“What’s up, sweetie?”

She put her hands on her hips. “We didn’t finish our conversation.” Somewhere in their teens, both his daughters had acquired the habit of speaking in a deep, creaky voice, an affectation that he understood the linguists called a vocal fry. It made them sound like they were supremely bored by, and slightly disgusted with, everything around them. “About the apartment?”

“I thought we did finish,” he said. Last year she and her ex-boyfriend went in together on a loft in San Francisco, with Barrett fronting Courtney’s half to the tune of $1 million. Now that they’d broken up, she wanted to buy out her ex, and she wanted $1.5 million to do it. “Like I said, get me two appraisals of current market value, and I’ll consider it.”

“Why can’t you just take our word for it? It’s worth three million today.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Is it? Or is he just charging you a half-million-dollar breakup fee?”

“I don’t care! I just want this to be over. I can’t have him in my life anymore. It’s just too fucking painful.”

Courtney wasn’t as lucky as her sister in the looks department. Potato Face, Chloe called her, and admittedly there was a pasty lumpiness about her. Her eyes sometimes looked like currants pressed deep into a rising dough. When she was in high dudgeon, as now, her face became red and mottled and even more unfortunate.

“You told me he moved in with that other girl,” he said. “So how is he still in your life?”

“He’s still on the deed, isn’t he? He still has the right to come and go whenever. How am I supposed to get over him if he can show up at any moment?”

“So put the place on the market, divide the proceeds, and you’ll never have to see him again.”

“Why should I have to give up my home? I love that place! It’s the only thing I love in the world.”

“No wonder,” he said. “An apartment that appreciates from two million to three in barely a year must be pretty darn lovable.”

She flung her arms out. “So it’s the money you object to!”

“Of course it’s the money. What else?”

“It’s always about the money with you. That’s all you’ve ever cared about!”

“A good thing, too. Considering how you and your siblings run through it.”

She stared at him in horror, as if he’d just strangled a kitten in front of her. “I can’t believe you said that,” she rasped in her creaky voice.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. He dove for it. Culligan at last.

“Oh, sure,” Courtney said. “Ignore me. Your work always comes ahead of us. It always did.”

“Jack.” He turned his back to answer. “Is it done? Is she out?”

Culligan’s reply came a beat too late. “Oh, she’s out.”

His voice sounded strange. Even stranger than Courtney’s. Barrett opened the Ma Belle app on his phone and switched on the dashboard camera in the company SUV. It was hidden inside the AC air vent, and it gave him an up-view of Lester at the wheel and Culligan in the passenger seat. Culligan had a silver flask in his hand.