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or a freak of nature. He didn’t want to be gifted. He wanted to be a plain, ordinary kid. He wanted to play sports. Who wanted to play the stupid
piano
?
    His parents tried to reason with him, saying it was okay for a person to play sports and also be a musician, and that it would be a shame for him to waste his musical talent.
    But he knew better. He went to school every day, not them. He knew he’d be made fun of if anyone ever found out that he could play the piano and had tunes he didn’t even know the names of stored up inside his head.
    He held firm against their arguments. When pleading with them didn’t work, he resorted to obstinacy. One night after a supper-long debate over it, he swore that he would never touch a keyboard again, that they could chain him to a piano bench and not let him eat or drink or go to the bathroom until he played, and even then he would refuse. Think how bad they would feel when he shriveled up and died of thirst while chained to the piano bench.
    They didn’t cave in to the melodramatic vow, but in the long run, they couldn’t force him to play, so he won. The compromise was that he played only for them and only at home.
    Although he would never admit it, he enjoyed these private recitals. Secretly he loved the music that was conducted from his brain to his fingers effortlessly, mindlessly, without any urging from him.
    At thirty-eight he still couldn’t read a note. Sheet music looked like so many lines and squiggles to him. But over the years, he had honed and refined his innate talent, which remained his secret. Whenever an acquaintance asked about the piano in his living room, he said it was a legacy from his grandmother, which was true.
    He played in order to lose himself in the music. He played for his personal enjoyment or whenever he needed to zone out, empty his mind of the mundane, and allow it to unravel a knotty problem.
    Like tonight. There hadn’t been a peep out of Savich since the severed tongue incident. The lab at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation had confirmed that it had indeed belonged to Freddy Morris, but that left them no closer to pinning his murder on Savich.
    Savich was free. He was free to continue his lucrative drug trafficking, free to kill anyone who crossed him. And Duncan knew that somewhere on Savich’s agenda, he was an annotation. Probably his name had a large asterisk beside it.
    He tried not to dwell on it. He had other cases, other responsibilities, but it gnawed at him constantly that Savich was out there, biding his time, waiting for the right moment to strike. These days Duncan exercised a bit more caution, was a fraction more vigilant, never went anywhere unarmed. But it wasn’t really fear he felt. More like anticipation.
    On this night, that supercharged feeling of expectation was keeping him awake. He’d sought refuge from the restlessness by playing his piano. In the darkness of his living room, he was tinkering with a tune of his own composition when his telephone rang.
    He glanced at the clock. Work. Nobody called at 1:34 in the morning to report that there
hadn’t
been a killing. He answered on the second ring. “Yeah?”
    Early in their partnership, he and DeeDee had made a deal. She would be the first one called if they were needed at the scene of a homicide. Between the two of them, he was the one more likely to sleep through a ringing telephone. She was the caffeine junkie and a light sleeper by nature.
    He expected the caller to be her and it was. “Were you asleep?” she asked cheerfully.
    “Sort of.”
    “Playing the piano?”
    “I don’t play the piano.”
    “Right. Well, stop whatever it is you’re doing. We’re on.”
    “Who iced whom?”
    “You won’t believe it. Pick me up in ten.”
    “Where—” But he was talking to air. She’d hung up.
    He went upstairs, dressed, and slipped on his holster. Within two minutes of his partner’s call, he was in his car.
    He lived in a town house in the historic