Tan bandages covered his throat in patches, wet like welts. As he stood from behind his massive desk, he leaned on a mahogany walking stick with a gold dragon’s head handgrip. His gray, glen plaid trousers billowed around his thin legs, but his blue cotton shirt and black linen jacket clung to his massive chest and shoulders as if they’d been born there. The hand gripping the cane looked capable of crushing golf balls to dust with a single squeeze.

He planted his feet and shook against the cane as he stared down at us.

“Take a good look,” Trevor Stone said, “and then let me tell you something about loss.”

2

“Last year,” Trevor Stone said, “my wife was driving back from a party at the Somerset Club on Beacon Hill. You’re familiar with it?”

“We throw all our functions there,” Angie said.

“Yes, well anyway, her car broke down. I was just leaving my office downtown when she called, and I picked her up. Funny.”

“What?” I said.

He blinked. “I was just remembering how little we’d done that. Driven together. It was the sort of thing that had become a casualty of my commitment to work. Something as simple as sitting side by side in a car for twenty minutes, and we were lucky if we did it six times in a year.”

“What happened?” Angie said.

He cleared his throat. “Coming off the Tobin Bridge, a car tried to run us off the road. A carjacking, I believe it’s called. I had just bought my car—a Jaguar XKE—and I wasn’t about to give it up to a pack of thugs who thought wanting something was the same thing as being entitled to it. So…”

He stared out a window for a moment, lost, I can only assume, in the crunching of metals and revving of engines, the smell of the air that night.

“My car flipped onto the driver’s side. My wife, Inez, couldn’t stop screaming. I didn’t know it then, but she’d shattered her spine. The carjackers were angry because I’d destroyed the car they presumably thought of as theirs already. They shot Inez to death as I tried to remain conscious. They kept firing into the car, and three bullets found my body. Oddly, none caused critical damage, though one lodged in my jaw. These three men then spent some time trying to light the car on fire, but they never thought to puncture the gas tank. After a time, they grew bored, and left. And I lay there with three bullets in my body and several broken bones and my wife dead beside me.”