She was a pretty lady who wore a little bathing suit to match the lime in her drink. He was an attorney who’d loved and lost and loved again. They came together because her husband was missing, or maybe he was dead, or maybe it didn’t matter. Now Matthew Hope finds himself moving through a case where all the players are playing their own games, from kinky sex to high-class thievery, and everyone is playing it his own way. With one man already found dead on a Calusa beach with another man’s I.D. in his pocket, Matthew Hope has one chance of getting at the truth. Follow a trail of lies to the city of stars, wanna-bes, and icy wind — where Hope will get help from a detective named Steve Carella, of the 87th Precinct…

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Chapter 1

Occasionally, Florida could be glorious in January.

When Matthew moved down here from Chicago, more years ago than he could remember, Joanna was a little girl, and there were oranges on the tree in front of the house. He would pick them for breakfast, and Susan would squeeze them for juice while Joanna swam in the pool out back. There were cardinals in the trees and the air was balmy and the sky was blue and life was sweet and lazy and Florida was all that it should be.

That was a long tine ago.

Susan and he were now divorced and Joanna was fifteen and away from Florida most of the time because she was at a boarding school in Massachusetts. Rumor had it that Susan might remarry. Matthew hoped so. Once upon a time, he’d loved her.

In Florida, whenever the winter months turned a bit brisker than the Chamber of Commerce liked to admit, you heard people in antiquated winter coats and earmuffs telling you it was much worse up north, right?

Right, Matthew thought.

But you hadn’t moved to Florida so it could be much worse up north. You knew it was much worse up north. You came down here because you expected it to be much better. Forty-two degrees and windy was not a hell of a lot better. And frankly, up north was not a hell of a lot worse.

Forgive me, he thought.

I’m very cranky since I got shot.

Twice.

That was almost a year ago . . . well, it would be a year this March. The first bullet hit him in the left shoulder. The second one hit him in the chest. There’d been searing pain and then a feeling of complete helplessness, his shoulder leaking, his shirt wet with blood, legs going weak, arms flapping, mouth gasping for air, everything swimming out of focus as if he were the hero in a cheap detective novel, everything getting darker and darker and somebody screamed. Me, he thought. I was the somebody screaming. People who make movies should tell a person that getting shot is so painful it causes you to scream aloud.

But, listen, that was last March.

Shot or not, there was no reason for Matthew or anyone else in Calusa, Florida, to be cranky this January. This year, January was the dream month every transplanted northerner wished for. This was Florida weather the way it was supposed to be. This was weather that could make California people turn purple with envy.

This was Paradise.

The woman sitting opposite Matthew in the corner office at Summerville and Hope was dressed for the seasonably mild weather in a white cotton, single-breasted suit and white flats. He couldn’t quite place her accent, but he didn’t think she was a native Floridian, despite the sun-washed blond hair and glorious tan. Legs crossed, cotton skirt riding high, blue eyes wide in a quite beautiful face, she told him she wanted a divorce.

He took down the vital statistics.

Jill Lawton.

Thirty-four years old . . .

When a woman was thirty-four, she gave you her age without hesitation. Thirty-four was a good age for a woman. Matthew himself was thirty-nine and he hoped he would ever and always remain that age, because it was not a bad age for a man to be, well beyond the callow cusp of thirty-seven, yet not quite into that barren landscape of the forties. He could understand Jack Benny completely, although he had read someplace recently that many people didn’t know who Jack Benny was. Or even Alfred Hitchcock. Then again, some people didn’t know who the vice president of the United States was. Sometimes he shook his head in amazement.

Jill Lawton, thirty-four years old and living in a house she and her husband had once shared on Whisper Key until he went up north a year ago, presumably to explore job opportunities.

“When’s the last time you spoke to him?”

“Nine months ago.”

“Had he found work by then?”

“Well, freelance. But nothing steady. He didn’t want me to come up until he’d found a really good position somewhere.