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happy and the hell away from me. A couple of sports cars here, some half-baked investment over there—chump change.” Zalentine wiped his brow with his forearm. “You do know they never finished Princeton?”
    “I’d heard.”
    “Turned out they were paying a couple brainy nerds to take their classes and do their assignments. Some kid heard about it and ran to a professor. Three years of tuition and two hundred grand in legacy donations flushed down the shitter.”
    “Do you know of anyone who would want to harm your sons?”
    “You may want to check into where they bought their club drugs from, you know, designer pharmaceuticals—Vicodin, ecstasy, whatever’s the current craze.”
    “There was some high-grade cannabis found onboard their sailboat. We’re pressing that angle, but it seems unlikely for a dealer to go to this degree of trouble over recreational drugs.”
    “Isn’t that what these things always turn out to be? Bang-bang over the dope?”
    “That’s often the case, but your boys had access to no small amount of funds, Mr. Zalentine. Hard to imagine they’d stiff drug dealers to the point of a double homicide.”
    “To be frank, I can’t begin to imagine the predicaments those two might have burrowed themselves into.” Zalentine took another gulp from the water bottle. “Pains me to say this, but there could be some oddball sex angle. I’d heard some rumors about the weird stuff they’d get into with girlfriends. It didn’t sound pretty, and that was a few years back.”
    “You didn’t want your sons around here. Why is that?”
    “I sell diamond rings, Agent Cady. Lots of them. I know what makes people tick. For example, I can tell by your look that you’re silently judging me—as a father and a human being—and finding me wanting.”
    “Sir, I’m just here to ask—”
    “Fuck it, doesn’t matter,” Zalentine said, waving his hand. “I can size up a couple that walks inside any of my jewelry stores within thirty seconds, can tell you exactly what engagement set they’ll buy, whether they’ll still be married in five years, which one will be the first to cheat—you name it and I can tell you all of that within thirty seconds. So imagine how I could size up my sons. I know it’s not the most glowing endorsement of my own flesh and blood, Agent Cady, but do you remember those Menendez brothers—Lyle and Erik—remember them?”
    Cady nodded.
    “So the reason that I made damn sure they didn’t live here after the great hamster detonations, Agent Cady, the reason I sent them off to any boarding school in the country that would take them, and then off to a college on the East Coast, was quite simple. I didn’t want to wake suddenly one night to find Adrien and Alain at the foot of the king-size, naked, with scalpels, prepared to take their tricks to an entirely new level.”
    So it may not have come as an earth-shattering surprise to Vance Zalentine when he received the news that his boy, Alain, had been shot to death at a rest area off U.S. Highway 50, outside of Queenstown, Maryland. Alain Zalentine, out tooling around in his Porsche Carrera GT, had pulled into a rest stop and gone inside to use a bathroom stall. Unbeknownst to Alain, someone had followed him in, given him a minute or two to get settled, then kicked in the stall door and shot Alain dead center in the forehead.
    It was not a robbery. Alain’s eel-skin wallet, stuffed with six hundred dollars cash and six credit cards, and the keys to his Carrera remained in the pockets of his Dolce & Gabbanas, scrunched down about his ankles in the puddle of blood. Rather the opposite of robbery, and the reason the case immediately drew in the bureau, was that something had been left behind. In this case, a glass bishop had been inserted straight into the entry wound in the middle of Alain’s forehead.
    Another oddity left at the murder scene was on the men’s restroom door. An O UT OF O RDER sign had been duct-taped to