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  ‘Uh-huh,’ Sanders said. ‘Some fibres there, look like cotton. The killer probably came at him from behind.’

  ‘And all this . . .’ Sam scanned the dead man’s other wounds. ‘Before or after death, would you say?’

  ‘After,’ Sanders replied. ‘Almost certainly.’

  ‘Small fucking mercy,’ said Al Martinez.

  2

  Except for Joshua, her nine-month-old baby son, and Woody – the wire-haired dachshund-miniature schnauzer cross she and Sam had rescued almost four years ago – Grace Lucca Becket was home alone on the West Island in the Town of Bay Harbor Islands, when the doorbell chimed just after nine a.m.

  She came out of the nursery as the dog began barking and went to the hall window that gave the best vantage point over the front door step.

  Claudia Brownley, standing on the path down below, wearing a blue denim trouser suit, the jacket slung over one arm, two travel bags on the ground behind her, looked up and waved.

  ‘I don’t believe it!’

  With a cry of startled delight, Grace ran down the stairs and flung open the door and her arms, and her sister stepped into her embrace, leaning against her, while Woody did his best to clamber up Claudia’s legs.

  ‘Woody, get down.’ Grace drew back and regarded the bags on the path, which were much too large for a weekend visit, even an extended one. ‘Sis, what’s going on?’

  Claudia lived with her husband Daniel Brownley and their two sons, Mike and Robbie, thousands of miles away, on Bainbridge Island in Washington State, a ferry ride from Seattle. It was not her habit, neither was it practical, to show up unexpectedly on her sister and brother-in-law’s doorstep.

  ‘Don’t I get to come in?’ Claudia asked.

  ‘Oh, God, of course, come in.’ Grace seized her in another swift, warm embrace, then picked up one of the bags while her sister heaved up the other, and they came inside together, dumped the bags in the narrow hallway and headed straight for the kitchen.

  It was the heart of this small house and always had been, even before Sam had entered Grace’s life, before they had married and adopted their daughter Cathy, long before they’d had their son.

  ‘So,’ Claudia said, staying in the doorway, ‘where’s my nephew?’

  ‘Sleeping,’ Grace said. ‘I hope.’

  In a perfectly run world, she supposed, her son ought to be awake, but for the past several nights he had been waking at erratic times, and his thirty-eight-year-old mom and forty-one-year-old dad were both feeling the strain.

  ‘Can I just look at him?’ Claudia begged.

  ‘I want to look at you first,’ Grace said.

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ Claudia said. ‘I look lousy.’

  ‘You look beautiful,’ Grace said, which was true, except that she’d also instantly observed that her sister had lost several pounds and gained some lines around her brown eyes. ‘I’m the wreck,’ she added, pointing to her own hastily pulled on chinos and sleeveless white blouse.

  There were few physical similarities between these two sisters. Grace had inherited their late mother Ellen’s Scandinavian colouring, and Claudia had Frank Lucca’s dark hair and eyes and pale olive skin – those outward details mercifully her only obvious genetic legacy from their father, she and Grace had long since agreed.

  ‘Come on.’ Grace gave in, took Claudia’s hand and drew her up the stairs and into the nursery, a small, charming room decorated in pale blues and piled with soft toys.

  ‘Oh, Grace,’ Claudia whispered. ‘He just gets more wonderful.’

  Which Joshua Jude Becket undeniably did, this baby boy whose cheeks were the colour of cappuccino, dimpling whenever he smiled; who had been born in the midst of mayhem and tragedy, but who was now, thankfully, a sturdy, healthy bundle of frequently lusty and inquisitive contentment.

  His aunt stroked his dark hair, her touch delicate. ‘I won’t wake him.’

  ‘Just for a little while longer,’ Grace whispered back, gratefully. ‘Which will give us a chance to be just us.’ She laid an arm around her sister’s narrow shoulders. ‘I can’t believe you’re here.’

