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little on the marble, they turned a corner, heading toward the exit. A cold rush of air told him that Jelly had gotten there already, had made it outside and left the door open for him.
    She didn’t argue. Instead, she ran with him. Her feet slapped the marble floor aggressively, her steps as quick as his. Her expression was intense. Flushed with exertion, her arm warm beneath his imprisoning fingers, keeping a tight grip on the suitcase stuffed with stolen cash she’d done her best to part him from before, she didn’t offer the slightest degree of resistance.
    If she’d fought, he probably would have had to release her. He didn’t have time for another pitched battle, and he wouldn’t have shot her, for sure, or even have knocked her unconscious, as Jelly had suggested. As she almost had to know.
    Ah, there it was: the exit. French doors leading to a terrace, which led to a set of stone steps, which led to a shrubbery-shielded sidewalk, which led around past the pool to the rear of the pool house. The van, with Tina at the wheel and Jelly closing in, would be waiting.
    “This way.”
    Beyond the door, the night beckoned: a moonlit black sky shaking loose more flakes upon a glistening layer of snow. Just a few minutes more and …
    “Go.”
    As he propelled her ahead of him out the door into the icy darkness, a question started blinking on and off like a warning light in his mind. Why isn’t she busting her ass to get away?

Chapter
4
    God, it’s cold. That was Mick’s first thought as a frost-laden wind slammed into her body. Her second, as she leaped down the steps to the walkway, was My feet are freezing. Then the details got swamped by the big picture: This should not be happening. I should be taking this guy down, not taking off with him .
    But under the circumstances, taking off with him was the only thing she could think of to do.
    The pictures … those damning pictures. The images remained seared in her brain. Remembering, her heart pounded. Her pulse raced. Her stomach coiled around on itself like a writhing snake. Although she might wish on every star playing peekaboo with the thick layer of clouds overhead that it was different, there was no escaping what she had seen. And what she had seen changed everything.
    Unbelievable as it seemed, her uncle Nicco had been involved in the death—the murder— of Edward Lightfoot. There was no mistake. The photographs had been perfectly clear. Uncle Nicco’s face had been perfectly clear. Since Lightfoot’s wife and daughters had been killed at the same time, Uncle Nicco almost certainly had had a hand in their deaths, as well. Barring some exotic hoax involving Photoshop, there was no doubt that he had been on the scene, that he was guilty. She had to face it. And she had to face one more terrible thought, too: Seeing the pictures made her as much of a witness as if she had been there when the shooting had gone down.
    I’m not safe. I’ll never be safe again.
    Panic threatened to rear its ugly head. By sheer force of will she managed to clamp it down.
    There’d always been vague rumors floating around that Uncle Nicco was affiliated with the mob. That he was a crime boss, a gangster kingpin, the Godfather-like head of a wide-reaching operation. But it was the kind of nudge-nudge, wink-wink thing that no one paid much attention to: gossip and hearsay and something to occasionally tease Angela about. He actually owned Marino Construction, an extremely successful business with more than two hundred employees in three divisions: a home remodeling firm, a concrete company and a gravel company. As Mick’s dad’s best friend and the father of her own best friend, Uncle Nicco had always treated her like his blood niece. In the months and years after their mother’s death especially, he had assumed an almost parental role in her and Jenny’s lives. Mick loved the genial sixty-year-old unreservedly.
    If she had not seen the evidence with her own two eyes, no one