CHAPTER EIGHT

The encounter with the hidden security camera convinced Balint that he had to be far more cautious in selecting future targets; it also left him in a disagreeable mood. When Amanda returned home from her “bridge tournament,” he peppered her with questions about the event: How had her partner played? How many “master points” did she earn? Had she run into anybody they knew from Laurendale? Initially, his wife had been in bright spirits, but eventually she soaked up his irritability and snapped, “I don’t see why you care so much about my life all of a sudden.” So he withdrew to his den and spent the evening on the phone with Delilah. Amanda could have listened at the door, he realized, but he doubted that she cared enough to bother. When at breakfast the next day, his wife announced that she’d be attending another overnight tournament—on the weekend between Christmas and New Year’s—he was neither particularly surprised nor particularly upset. Let her have one final hurrah with Sugarman.

Another matter, however, caused him considerable consternation. Although his attorneys assured him that he was highly unlikely to face charges in the death of Abby Goldhammer, and Amanda had confirmed that any civil claim up to $2 million would be covered by their homeowners’ policy, the local press had laid the blame for the episode squarely on his shoulders. An Op-Ed in the Laurendale Leader branded him “Dr. Negligent” and the editorial page of the Hager Heights Beacon demanded criminal prosecution. It would have been a fitting reflection upon the state of the nation’s justice system, he reflected, if he went to prison for an accidental drowning while escaping punishment for a series of calculated killings. But that didn’t mean he had to accept this disparagement without a fight. Balint ordered his lawyers to threaten both newspapers with defamation lawsuits, even though the attorneys assured him that he had no chance of winning.

The community’s anger over Abby’s death took an even more personal turn. While Balint didn’t lose any of his current patients, approximately one-third of his new consultations canceled over the following several weeks. This figure was far higher than his usual drop-off rate: a man who was reckless in fixing the stones around his pool might be equally negligent when it came to matters of the human heart. Not that he actually needed the additional business. At a practical level, he was grateful for the extra free time. Yet the cancellations bruised his ego. During the first days after the Beacon editorial, he’d also received a handful of angry, anonymous phone calls at home, but these evaporated by the end of the week. Amanda’s coterie of friends rapidly circled their wagons around her—only Bonnie Kluger sided with Sally, and Bonnie had always been an odd duck—so the negative social fallout from the incident was also limited. In fact, rumors circulated that the Goldhammers felt so isolated in Laurendale that they planned to move back to Brooklyn. Nonetheless, the entire episode left a bad taste in Balint’s mouth.

He had warned his receptionist to keep an eye out for process servers, as it was almost inevitable that Timothy

Goldhammer would eventually subpoena him—and he didn’t feel the need to make a civil suit any easier for the banker. So he was already on his guard, when on Christmas Eve, an unfamiliar man in a business suit approached him as he sipped a cup of coffee in the hospital atrium. Another prospective patient had “no-showed,” leaving him forty-five free minutes before his noon conference.

The stranger appeared to be in his forties, but with gray-tinged sideburns and a deep groove between his eyes. He carried himself with his chest out—like a man who’d inhaled a balloon full of anger. “Are you Dr. Jeremy Balint?”

“Can I help you?” Balint asked noncommittally.

“I’m looking for Jeremy Balint.”

“And what’s your business with Dr. Balint?”

The stranger responded by socking him in the jaw. Balint toppled backward and his head slammed into the tile floor. He could actually hear what sounded like the snapping of bone, but he remained conscious. Above him, his attacker had lifted a chair and was about to bring it down upon his face—Balint raised his hands in an effort to deflect the blow—when someone tackled his assailant from behind. Through the haze of struggle, he heard a voice shouting, “That monster killed my daughter. That monster killed my baby girl.” And then he blacked out.

BALINT AWOKE six hours later on the VIP unit—in a room adjacent to the one where he’d treated Norman Navare. His head throbbed, but a quick check of his limbs revealed full mobility down to his fingertips and toes. At the foot of the bed, a physician sporting a bow tie perused his vital signs on a clipboard. It took Balint a moment to recognize Myron Salt, the director of clinical neurology. “Sure took you long enough,” said Salt, when he finally noticed that Balint was awake.

“How bad do I look?”

“No worse than before.” Salt set down the clipboard. “Nothing broken either, as hard as that may be to believe. But we did give you some steroids to prevent swelling.”

“Aren’t they going to make me loopy?”

