arched an eyebrow over his cards at Cooper. “A bit on edge, are we?” he asked.

A long moment passed and then Cooper exhaled slowly, lowered his weapon, and sat down again, resting his gun on his knee.

Archie listened, but didn’t hear the noise again.

Susan settled on a third card and laid it down with the other two she had discarded, and Karim picked them up and added them to his hand. “You don’t believe this business about Gretchen Lowell, do you?” Karim asked Cooper, as he looked at his cards.

Cooper was still eyeballing the door.

“It’s rubbish,” Karim continued, laying down a card. “Creative. But total rubbish.”

Susan laid down a card on top of Karim’s. “You guys should get a cat,” she said. “You know, a pet to ease up the tension around here.”

“The bloody pythons would eat it,” Karim said.

Susan made a little strangled sound of fright.

“Told you,” Cooper said to her.

“There are no pythons on this island,” Archie said.

Susan gave him a dubious look.

“Listen,” Karim said to Archie. “Jack’s not here. Why don’t you tell us why you were really down there?” He played another card, and then Susan followed, and they traded like that back and forth until Susan smiled smugly and transferred the entire pile in front of Karim on the settee.

“I told you why we were down there,” Archie said. He set his drink down on the Town & Country magazine. “Why were you down there?” Gretchen had said that the tunnels they were in weren’t used anymore. They certainly appeared abandoned. Now the obvious question occurred to Archie. What reason would Jack’s men have to search them?

Karim’s expression didn’t change. He brushed something off the knee of his gray slacks.

He was stalling.

Cooper cleared his throat and sat forward. “We monitor the traffic near the house,” he said. “We’re aware of the FBI surveillance, so we pay attention to unfamiliar cars. We noticed a black Audi parked near some undeveloped property Jack owns. As that property happens to be the location of one of the old tunnel entrances, we checked it out, and discovered that the area around the entrance had been disturbed. It appeared that someone had entered the property. So we put a team together to patrol the tunnels. We hadn’t been down there long before we saw the light go on under the door of the room you were in.”

Archie lifted his glass and took another sip of whiskey. His glass had left a wet ring on Christie Brinkley’s forehead. “We?” he asked Cooper.

Cooper was quiet.