“Okay. Here’s what I need you to do. Call me exactly ten minutes from now. I’ll say something to you—ignore whatever it is that I say—then I’ll disconnect you. Call me back immediately. I’ll say something else and disconnect you again. Call me a third time and, no matter what I say, leave the line open at that point and turn on the recorder. Okay?”

“Why the extra complication?” There was a rising note of anxiety in her voice.

“Alyssa may assume that I’m recording the interview on my phone or that I’m transmitting it to another recorder. I want to kill that idea in her head by creating a situation that will convince her I’ve turned it off completely.”

“Okay. I’ll call you in ten minutes. Ten minutes from right now?”

“Yes.”

He slipped the phone into his shirt pocket and took a small digital recorder out of the car’s console box and clipped it to a very visible position on his belt. Then he drove from Killington’s Mercantile Emporium to the opposite end of Venus Lake—to the open wrought-iron gate and driveway that led up to the Spalter house. He passed slowly through the gate and parked where the driveway broadened in front of wide granite steps.

The front door appeared to be an antique salvaged from an older but equally prosperous home. On the wall beside it there was an intercom. He pressed the button.

A disembodied female voice said, “Come in, the door’s unlocked.”

He checked his watch. Just six minutes to Madeleine’s call. He opened the door and stepped into a large entry hall illuminated by a series of antique sconces on each wall. An arched doorway on the left opened into a formal dining room; a similar one on the right opened into a well-furnished living room with a weathered-brick fireplace a man could stand in. At the rear of the hall a polished-mahogany staircase with elaborate banisters rose to a second-floor landing.

A half-naked young woman came out onto the landing, paused, smiled, and began to descend the stairs. She was wearing only two skimpy bits of clothing—clearly designed to emphasize what they nominally concealed—a pink cutoff T-shirt that barely covered her breasts, and white shorts that covered almost nothing. An unexplained acronym, FMAD, was printed in bold black letters across the stretched fabric of her shirt.

Her face looked fresher than Gurney had expected the face of a drug addict to look. Her shoulder-length ash-blond hair was disarrayed and damp-looking, as though she’d recently come from the shower. She was barefoot. As she descended farther, he noticed that her toenails were painted a pale pink, matching the hint of pink on her lips, which were small and delicately shaped, like a doll’s.