“Doesn’t matter what you believe, Jack. It’s what you can prove. Now, either you’re here for a social visit and if you are, mind your manners and drink the whiskey I so graciously offered you. If you’re here on police business, you’d better charge me with something or get the hell out of my house.”

Jack didn’t budge. Now he was getting somewhere. Polidori had lost his cool. “Joey Siri and Rudy Gianotti worked for you.”

“Not recently.”

“Then they worked for your boy.”

Polidori’s calm face flushed red and he leaned across the desk. “Leave Mario out of this,” he ordered, his lips barely moving beneath his neatly trimmed mustache.

“He could be in it up to his eyeballs,” Logan replied. “Rumor has it he was involved with the Danvers girl-the older one-a few years back. She was underage at the time-sixteen, if memory serves-when the romance went sour.”

Polidori’s nostrils flared. “My boy was in Hawaii when the little girl turned up missing.”

“Convenient.”

“He knows nothing about the kidnapping.”

“Everyone in town knows about it, Tony. It’s been in all the papers, even hit national television. I’ll even bet it made it into the news on Waikiki.” He pinned Polidori with one of his hard-ass, bad-cop stares. “The way I see it, someone just wanted to fuck Witt Danvers. So I’ve been checking into things, digging up people who have a grudge against the guy, and guess whose name keeps showing up at the top of the list?”

“I don’t need to listen to this.” Polidori reached for the phone.

“Is Mario around? I’d like to talk to him.” Logan finally felt that he had the upper hand. He reached for his drink. So he was on duty. What the hell.

“You have nothing to say to Mario.”

“I can talk to him here,” Logan said, rimming his glass with his finger. “Or I can cuff him and haul him down to the station.” He frowned thoughtfully, as if considering. “Still a lot of reporters hanging around there. Hungry guys. Looking for a story. But it’s your choice.”

“You’re a pig, Logan.”

“And you’re a liar.” He leveled his gaze at the shorter man in the expensive suit. “So what else is new?’

Polidori dropped the receiver and straightened his jacket. Logan could almost see the wheels turning in his mind. God, it felt good to make the bastard sweat a little.

“If Mario cooperates here, I probably won’t have to run him in. If not-” Logan lifted his huge shoulders and watched Polidori over the rim of his glass. The whiskey was expensive. Smooth and warm, it burned a familiar and welcome path to his stomach. “-Well, it wouldn’t look too good in the society papers if all that old trash about your son was brought up again.” He smiled into his glass. “Scandals have a way of raising their ugly heads time and time again. People in this town have long memories.”

Polidori’s eyes narrowed just a fraction. “You’ll keep this quiet?”

“I might be a pig, but I don’t lie.”

With a snort of disbelief, Polidori dropped into an oxblood chair, pressed a buzzer hidden in the drawer of his desk, and a guard appeared. After a rapid-fire exchange of Italian in which Mario’s name was repeated several times, the guard slipped away. Logan sipped his drink. Within minutes, Mario appeared in the doorway.

About twenty-six, he was taller than his father by a full head and his eyes were a lighter shade of brown. Curly dark hair, easy smile-the playboy son of the rich father. When he wasn’t racing cars, or sailing the Caribbean, Mario ran the family restaurant downtown. And he was edgy. A restless energy kept him moving. Drugs? Adrenaline? Or plain old, kick-you-in-the-gut fear?

Anthony motioned toward Logan’s chair. “You know Detective Sergeant Logan.”

“We’ve met,” Mario said, his gaze flicking toward Logan for only a second. Logan didn’t bother to get up.

“He thinks you might know something about the Danvers kidnapping.”

“In your dreams, Jack,” Mario said, resting a jean-encased hip against the edge of the desk. His foot never stopped bouncing nervously. “I was in Hawaii.”

“You know Joey Siri and Rudy Gianotti.”

“They used to work for me.”

“Doing what?”

“Whatever I asked,” Mario said with a charming smile of even white teeth. “Mainly odd jobs down at the restaurant. I fired Rudy six months ago-he was into drugs, uppers and downers. Caught him dealing and cut him loose. Joey had a fit, claimed he wouldn’t stick around if I let Rudy go. So I fired him, too.” He shoved away from the desk, moved to the window. Avoided the policeman’s gaze.

“That was it? You’ve never seen them again?” Logan finished his drink.

Mario lifted a shoulder. “I’ve seen them around. Some of the guys who work for me know ’em, but Rudy and Joey stay clear and I like it that way.”

“You know Zach Danvers claimed they attacked him?”

Mario’s shoulders bunched. “Zach Danvers lies.”

