But he fought it all. He didn’t know how he was going to get away with three things, three things that stood in the way of the part of him that wanted to see this through. That part of him was frantically writing new lines into the script to clear his path.

He needed to decide what he would tell his wife and daughter—stepdaughter, damn it—about why they had been filmed coming in and out of the foyer of their own house for better than half a year when they didn’t know it. And why the panic button might as well have been the thermostat for all the good it did for poor Carly to bang away at it.

And the painting. Goddammit, why had he never thought about what else it could mean to have even a little bit of it in view of the foyer camera? It had never occurred to him that anyone would see these images. Not from any of the cameras, but especially not from that one. It was the entire point.

Interior 1 was only for him, only there at all because he hated that the painting was hanging out in the open. It didn’t look like much, but if anyone, inside the house or a delivery person or salesman peering in through the sidelight window, ever stopped to look at it or gave it any special notice, at least the camera would let him know. He would see them looking. He’d gauge the reaction. Then he could decide what to do about it. But that had been the end of the plan. He’d never imagined that anyone besides him would know a camera was there.

Only a corner of the painting was in the recordings anyway. The unframed panel wasn’t all that big to begin with. Just a triangle of the lower left corner, no more than seven inches deep, took up a slice of the camera’s capture in the far right of the shot.

The cops, no surprise, hadn’t reacted to it at all. That was something. But it wasn’t everything. Some people out there would know what it was.

More than one person in the world would recognize even a small section of that painting and know its worth. Beyond that, a few would know what all it had been through.

He’d already dealt with three of them. One, still alive and an eternal pain in the ass; another who made John wonder about how hot a grudge could burn and for how long; and one who’d bled out all over his shirtsleeves and the pavement under his feet four years ago.

CHAPTER THREE

The whole thing was over so fast. Her favorite song was longer than that. Just a few minutes, start to finish. Finished. It was over now. It would always be over.