  She was experiencing, if truth were told, somewhat mixed feelings about the suddenness of Claudia’s arrival. Without question she felt a most overwhelming sense of gladness at having her sister here with her again – but she knew too that she might, if asked in advance, have hesitated momentarily because she was in the throes of organizing her return to work, with all its complications, and all that following a period of minor post-natal depression.

  ‘Plus a little post-traumatic stress,’ her father-in-law had diagnosed some months back.

  Dr David Becket was Sam’s adoptive dad, a sixty-three-year-old Caucasian Jew who measured, these days, no more than five-nine (‘shrinking all the time,’ he claimed), but whose six-foot-three son still looked up to and trusted him above all men in the world. A man of wisdom and humour and great kindness, and infinitely more of a father to Grace than her own had ever been. And even if he was a paediatrician, not a psychiatrist, and on the brink of full retirement, David Becket was still the medic Grace would most listen to even if she’d had the chiefs of Mount Sinai and Jackson Memorial on hand to advise her.

  ‘You’re entitled,’ he’d told her when she’d first confessed her sense of inadequacy to him. ‘And you’re not alone,’ he’d added. ‘It’s hard to be joyful or even optimistic when two young people in your family are grieving.’

  Yet still she’d felt shame for feeling bleak and not completely in control at exactly the time when she ought to have been filled with gratitude and competence. Even if she, more than most – being a psychologist herself, albeit a practitioner of child and adolescent psychology – knew better than that. Ought to know better.

  Different when it was the shrink suffering the blues.

  She had mixed feelings now, too, for an entirely separate reason. Because for months now she’d been worrying about Claudia, knowing that all was not as it should be with her, had even, a few times, decided it was high time she packed up Joshua and flew to Seattle with him – and Sam would have backed her up, no question, but each time she’d thought about it, Grace had found reasons not to go. And now here Claudia was, without so much as a warning call, with two large bags. And, more to the point, a husband and two sons back home.

  Something was very wrong.

  3

  The investigation was underway.

  The rowboat and victim having been photographed and checked over as thoroughly as possible in situ, the body – still in the boat – had been covered and removed from the scene, and was on its way to the medical examiner’s office, where every fraction of an inch of the small vessel would be examined for evidence – after which Sanders would begin his painstaking work on the deceased himself.

  The skills of the ME and his team were their best chance for a swift resolution in this case, Becket and Martinez were well aware, with no true crime scene to pore over. Any trace evidence turned up by the officers and technicians on the beach would almost certainly be either totally unconnected with the crime, or might be linked to Joe Myerson, the man without whom – as Sam had told him earlier – it was possible the crime might never have been discovered.

  ‘I guess he’d have washed up someplace,’ Myerson had said.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Sam said. ‘With more weather on the way.’

  The guy had looked a little better for a moment after that, and then he’d remembered what he’d seen.

  It would be a long time till he forgot that.

  4

  It wasn’t easy getting much out of Claudia.

  She had asked, soon after her arrival, if she could stay for a while.

  ‘Sure you can,’ Grace had said. ‘You know that.’

  Managing, with an effort, not to ask why.

  ‘Dan’s going to work from home,’ Claudia said. ‘Take care of the boys.’

  ‘Can he do that, with the office to run?’ Grace asked, sinc
e Claudia worked part-time in her husband’s architectural practice these days.

  ‘Don’t you think I’m entitled to a break?’

  That wasn’t like Claudia at all, that kind of self-pitying snap-back, and Grace had decided it was time to delve, but then Joshua had noisily woken up, which meant that the next hour or so had been all about him. And seeing Claudia holding her nephew close, seeing her tenderness and the little boy’s happy responses, Grace felt once again overpoweringly and unequivocally glad that she was here.

  This was the sister who had often clung to her for comfort after Frank Lucca, their father, had abused her, who’d followed her lead when Grace, the younger sister, had discovered her own inner strength and masterminded their escape from Chicago to Florida. The sister who had always been close, loving and absolutely necessary to her.

