"No." Justin cursed himself and picked up the phone again. "This is Blade. Has Ms. MacGregor taken her car out?" He waited, angry, impatient, while Caine prowled the room and Alan watched him. Justin listened to the answer from the garage, then hung up without speaking. "Her car's still there."

"She might have gone for a walk on the beach," Alan suggested.

"She was expecting me here a half hour ago,'' Justin said flatly. "She was supposed to order some lunch, but I've checked; she never called down. I found this near the front door."

Alan took the brush from Justin's hand. He remembered giving the antique vanity set to Serena for her sixteenth birthday. It was one of the few things she owned that she took meticulous care of.

"Had you been arguing?"

Justin whirled on Caine as his control slipped another notch.

"Justin," Caine said quickly. "Rena has a wicked temper. If she were angry, she could have stormed out without a word to anyone. She'd stomp around on the beach until she'd cooled off."

"No, we hadn't been arguing," Justin said tightly. "We'd been making love." He stuck his hands in his pockets because he wanted to ball them into fists. "I got a call from downstairs. An envelope had been left for me at the front desk. It was another threat."

Alan set Serena's brush down carefully on the table. "Justin." He waited until the angry green eyes met his. "Call the police."

Like an exclamation point at the end of his words, the phone rang. Justin grabbed for it. "Serena," he began.

"Looking for her already?" The voice was muffled and sexless. "I've got your squaw, Blade." The connection broke with a soft click.

Justin stood still as stone for a full ten seconds. He tasted copper in his mouth and recognized it as fear. "He's got her," he heard someone say, then realized the voice was his own. On a blind wave of fury he ripped the phone out of the wall and threw it across the room. "The son of a bitch has her."

Lieutenant Renicki glanced around the living room of Justin's suite and decided it was warmer than he would have expected. The man he had met downstairs seemed suited to cold colours and straight lines. His eyes rested on the phone that lay drunkenly against the east wall. Well, still waters run deep, he supposed.

The tall blond man staring out of the window was Caine MacGregor, the hotshot young lawyer who was currently serving as state's attorney in Massachusetts. The dark man sitting in the chair staring at the hairbrush in his hands was Alan MacGregor, U.S. senator, a bit of a left winger with a glib tongue. The lieutenant looked at Justin again.

"Suppose you run through it once more."