“Better loopy than dead. It’ll teach you not to fight outside your weight class. The guy who slugged you was apparently a boxing champion in college.”

His altercation with Tim Goldhammer slowly came back into focus. “What happened to him?” asked Balint.

“No idea. But Andy Price in hematology recognized him from their time together at Princeton. Says the guy was the state middleweight champion three years running. You owe Andy, by the way. If not for him, we’d be prying chair legs out of your eye sockets.”

“You neurologists always phrase things so eloquently.”

“Nothing more eloquent than the truth. Now try to get a good night’s sleep and we’ll see about discharging you in the morning.”

“You can’t seriously plan on keeping me overnight.”

“Dead serious. Which is a hell of a lot better than dead.”

That was when Balint registered that he’d been changed from his street clothes into a hospital gown—that his wallet was no longer in his possession. And his wallet contained more than seven yards of green ribbon! If they’d inventoried his belongings, he was a goner. “Where’s my stuff?” he demanded. “Where’s my wallet?”

“That’s a question for a nurse,” replied Salt.

He patted Balint on the arm and departed. Balint rang the call button.

After a wait of several minutes—during which he pressed the button again multiple times—a portly Filipino matron entered the room. She was not one of the nurses whom he knew well, but he did recognize her from his days as an electrophysiology fellow. “Sorry for the delay, doc,” she said. “I was on break.”

“Where are my things?” demanded Balint.

At first, the nurse appeared puzzled.

“My wallet,” he prompted her. “My keys. My clothing.”

The nurse smiled. “Oh, I believe your wife took those home with her. She said that if you woke up, to tell you she’d be back in the morning . . . Now do you think you’re ready for some dinner?”

Balint shook his head. For all he knew, at that moment Amanda was rifling through his belongings—running her tiny fingers over the incriminating ribbon. He wondered if she’d phone the police, but he doubted that she would—at least not until she first confronted him directly. But even if she never went to the authorities, even if he could come up with a plausible justification for owning the ribbon that did not involve homicide, the discovery would still rule out strangling Sugarman. His only hope was that Amanda hadn’t bothered to look inside his wallet at all. That she couldn’t be bothered. If he were lucky, she’d taken advantage of his injuries to spend the night with her lover. What he longed to do was to call her at home—to ask her to bring his wallet to the hospital immediately—but he feared that such a request might prompt her to sort through his things. Far wiser to wait. So he passed the most stressful night of his adult life, anticipating the worst. When Salt dropped by again the next morning, with a team of residents in tow, Balint hadn’t slept a wink.

“You cured yet?” asked the neurologist.

“I will be when I get out of here. You haven’t seen my wife, have you?”

“Nope. But I have seen the inside of your skull. Take it easy for the next few days, okay? And try not to use your face as a punching bag.” Salt turned to his house officers and added, “Dr. Balint is a fine cardiologist, but he’s not the world’s best boxer.”

“It was a sucker punch,” insisted Balint.

“That’s what they all say.”

The house officers took turns listening to Balint’s chest and palpating his cranium. Another two hours elapsed before Amanda arrived. She wore her tennis sweats under her open coat and carried a racket under one arm—her outfit announcing to the world that she wasn’t particularly concerned for her husband’s health. Balint scoured her face for signs that she’d searched his wallet. “I didn’t realize you’d be lucid already,” she said. “The emergency doctors said they might keep you sedated for a day or two.” He detected a twinge of disappointment in her voice.

“Did you bring my clothes?” he asked.

“They’re in the car.”

“Can you get them? I’m ready to go home.”

“You sure the doctors are okay with that?”

Balint sat up—too rapidly. As the blood drained from his brain, he felt dizzy, yet his head throbbed much less than it had the previous night. “I don’t give a damn what the doctors think. I am a doctor. Now bring me my pants and let’s get the hell out of here.”

Amanda rolled her eyes, but agreed to retrieve his clothing. She returned ten minutes later toting a brown paper bag. “Here you go,” she said—reaching into the bag—and, for an instant, Balint was certain she was going to pull out a strand of green ribbon, like a magician performing a particularly cruel trick. Instead, she handed him his slacks and shirt. “Satisfied?”

