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you.”
    “No, no, I was just getting up.”
    The woman chuckled.
    “I always say that, too. Patty, it’s Kristine Zurowski from the academy. Remember me?”
    “Of course.” Patty instantly conjured up the image of a pleasant, dark-haired woman, who, like herself, was in her early thirties. The similarities between the two of them hardly ended there. Kristine was also intelligent, extremely intense, and as committed as Patty to making it to detective in the state police. The two of them each finished close to the top of their class, and, within a shorter time than any of the other graduates, Patty had made detective. Not long after that, she heard that Kristine had, too. “Everything all right with you?”
    “I’m absolutely exhausted all the time,” Kristine said, “if that’s what you mean by ‘all right.’ My husband has a photo of me pinned to the pillow so he can remember what I look like.”
    “Believe me, if I had a husband, he’d have a photo pinned up, too. It’s like be careful what you wish for. So, what’s up?”
    “You know I’m attached to the Norfolk barracks.”
    Norfolk County was south of Middlesex, Patty’s unit.
    “I had heard that, yes.”
    “Well, I’m calling you from a crime scene in Dover. A man named Cyrill Davenport was in his Cadillac when it blew up in the driveway of his mansion. The bomb squad says someone wired his car. He is—
was
—the CEO of Unity Comprehensive Health.”
    Patty sucked in a jet of air. Davenport would be the third managed-care executive in the area to be murdered in the last eight weeks. The first, Ben Morales, was shot—
executed
would be a more appropriate word—outside his home in Lexington. One bullet, mid-forehead, fired by a .357 of some sort. No witnesses. Patty was the investigating officer initially assigned to head the investigation. It was her third murder case, but the first in which the killer wasn’t immediately known.
    The second managed-care executive, Marcia Rising, had been gunned down in the secured parking lot of her guarded HMO office building, also in Middlesex County—this time with a nine-millimeter. Once again there were no witnesses. The similarities between the two deaths brought greatly increased interest and concern all the way up the state police chain of command, from Patty’s immediate boss, Detective Lieutenant Jack Court, through the detective captain, the major, and finally to Colonel Cal Carver, and Carver’s right-hand man, Lieutenant Colonel Tommy Moriarity, Patty’s father.
    Immediately following the Rising murder, with Tommy Moriarity’s tacit blessing, Wayne Brasco, a long-time detective and close
compadre
of Lieutenant Court in the Good Ol’ Boy Club, was assigned to take over for Patty and oversee the investigation. Patty would continue to work with him, but Brasco, in every sense of the term, would be The Man. While Patty was displeased with what she saw as an undeserved demotion, she was even more pained by the selection of Brasco, for whom she had no respect as a cop and whom she had already warned more than once to stop calling her Sweetcakes, Babe, and the like.
    The phone tucked between her chin and shoulder, Patty was already out of bed snatching clothes from her bureau and closet.
    “Kristine, it’s great of you to call me so quickly. I’ll get in touch with Wayne Brasco, my partner on this one, and we’ll be out there in just a little while. I guess you know this case is number three.”
    “I do, but don’t bother calling Brasco.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because he’s already here. Apparently someone from Norfolk called him, because he’s been here almost from the beginning, glad-handing the guys like this was some sort of frat party and ignoring every part of me except for my breasts. A couple of minutes ago, he jokingly let slip that you were also on the Middlesex cases with him—something about your being assigned to work with him as a favor to your father.”
    “That’s