Once the pleasant-faced woman had gone, Ivan helped himself to a cup of coffee and a croissant. “Nice to see you living the good life at last, Prescott. I was beginning to think you were going to spend the rest of your days crawling through jungles on your belly and hobnobbing with the Klan.”

Despite his sometimes abrasive manner, Mitch liked and respected Ivan Wright. The man was always direct, and he played hardball in all his dealings. “I guess I’m ready to settle down,” he said, and his mind immediately touched on Shay.

“That could be good, and it could be bad,” Ivan replied. “What are your plans for after?”

“After what?”

“After you finish the Rosamond Dallas book.” Ivan added jam and cream to his croissant.

“I haven’t made any plans for another project, if that’s what you’re getting at. I may retire. After all, I’m a rich man.”

“You’re also a young man,” Ivan pointed out. “What are you, thirty-seven, thirty-eight?” Without waiting for an answer, the agent went on. “Your publishers want another book, Mitch, and they’re willing to pay top dollar to get your name on the dotted line.”

The thought made Mitch feel weary. He was having a hard enough time working up enough enthusiasm to write about Rosamond, but he supposed that was because of Shay. No matter how delicately the project was handled, she would, to some degree, be hurt by it. “We’re talking about a specific subject here, I assume.”

Ivan nodded, licking a dab of cream from one pudgy finger. “You’ve heard of Alan Roget, haven’t you? That serial murderer the FBI picked up in Oklahoma a few months back?”

Mitch remembered. The man had been arraigned on some thirty-two counts of homicide. “Sweet guy,” he reflected.

“Roget may be a pyscho, but he’s a fan of yours. If anybody writes his story, he wants it to be you.”

“They don’t need his permission to do a book,” Mitch pointed out, and he remembered saying a similar thing to Shay.

“No,” Ivan agreed readily, calmly. “The difference is that he’s willing to talk to you, tell you the whole disgusting saga from his point of view. Another writer could do the job, of course, but they’d be operating on guesswork.”

“What about my anonymity? How could we trust this maniac to respect that?”

“He wouldn’t have to know your real name. That can be handled, Mitch, in the same way we’ve handled it in the past. What do you say?” A master of timing, Ivan waited a moment and then laid the sizable check Mitch and Shay would share on the coffee table between them.

“I need time to think, Ivan. For one thing, I’m not sure I even want to hear all the rot this space-case probably plans to spill.”

“Going soft, Prescott?”

“Maybe.”

Ivan gave a delicate sigh and stood up. “Well, I’ve got a cab waiting. Got to get back to the airport, you know.”

Mitch only shook his head. He was half Ivan’s age, but even in his jungle-crawling, Klan-breaking days, he hadn’t lived at the pace that Ivan did.