“Not this time.” Logan pretended interest in his empty glass. “Rumor had it that you and Trisha Danvers were…well, involved.”

Almost imperceptibly, the corners around the younger Polidori’s mouth tightened. “I know her.”

“The way I heard it, you knocked her up.”

“What’s your point, Logan?” Mario’s eyes snapped with an inner fury as dark as hell. Despite all his wealth, the boy carried one helluva chip on his muscular shoulders.

“Somehow Danvers put a stop to it. Wouldn’t let his daughter be seen with a Polidori. Made sure she never had the kid.” Logan set his empty glass on the desk.

“Is that so?”

“I don’t know all the details, but I’m looking into them. My guess is you’ve got plenty of motive to get back at Witt Danvers.”

“Lots of people in this town would like to see Danvers go down,” Anthony said from his position behind the desk.

Logan lifted a bushy eyebrow. “Some more than others.”

“I was in Hawaii. On business. At the time of the attack on Zach Danvers. I was-”

“I know, sipping Mai Tais on the beach in Waikiki.” Logan set his glass on the desk. “But somehow Joey and Rudy messed up Zach Danvers and at the same time his kid sister and nanny were abducted.”

“My money’s still on Zachary.” Mario’s smile had turned cold. He shifted on the desk. “It’s no secret that Zach hates Witt. If you ask me, he staged the whole thing about the attack against him to get back at his father. If you want to find out what happened to London, talk to Zach.”


“You think Dad would go to this much trouble if anyone else had been abducted?” Trisha demanded, her blue eyes cloudy with anger. “No way. He’s in a state because it’s London!”

Zach didn’t want to hear it. Stretched out on a chaise near the pool, he closed his eyes behind the lenses of his sunglasses and wished Trisha would just go away. No such luck. She set up her easel in the shade from the old-growth fir trees that towered along the brick wall rimming the grounds. Sunlight dappled the grass and reflected off the water as Trisha adjusted a three-legged stool, trying to catch the right light.

The day was sweltering. Heat rose in waves that shimmered off the concrete near the pool house. Zach’s head throbbed and his shoulder ached. He was recovering, but slowly. He grabbed his can of Coke and smiled to himself because he’d had the foresight to pour “the real thing” out of the can and fill it with Colt 45 malt liquor from a bottle he’d taken from the refrigerator. He’d probably get caught, but he really didn’t care. He took a long swallow of the ale and felt it cool against the back of his throat. In a few minutes, he’d relax. In the meantime he’d ignore his sister.

“Dad’s fit to be tied because the police and the FBI can’t find out who’s behind it,” she said, smudging her charcoal drawing with the tip of her finger. “He wants to blame the Polidoris just because those two guys who attacked you worked for them once.”

Why was she bothering him? Zach had only been home from the hospital for four days and this was the first time he’d ventured out of his room. He’d decided to rest by the pool because the four walls were closing in on him and he was going out of his mind staring at posters of Jimi Hendrix and Ali McGraw.

“Mom called the other day to see how you were doing…but you were sleeping or something.”

He didn’t want to think about his mother. Eunice. Some mother she’d turned out to be. A mother shouldn’t admit this, Zach, but you’ve always been my favorite. Her words still echoed in his mind. His chest was suddenly tight and he had trouble saying, “She stopped by the hospital.”

“And you wouldn’t talk to her.”

“Nothin’ to say.”

“Christ, Zach, you can be such a prick,” Trisha said, frowning at the image on her easel.

“Family trait.”

“Be serious.”

“I am.” If she only knew. He reached onto the table and flipped on his transistor radio, hoping that music, hard rock, would drive her away. The radio crackled with static before he found a station blasting an old Rolling Stones hit. The throbbing beat of “Satisfaction” echoed over the aquamarine water.

“I can’t get no…no, no, no, no…”

“I can’t hear myself think with that blaring at me!”

He didn’t respond. He didn’t give a damn if she was stone deaf, he just hoped she’d quit yammering at him. He needed to be left alone. And he didn’t want to think about his mother. Or London. Or anything. He took another gulp of the brew. Most of the time he felt that everyone, including Trisha, was pumping him for information about the kidnapping, as if they could make him slip up and admit that he’d taken the kid. But why? And how? And where?

He didn’t trust anyone named Danvers. Maybe there was some truth about Polidori blood running through his veins, he thought with a sarcastic grimace. Wouldn’t that be something-if he really turned out to be Anthony Polidori’s son after all these years? It would explain a helluva lot-why he was Eunice’s favorite, for crying out loud. But he didn’t like the idea. Not a bit. It was true that Witt was a class A-1 bastard, no doubt about it, but Polidori was no better. For years the police had tried to connect him to organized crime.