Book of Souls

“You must be Will. And you must be Nancy. And who’s this little man?”

Nancy took to Dane’s kind, gray-stubbled face. “His name is Phillip.”

“My condolences, folks. Your plane’s all gassed up and ready to go.”

Frazier waited all afternoon until the cars pretty much stopped coming and going from the Lipinskis’ block. In the late afternoon, he spotted Laura Piper and her husband leaving in a taxi. At dusk, he pulled down Anthony Road for a quick drive-by. The only car in the driveway was Joseph’s. There were lights blazing on both levels. He decided to give it another hour, to make sure there were no late arrivals.

At the appointed time, he and his men pulled into the driveway and split into two, two-man teams. He sent DeCorso through the bulkhead and personally shouldered his way through the patio door. His safety was off, and the silencer tube made his pistol look long and menacing. It felt good to be off his butt, on task. He was prepared, even anxious to engage in some level of violence. He was anticipating the pleasure he’d get pistol-whipping Piper across his temple, knocking the bastard onto the floor.

What he was unprepared for and what made him swear out loud was a completely empty house with a Phillip-sized doll lying on the living room sofa where Laura Piper had left it.

DANE BENTLEY PILOTED a twenty-year-old Beechcraft Baron 58, a sporty twin-engine with a top speed of two hundred knots and a range of almost fifteen hundred miles. There was hardly anywhere in the continental US where he hadn’t touched down, and there was nothing he liked better than having an excuse to do some serious flying.

When his old friend Henry Spence called invoking the 2027 Club and told him he’d foot the gas bill, Dane was quickly behind the wheel of his ’65 Mustang motoring to the hangar at Beverly Muni Airport on the rugged Massachusetts coast. On the way, he left a voice mail for his live-in lady friend informing her he was going to be away for a few days and a second voice mail to the younger woman he was seeing on the side. Dane was a young sixty.

In the distance, about fifteen nautical miles to the north, the late-afternoon sun was glinting over long, skinny Lake Winnipesaukee, a large deepwater body dotted with two hundred pine-bristling islands. Dane suppressed his tour-guide instinct to point it out. His three passengers were behind him, sound asleep in facing red-leather seats. Instead, he started chatting with the tower at Laconia Airport, and several minutes later, he was swooping over the lake and approaching the runway.

Jim Zeckendorf had left one of his cars for Will at the airport, its keys in an envelope at the general aviation desk. Will bundled his family into the SUV and took off for the house, leaving Dane behind to check the weather, file a flight plan, and catch a quick nap in the pilots’ lounge.

It was a straight ten-mile shot east on Route 11 to Alton Bay, one of the small towns that ringed Winnipesaukee. Will had visited once a few years earlier for a weekend of fishing and drinking. He recalled he had a girlfriend in tow but for the life of him he couldn’t remember which one. It had been a time when women were flying in and out of his life at speed, a bimbo blur. All Will could remember for sure was that Zeckendorf, who was wifeless that weekend, was more interested in his girlfriend than he was.

Zeckendorf’s second house was befitting a big-time Boston law partner. It was a six-thousand-square-foot Adirondack, perched on a rocky ridge high over the choppy waters of Alton Bay. Nancy was too tired and numb to appreciate the rustic, airy, vaulted living room which flowed into an open-plan granite-topped kitchen. On a happier day, she would have been flitting from room to room like a honeybee in a field of clover, but she was impervious to the magnificence of the place.

It was dusk, and through a wall of lake-facing windows, stands of birch and pines were swaying in the wind and the gray-black waters were doing an imitation of the sea, methodically crashing against the stone breakwater. Nancy went straight for the master bedroom to change Philly and get out of her mourning dress.

Will zoomed around the house, checking things out. Zeck’s wife had made a trip up from Boston and stocked the fridge and the pantry with provisions and baby food and boxes of diapers. There were fresh towels everywhere. The thermostats were adjusted. There was a car in the garage with keys. There was even a brand-new travel crib in the bedroom and a high chair, with a price tag still affixed, in the kitchen. The Zeckendorfs were unbelievable.

He unpacked Nancy ’s service weapon from its case, checked its clip and safety, then left it conspicuously on her bedside table next to a prepaid phone.