  It was hard for Grace to imagine what might have gone wrong in the Brownley household, because for as long as Claudia, Daniel and the boys had lived down in the Florida Keys, all had seemed about as blissful as any family scene could be. But then Daniel had made his decision to move all the way north-west to Washington State, had set up a shiny new architectural practice in Seattle and found his family a great waterfront house on Bainbridge Island, a thirty-five minute ferry hop from the city (and a location once picked by CNN and Money Magazine as the second-best place to live in the United States).

  The waterfront position had been intended to make them feel at home, and Grace’s impression had been that it had certainly worked out for Daniel and the boys. But not so well for Claudia, which Grace had suspected for a long time.

  And done nothing about it. Not that there was much she could have done, except make her regular phone calls to ask how her sister was doing, and, of course, worry about her.

  Now, a new heap of guilt came flying at Grace. She’d been too busy with her own life to consider Claudia properly, too busy with her own family and her patients – and then all hell had broken loose almost a year ago, after which they’d been blessed with Joshua, and ever since then it had all been about learning to cope with motherhood and her own new, unfamiliar uncertainty.

  Excuses.

  ‘You can stay as long as you want,’ she told her sister now.

  She couldn’t believe she hadn’t said exactly that right away.

  ‘Only I thought,’ Claudia said, ‘with Cathy away, there might be space.’

  Cathy, their beleaguered daughter, who’d gone through more pain and grief in her young life than most people endured in a whole lifetime, and who had told Grace and Sam a little over three months ago that she was going to do some travelling because there were too many bad memories for her, on campus at Trent University and at home and on the beach and just about every place she looked in and around Miami.

  ‘And I know it’s all going to come with me wherever I go,’ Cathy had told her parents, ‘but still, I have this feeling that getting away for a while might help me.’

  Sam had fought it longer than Grace, wanting passionately for their daughter to stay home and let them go on helping her heal, but his wife had reminded him that maybe home was getting a little claustrophobic these days for a twenty-one-year-old with a need for private space to howl out her pain.

  ‘Not to mention having a paranoid cop for a dad,’ David Becket had added, ‘wanting to mount surveillance every time Cathy comes within a mile of anyone who might spell trouble for her sometime in the next three decades.’

  ‘Am I really that bad?’ Sam had asked his father.

  ‘You just want her safe,’ David had said. ‘We all do, son.’

  And Cathy’s travel plans had sounded safe and well thought through, and even if she had needed their permission they’d have known they had to let her go, because whether or not it worked out for her, that was the only way they could hope to get her back again when she was ready to come home.

  So for now, Cathy was on the West Coast, working as a coach’s aide at a Sacramento college, after which she was scheduled to work and train at a series of summer athletics camps in various parts of California.

  And every time Grace opened one of her kitchen cabinets, she saw a box of her daughter’s favourite Honey Graham Life cereal and missed her more than ever.

  But Cathy’s bedroom was available for Claudia.

  5

  The area canvas was already well underway, a small team of detectives working through every residential, hotel and commercial building with an outlook on to Ocean Drive between 5th and 15th Streets, as well as the promenade, dunes and the beach itself, checking every available surveillance camera, their aim to speak to every resident, worker, proprietor and visitor in the vicinity.

  ‘Let’s hit the Strand first,’ Sam had said at the outset, since that particular boutique hotel faced the beach between 10th and 11th Streets, and was also one of the few buildings in that part of the Art Deco District with balconies – and a rooftop known as one of the best spots in South Beach for watching firework displays.

  And maybe homicides, too.

  Nothing there, nor at the Victor, no one discovered anyplace as yet with anything useful to talk to them about, though in the circumstances neither Sam nor Martinez had expected this to be easy.

  ‘Mildred wants to talk to you, Sam,’ Detective Beth Riley informed him at around eleven as she and Mary Cutter – a petite, attractive detective with whom Al Martinez had enjoyed a brief, but pleasurable relationship some years back – came into the large office shared by the Violent Crime detectives.

  Sam’s antennae were up. ‘Where and when?’

  ‘Usual time and place, she said,’ Cutter answered.

