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not comfortable dealing with Des. She was not his mother. She was not his girlfriend. She was someone who filled a role in his life no woman had ever filled before.
    “Back at you, wow man,” she said. “How’s Little Eva?”
    “You mean Bridget? She hates me.” He showed her the fresh set of cat scratches all over his hands.
    “You’ve got to be more gentle with her, Rico,” she informed him, not unkindly. Spoon-feeding was required with Soave. He was a work-in-progress, not unlike one of her strays. “A feral cat is like a woman. You work your way into her good graces and she will be loyal to you until the day she dies.” Not that he understood a thing about women. He’d been dating the same girl since high school, a manicurist named Tawny. Here is how Des had described her to Bella: picture Lisa Kudrow, only dumb.
    “You still wigging on the hooker?” he asked, glancing over her shoulder at the report. “It’s ice cold.”
    “Torry was not a hooker, Rico.”
    “Well, she wasn’t exactly Suzy Homemaker either.”
    “Um, okay, I’m thinking there must be like some kind of point to this,” she said, an edge creeping into her voice. Sometimes Des ran out of patience.
    Soave stuck out his lower lip, chastened. “No point, loot. No point at all.” Red-faced, he returned to his desk.
    Des went back to scanning the report, chewing on her own lower lip. Maybe he was right—maybe she was wigging on it. But with good reason. It wasn’t just that Torry Mordarski was a young single mother who had fallen through the cracks and had paid dearly for it.
    It was Stan. He frightened Des. He was calculating. He was careful. He was good.
    And he was out there somewhere, roaming.

CHAPTER 5

    “FRANKLY, I WISH DOLLY had rented the place to someone else,” Kinsley Havenhurst declared flatly. “Nothing against you, Mitch. I just would rather have seen the carriage house go to someone we know.”
    Mitch was seated in Havenhurst’s law office, where he had come to sign the lease and pass inspection. Which he clearly did not. When they’d shaken hands, Havenhurst had told him that everyone except his late mother called him Bud. It was the only cordial thing that Dolly Seymour’s lawyer said to him. Bud Havenhurst was too well bred to be overtly hostile, but he was chilly. Clearly, he saw Mitch as the point man for an invading army of loud, pushy New Yorkers bearing cell phones. Clearly, he felt threatened by him.
    His law office was over an art gallery in the center of Dorset’s Historic District. The building had once been a grain and feed store. The office was quaintly old-fashioned, with a roll-top desk, potbellied stove and decidedly nautical air. There was an aged brass ship’s barometer mounted on the wall. Also a number of maritime charts and architectural drawings of sailboats. Havenhurst’s Yale Law School diploma hung in the outer office where his secretary sat. She evidently walked to work. There had been only one car in the rear lot where Mitch parked—a mud-splattered Range Rover.
    “To be perfectly honest,” Bud Havenhurst added, “I’d rather she simply hadn’t rented it out at all.”
    Bud Havenhurst was in his early fifties and he struck Mitch as someone who had always been rich and good-looking and sure of himself. He was tall and tanned and sleekly built, with closecropped salt and pepper hair, a long, patrician blade of a nose and a big, forward-thrusting chin. He wore a blue button-down shirt, striped tie, khakis and a pair of scuffed Topsider boating shoes. He had an air of privilege about him. Also an air of authority. He was Somebody in Dorset.
    “She did seem a bit reluctant,” Mitch allowed.
    “Young fellow, it’s important for you to understand the caliber of individual you’re dealing with here. Dolly happens to be the product of an exceedingly distinguished American family.”
    “She told me about how the Pecks founded Dorset.”
    Bud sat back in his sea captain’s chair,