The Society

and federal governments had taken significant steps backward when it came to holding HMOs responsible for medical catastrophes incurred by their insured. Clearly, the powers that be understood that the HMOs and other health insurers were merely trying to make the system work by keeping costs in line. If the physicians and hospitals in the old fee-for-service system hadn’t lost sight of that goal, fee-for-service would still be the standard of care in the land.

Davenport flicked off the kitchen and hall lights and slipped out the door into the garage. As he was shutting the door behind him, he swore he heard Gloria’s prizewinning snoring emanating from the master suite, upstairs and at the far end of the house.

The broad garage door was closed, and Gloria’s neat little white BMW roadster was in its customary spot, but his Cadillac Seville was missing. Suddenly nonplussed and anxious, Davenport hit the button on the wall beside him. As the automatic door glided upward, he sighed with relief. The silver Caddy, an absolute joy from the day six months ago when he decided to make the switch from his Lincoln, was parked a dozen or so yards down the drive, right by the walk to the front door.

Curious.

Davenport distinctly remembered driving into the garage last night when he returned from work, and also closing the electronic door behind him. Only Gloria, their garage-door service company, and their attorney knew the keypad password. Not even their groundskeeper, Julio, had it.

Davenport glanced at his Rolex. Almost five-thirty. He had a mountain of work to get done before the others arrived and this most significant of days got under way. It had to have been Gloria, he decided as he stepped out onto the drive and shut the garage door behind him. She obviously ran out of booze late last night and in a moment of clarity decided to take the heavier, safer car to get restocked. Davenport grimaced at the image of her fumbling with the keypad in the Caddy, then finally giving up, leaving the car where it was and entering the house up the front walk instead. The notion of her driving sloshed, which she was even before he went to sleep, produced a knot in his throat. Gloria was capable of doing damage that not even their ten-million-dollar umbrella liability policy could cover. He wondered how the neighbors would feel having some homeless, crippled accident victim take over Sycamore Hill.

With images of another trip to rehab suddenly occupying his mind, Davenport slipped the key into the ignition and turned it. The Caddy purred to life. He put the car in reverse, checked over his right shoulder, and gently depressed the accelerator. The journey to Unity Comprehensive Health lasted just four feet. Cyrill Davenport heard the explosion a nanosecond before he and the Cadillac were blown to bits. All twenty-three windows on the south side of 3 Serenity Lane shattered.

In the second-floor master suite, Gloria Davenport, her blood-alcohol level still three times legally intoxicated, opened her eyes a slit and tried to make sense of the noise she had just heard and the chilly air she was feeling. Then she pulled the covers over her head and sank back to sleep.

CHAPTER 4

The jangling phone slammed into Patty’s dream like a wrecking ball, shattering a scene in which she was flying, arms outstretched, over the houses and buildings of Pittsfield, her hometown. In the dream, a recurring one since childhood, she would put her head down, sprint ahead, and leap, only to fall heavily to the ground. Again and again she would repeat the maneuver until at last, after numerous tumbles and bruises, she would hover just a bit before the painful fall. Finally, after increasing periods just above the ground, pulling through the air like a frog through water, she would suddenly gain altitude and fly. It was a glorious experience when she made it to the clouds, but thanks to the disrupted, bizarre sleep patterns associated with her job, the occasions when her soaring reached such an altitude were few and far between.

“’lo?”

“Patty Moriarity?”

“Yes?”

The LED on her bedside clock read 6:00, not that early, but she had been riveted to the computer screen in her office until nearly two, researching serial killers.

“Sorry to have woken you.”

“No, no, I was just getting up.”

The woman chuckled.

“I always say that, too. Patty, it’s Kristine Zurowski from the academy. Remember me?”

“Of course.” Patty instantly conjured up the image of a pleasant, dark-haired woman, who, like herself, was in her early thirties. The similarities between the two of them hardly ended there. Kristine was also intelligent, extremely intense, and as committed as Patty to making it to detective in the state police. The two of them each finished close to the top of their class, and, within a shorter time than any of the other graduates, Patty had made detective. Not long after that, she heard that Kristine had, too. “Everything all right with you?”

“I’m absolutely exhausted all the time,” Kristine said, “if that’s what you mean by ‘all right.’ My husband has a photo of me pinned to the pillow so he can remember what I look like.”

“Believe me, if I had a husband, he’d have a photo pinned up, too. It’s like be careful what you wish for. So, what’s up?”

“You know I’m attached to the Norfolk barracks.”

Norfolk County was south of Middlesex, Patty’s unit.

“I had heard that, yes.”

“Well, I’m calling you from a crime scene in Dover. A man named Cyrill Davenport was in his Cadillac when it blew up in the driveway of his mansion. The bomb squad says someone wired his car. He is- was-the CEO of Unity Comprehensive Health.”

Patty sucked in a jet of air. Davenport would be the third managed-care executive in the area to be murdered in the last eight weeks. The first, Ben Morales, was shot-executed would be a more appropriate word-outside his home in Lexington. One bullet, mid-forehead, fired by a.357 of some sort. No witnesses. Patty was the investigating officer initially assigned to head the investigation. It was her third murder case, but the first in which the killer wasn’t immediately known.

The second managed-care executive, Marcia Rising, had been gunned down in the secured parking lot of her guarded HMO office building, also in Middlesex County-this time with a nine-millimeter. Once again there were no witnesses. The similarities between the two deaths brought greatly increased interest and concern all the way up the state police chain of command, from Patty’s immediate boss, Detective Lieutenant Jack Court, through the detective captain, the major, and finally to Colonel Cal Carver, and Carver’s right-hand man, Lieutenant Colonel Tommy Moriarity, Patty’s father.

Immediately following the Rising murder, with Tommy Moriarity’s tacit blessing, Wayne Brasco, a long-time detective and close compadre of Lieutenant Court in the Good Ol’ Boy Club, was assigned to take over for Patty and oversee the investigation. Patty would continue to work with him, but Brasco, in every sense of the term, would be The Man. While Patty was displeased with what she saw as an undeserved demotion, she was even more pained by the selection of Brasco, for whom she had no respect as a cop and whom she had already warned more than once to stop calling her Sweetcakes, Babe, and the like.

The phone tucked between her chin and shoulder, Patty was already out of bed snatching clothes from her bureau and closet.

“Kristine, it’s great of you to call me so quickly. I’ll get in touch with Wayne Brasco, my partner on this one, and we’ll be out there in just a little while. I guess you know this case is number three.”

“I do, but don’t bother calling Brasco.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s already here. Apparently someone from Norfolk called him, because he’s been here almost from the beginning, glad-handing the guys like this was some sort of frat party and ignoring every part of me except for my breasts. A couple of minutes ago, he jokingly let slip that you were also on the Middlesex cases with him- something about your being assigned to work with him as a favor to your father.”

“That’s absurd.”