Never in his entire life had the presence of any physical object brought Balint such relief—such joy—as the feel of his cotton trousers. He stepped into the bathroom and locked the door. His wallet remained in the back pocket, precisely as he’d left it. The ribbon appeared untouched. If Amanda had discovered his secret, she’d concealed the evidence of her discovery impeccably. He dressed quickly and then slid the door slightly ajar—just far enough so that he could spy on his wife. Amanda sat cross-legged on the bed, examining her nails, looking jaded with life. Nothing in her expression suggested a woman who’d just discovered that her husband was murdering strangers for a hobby. But nothing in her earlier demeanor had ever suggested she was sleeping with his colleague—so Balint couldn’t be certain. He opened the door fully and cleared his throat.

“Did they arrest that lunatic?” he asked.

“They didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“About Tim Goldhammer . . .”

“What about Tim Goldhammer?” demanded Balint, growing impatient.

“The police felt bad about Abby, so they apparently wrote him a ticket for disorderly conduct and let him go home. But he didn’t go home. He drove up to Asbury Park and jumped off an overpass.”

“Dead?”

Amanda paused and gazed out the window. “Not dead. But in pretty lousy shape.”

“Serves him right.”

Amanda didn’t respond.

“Well, it does serve him right,” said Balint. “He could have broken my jaw.”

“His daughter died. Imagine how we’d feel if something happened to Jessie or Phoebe—if someone let something happen to Jessie or Phoebe.”

“I’d give that someone more than a punch in the face.”

Balint buckled his belt and tossed the rumpled hospital gown onto the bed. He examined himself in the mirror, running his fingers along his swollen chin. Secretly he was relieved that Goldhammer had been severely injured—that the banker no longer posed a threat to his own daughters. “Bet there’s going to be hell to pay for the cop who let him go home. Shows there’s no upside to being a patsy.”

“I feel terrible for Sally,” said Amanda. “I genuinely do.”

Of course, you do, thought Balint—but I don’t. That’s the difference between us. But all he said was, “I’m sure she’ll be okay in the long run.”

WHEN BALINT arrived at work the next day—around one o’clock, after taking the morning off to sleep late and recover—he was greeted by another unexpected visitor: Etan Steinhoff. The rabbi stood in Balint’s waiting area, pacing and speaking on his cellular phone. From the snippets of dialogue that Balint overheard, he picked up that Steinhoff was trying to set up another Project Cain clinic, this one in Camden. “I was here visiting a congregant,” the rabbi explained, “and I figured I’d take advantage of the opportunity to chat with you. I promise I’ll only take a moment. I know how busy you must be”—he glanced at his watch—“and I have a meeting across town at three.”

Balint scanned the suite; a handful of patients appeared to be waiting for one of his junior colleagues, but he didn’t recognize any of his own. “No sign of my one thirty?” he asked his receptionist.

“She’s running late. Traffic. Called to say she’d be here by one forty-five.”

“There you go,” replied Balint—none too pleased. “We have forty-five minutes.”

“I won’t take nearly that long.”

Steinhoff followed him into his office. He thought he knew what was coming: in light of the ongoing negative publicity surrounding Abby Goldhammer’s death, he expected the rabbi to relieve him of his duties as medical director of the free clinic. Little did Steinhoff realize how welcome this dismissal would be.

“So I wanted to touch base about Project Cain,” said the rabbi. “As you may know, at the beginning of the coming year, we’re hoping to open three more clinics—in Camden, Atlantic City, and South Philadelphia.”

“And I imagine you’ll want new medical leadership,” offered Balint, trying to make his discharge easier on the rabbi.

“Maybe at some point, I suppose,” said Steinhoff. “We’ve discussed bringing on board a full-time clinician to oversee our four regional medical directors. But that’s a long way off—and, I might add, you’d be the leading candidate for the job. A shoo-in, quite frankly, if we could lure you away from the hospital.”

Balint sensed that the conversation was not headed where he’d hoped. “I’ll bear that in mind. If I’m ever up for luring . . .”

“What I wanted to speak to you about is something much more pressing,” continued Steinhoff, glancing at his watch again. “My data people have been crunching numbers, and it seems we’re not giving away enough free care.”

“Maybe people aren’t sick enough.”

“I don’t think that’s it,” said Steinhoff. “What I think—”

“Because we could make them sicker,” interjected Balint. “And then we could make them better again. That would vastly improve your numbers, I’m sure.”

“What I think,” repeated Steinhoff, “is that we have a visibility problem. To put it bluntly, not enough people in the community know about our services. And if you don’t know about them, you can’t possibly access them.”

“You have a point there,” agreed Balint.