  Which meant around noon in Lummus Park, on a palm-shaded bench.

  ‘Think she has something?’ Martinez asked.

  There was no acrimony between himself and Cutter, though fear of just that was what had driven them both to ending the relationship before they’d got in too deep. No special woman in Martinez’s life these days, though that was, he claimed, the way he liked it; no one to worry about night and day, he said, no one to fear for him.

  ‘She didn’t say,’ Cutter answered.

  Homeless people were often high on the investigators’ agenda, seldom as suspects, more often just the most likely bystanders to have stumbled on potential evidence or useful information.

  Mildred Bleeker was a bag lady of uncertain years who enjoyed a relationship of mutual respect with some of the cops and detectives in the Miami Beach Police Department. In return for their courtesy – and, now and again, a bottle of Manischewitz Concord Grape – Mildred had never shown any great qualms about assisting the police with occasional nuggets of information about crimes of violence, especially those related to drugs.

  She did, however, have her preferences, and for a while her favourite had been a young patrolman named Pete Valdez, but he’d left the department a few months ago, and since then Mildred’s personal bias had leaned firmly towards Sam.

  ‘I heard about your troubles, Detective Becket,’ she’d told him one morning last March, encountering him on the corner of Lincoln and Washington and accepting his invitation to dip into the bag of Krispy Kremes he was bringing to a departmental meeting. ‘I hope you don’t mind if I ask you how your family are faring now?’

  ‘I don’t mind at all.’ Sam had been surprised but touched, had told her they were faring pretty well, and then he had shown her some photographs of Joshua, and in return Mildred had tugged out a gold locket from beneath layers of mostly black clothing – she always wore black with just a few splashes of colour – and had opened it to reveal a pair of tiny black-and-white photographs of a young man and woman.

  ‘My fiancé,’ she had said.

  ‘And you,’ Sam had said.

  ‘About a thousand years ago,’ she said.

  ‘I’d still know you anywhere,’ Sam told her. ‘Handsome couple.’

  ‘Donny was one of a kind,’ Mildred said. ‘They broke the mould, you know?’

  ‘Sa
me with my wife,’ Sam said. ‘Grace.’

  They’d left it there, respecting each other’s privacy, but there had been a fair number of exchanges since, and during one Mildred had confided that Donny had died as an innocent bystander in a drug-fuelled shooting. Sam had tried a few times to persuade her to come eat with him in a restaurant or coffee shop or even back at their house, which Grace had encouraged – anything that might take the lady’s fancy – but she had always thanked Sam and refused. So far as he could tell, Mildred Bleeker’s lifestyle was of her choosing, and the closest they’d ever come to lunching in comfort had been a couple of conch-filled tamales on her bench.

  There was no reason to think that Mildred’s message was in any way connected to the killing, Sam realized now.

  ‘Could be anything,’ he said, as Cutter set down a coffee cup on her desk and Riley started checking her messages.

  ‘Mildred know about the rowboat?’ Martinez asked.

  ‘She didn’t say,’ Riley said, raking one hand through her short red hair, her mind already half on other things.

  ‘Guess she wouldn’t,’ Martinez said. ‘You not being Sam Becket.’

  All Sam knew was that he’d give a whole lot more than a dozen tamales for so much as a clue as to where the slaying had taken place. With nothing new to go on, and with the likelihood that the brutality had gone down inside someplace – maybe in a motel or hotel room or a brothel or a garage or someone’s private apartment – the only way they were going to find out about that any time soon was if it was some place where, say, an employee had walked in this morning to find more than they’d bargained for.

  No reports yet of bloodstains or chemical spillage or even struggle.

  Sam was itching to see Mildred.

  6

  Grace was sometimes afraid that Cathy might never come back.

  Too many things she’d seemed fearful of since Joshua’s birth.

  ‘Which is not really like me,’ she’d told Magda Shrike a few months back. Magda being her former mentor and psychologist and good friend who’d relocated to San Francisco for a time, then returned a year ago. ‘Or never used to be.’