Most likely, it had been wine. The truth of her would not prove to be as dark as it sometimes seemed. She didn’t merely look like Emily, but was also good at heart, as Emily Carlino had been. That was what he believed. Needed to believe.

The business I had to take care of was so terrible, depressing, this awful man of such wicked character.

In the night, she hadn’t come into his bed with the scent or substance of another man clinging to her. She had been fresh, clean, and wholesome in her passion. Whatever “business” she conducted with that wicked individual had not involved intimacy. But that didn’t mean the only alternative explanation to sex was murder.

After exiting the Orange County police blotter, he accessed that for Santa Barbara County, where Maddison lived, which also had a low homicide rate. He scrolled backward day by day. On the rare occasion when he found a murder, he retreated from the site to review media reports regarding the case. If the murder had been public and witnesses had identified the perpetrator, or if the victim was from society’s most powerless class—a homeless person, an illegal immigrant living in one room above someone’s garage—he had no further interest in the case. The word assassination implied that the victim must be in a position of power, either in government or the private sector.

He found what he hoped not to find. Four months earlier, in November of the previous year, a husband and wife—Ephraim and Renata Zabdi, high-tech entrepreneurs and generous philanthropists—were murdered in their home in the exclusive community of Montecito, under mysterious circumstances. Since the event, police had never mentioned a suspect, and press stories indicated that the FBI was involved in the case because the Zabdis’ company, Quicksilver, had research contracts related to national security and defense. One story quoted the Zabdis’ personal attorney, Gilbert Gurion, who said they were “two of the finest people” he had ever known. He suggested that they were the victims of “ignorant people who fear the future,” though he apparently never explained what he meant by that.

Before backing out of the internet, David found an address and office phone number for Gurion, in Santa Barbara. Intuition warned that even if the day remained sunny and cloudless, darkness would settle through it long before nightfall.

| 32 |

The mortuary office might almost have been the study in a minister’s residence: dark wood paneling; heavy furniture; deep-pile carpet and rubescent-velvet draperies to assist in the creation of a reverential quiet, to suppress the sounds of grief and confession; paintings of serene parklands receding into the distance; but no cross or Star of David, because this was an age when certain secular clients often took quick offense at the sight of symbols that they considered to be primitive, regressive influences on a new world aborning.