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Jerry laughed out loud. “I don’t think you’re going to be able to patent that, Gord.”

“No, but I’ve proved to myself I can do it,” Gordon said—a little prissily, Jerry thought. “And you’re not going to mess it up for me. We agreed this was the way to go.”

“It sure is fucked up now, though, isn’t it, Gord? How’d he get away from you? Now we’ve got kidnappers demanding money, and what if they hack him to little pieces? Talk about a damn clusterfuck!”

“Shaun’s good. She’ll get him back, and she’ll get him back in one piece.”

But Jerry heard a smidgen of doubt in Gordon’s voice. And anyone who knew Gordon knew he never suffered from doubt.

After Jerry ended the call, he went back to his new storyboard. It was beginning to take shape—simple, elegant, with a logical explanation for the lack of a body.

He liked it.

He liked it a lot.

GORDON STARED OUT at the beautiful Verde Valley and the distant red rocks of Sedona, and thought, It’ll work out .

But in his heart of hearts, he was worried. The first time Gordon had met Shaun, he’d thought she was beautiful but unsettling. He hadn’t liked the way she’d looked at him, as if he were a specimen in a petri dish. If she were an owl, he’d thought, she would eat him.

Gordon had known then that Shaun was as dangerous as nitroglycerin.

Shaun had helped him out a few times, mostly by intimidating her prey, like the socialite who claimed Gordon had fondled her while she was sleeping. Whether he had or he hadn’t was immaterial. The woman was a hysteric, threatening to bring down the whole enchilada—the beautiful healing center he had built up from nothing. The Desert Oasis wasn’t just a business he loved. In many ways, he was the Desert Oasis. He could work a Hollywood party like nobody’s business, but he was at home here in the Arizona desert. He felt a spiritual call from the baking red rocks, the deep blue skies, the hawks and eagles that inspired him, and the very wealthy and fucked-up people who came to him for help.

Shaun had a talk with the woman, and that was the end of that.

Mickey Barron’s granddaughter put the fear of God into people. Usually, it was no big deal. But there were a couple of times when Gordon needed a…permanent solution, distasteful as that was. Shaun was good at what she did. She’d done a spectacular job on the Russian mobster who had threatened to kill him over a debt. Gordon would be eternally grateful to her for that one.

And the DePaulentis situation had gone off without a hitch.

But Gordon couldn’t help but feel that under Shaun’s cold, unruffled, professional exterior beat the heart of a lunatic.

Chapter Twenty

“MATERNAL” WAS NOT a term Shaun would have used for herself five months ago. In fact, she had never even thought of having children. Children slowed you down. They dulled your instincts. They were something that could be held over your head. They had to go to school, or be homeschooled. They had to be fed, clothed, entertained, cajoled, raised from mewling little creatures that were, face it, ugly. She never oohed and aahed over a baby like most women did. More often than not, she ignored them. They could do nothing for her.

She’d been in a relationship once with a woman who’d had a little kid. The kid had been whiny, and worse, the woman had always put him first.

But now, watching her son creep quietly over and around broken glass, seeing the concentration on his face, his hair falling over his brow, Shaun felt her heart bloom.

From the moment she’d met him five months ago—he’d actually tried to rob her on the street one night—Shaun had felt an immediate jolt of recognition. He was like her—they were two peas in a pod. After she’d subdued him (falling just short of breaking his arm), she’d sat him down and told him the facts of life. Then she’d asked him about his family and he’d said he had none.

Turned out that was a lie. (Jimmy was a very convincing liar.) But as their relationship deepened and he came to see her as his true mother, he admitted that he’d lived with his aunt for three years. His father was in prison, and his mother died of a drug overdose.

Poor kid needed a real family.

They’d been together ever since.

The night before they left on this trip, they’d had popcorn and watched an old western. The hero stood up against the bad guys after they harassed his son, and said, “You stay away from my boy!”

My boy.

Now she asked him, “What do you think happened here?”

“There was a gunfight. But where is everybody? You checked the house, right?”

“No one there.”

But it had been a cursory look around. She’d cleared every room in the main house, but hadn’t had a chance to do a thorough search. Just enough to know that Max Conroy was gone. “How long ago do you think this happened?”

Jimmy screwed his eyes shut and thought about it. Looked at her. His eyes were hazel and steady. He was just like her. She experienced that quizzical bloom in her heart again.

“I can still smell nitroglycerin.” He added, “When did they call Gordo?”

“Don’t be disrespectful. His name is Gordon.”

“ You call him Gordo.”

“I’m an adult.”

“No fair.”

“You need to concentrate.”

He nodded. He was a serious boy, her son. He looked at the vehicles and the four bays separated by wooden posts. “He could’ve grabbed a car and escaped.” He ticked them off on his fingers: “Three cars. The old Cadillac over by the mailbox, the Saturn. And the Chevelle SS—that one’s cool. Leaves two places in the garage.”

“So?”

“I don’t think there was another car, though. At least not in the carport.” He leveled his gaze on Shaun. “I think there was just the Chevelle and the Saturn.”

“Why do you think that?”

He shrugged. “There’d be more glass. Someone would have driven over it.”

“They called Gordon forty minutes ago. You see anything out there?”

“No.”

Shaun stared at the blood soaked into the concrete apron near the kitchen door. She reached down and pressed her finger into it. Dry, not even sticky. She sniffed it. Copper.

She’d always loved that smell.

“You think they killed him?” Jimmy said.

Jimmy’s question echoed her own thoughts. They could have killed him by accident, panicked, and taken off. Maybe there had been another car out front. There could have been a whole caravan of them. The dirt held lots of tire tracks, all of them muddled together—too much sand. Still, they would look at the tracks and see what they could see.

She stared at the silent hills bristling with saguaros, rocks, and mesquite. Noted the corral, the lean-to, the stock tank. The sun was at the top of its curve, and there was hardly a shadow anywhere. She kept her eyes on the scene, looking at it as if it were a tapestry. Looking for one thing out of place, one thread pulled. She saw the desert as a whole, as if she were taking a landscape photograph with her mind. Nothing registered. Closed her eyes to reorient herself, and looked again. This time Shaun looked at objects individually. The palo verde tree by the road. The lean-to. The water tank. The top of the hill. The sky. The house down the road. The house beyond that. A horse. Some calves. Two cars parked outside another house. All the way around, a panorama. Back to the bamboo surrounding the yard and the old Cadillac parked by the mailbox. Panned right and left again. Up and down.

Closed her eyes.

Looked at it again as a whole.

Nothing.

“We search the house again,” she said. “Let’s make it quick, though.”