“I’m glad we see eye to eye. Because what I’d like to do, God willing, is to start advertising directly to the population we’re trying to serve. I’m thinking a series of sixty-second radio spots. Maybe television too—during the local news—if we can raise the funds. What do you think?”

“I guess it can’t hurt trying.”

“Great. So when would be a good time to set up the taping? Ideally I’d like to have you record the first handful of segments sometime within the next week.”

“You want me to tape the ads?”

“Who else? I already took the liberty of jotting down a few loose ideas for the text.” He reached into his canvas bag and handed Balint a manila folder. “But nothing is carved in stone, so feel free to add ideas of your own . . .”

Balint opened the folder. Steinhoff’s “loose ideas” were, in reality, polished scripts. The first of these began: “I’m Dr. Jeremy Balint and saving lives is my job. It’s also my passion . . .”

The rabbi stood up. “I can’t thank you enough for your involvement in this effort,” he said. “Volunteers like you make Project Cain possible. But I don’t want to take up any more of your time. Why don’t I call you tomorrow and we can hammer out the scheduling details?”

He didn’t give Balint an opportunity to disagree.

“And send my love to that charming wife of yours, Dr. Balint,” said Steinhoff. “You’ll forgive me for saying that you’re a very lucky man.”

Balint slid the folder onto his desk. “If I had any more luck,” he griped, “I wouldn’t have enough time in the day to thank God for my good fortune.”

“I couldn’t have said the words better myself,” agreed the clueless rabbi, clasping Balint’s hand and then retreating to the door. “If you ever give up medicine, you’d make a fine rabbi, Dr. Balint. And I don’t say that to many people.”

THE IMAGE of the security camera had been emblazoned indelibly upon Balint’s consciousness. In hindsight he realized that trawling the streets for a suitable target had been the height of madness. He’d gotten lucky three times—first in Cobb’s Crossing, then with Kenny McCord, and finally outside the church—but only a fool would rely on luck with the stakes so high. Now he determined to be far more prudent. Rather than choosing his victims on the spot, he decided to scout for them in advance—to identify promising individuals long before he actually approached them. His initial idea had been to use the hospital’s brand new electronic medical record system to look up promising patients at Laurendale-Methodist’s affiliates in Nassau County. He’d intended to check the records from somebody else’s account—accessing a public computer after a nurse or social worker forgot to log out of the network—in order to identify vulnerable candidates who lived alone. Then he realized the flaw in his scheme: once he’d killed these people, their bodies would likely be transported to the same affiliate hospitals, where internal security might later screen for unauthorized access to their charts. The IT probe would be looking for inappropriate access by curiosity seekers, bored technicians, and medical students seeking the inside scoop on an Emerald Choker victim, not for suspects. Yet the computer folks might inadvertently notice his own hospital’s electronic fingerprints and launch an inquiry. The odds of that happening were exceedingly low—but exceedingly low was not the same as zero.

Balint ultimately decided to cull his victims from the obituaries. He’d once caught the tail end of a radio call-in show where a female participant “of a certain age” explained that she found her boyfriends by combing the death notices for recent widowers. So why not use the same info to help select murder victims? The process entailed a small risk: he had to look up the various Nassau County newspapers online at the Pontefract Library, so it was theoretically possible that his trail might be traced. But in this case, the danger truly did approach zero. The only real risk was being seen by Bonnie Kluger once again—but what could she possibly do? Lots of people visited libraries every day, and few of them were cold-blooded killers.

He proceeded with caution. His optimal target, he decided, was a widow over sixty whose husband’s obit didn’t list any other survivors. It was also essential that she live in a freestanding dwelling, either a private home or a duplex, because apartment buildings contained meddlesome neighbors and superintendents and hidden security monitors. To his surprise, and frustration, very few notices met these criteria. Eventually, he recognized why: an actual human being had to place a death notice—and to pay for it. If you died with survivors, particularly adult children, this increased the pool of persons who might arrange for such an announcement. Solitary widows apparently preferred to save the money and the effort.

So days elapsed with no optimal candidate, while life in Laurendale continued all around him.

Amanda attended her “bridge tournament” in Philadelphia—and had the audacity to telephone him to announce that she’d be staying over an extra day because she’d qualified for the final round. On New Year’s Day, he took the girls ice-skating at the rink in Musselburgh, affording his wife yet another afternoon alone with Sugarman. But he refused to let her philandering get under his skin. He kept his eyes focused on his prize. Finally, during the first week of January, he spotted a notice in the Queensferry Sentinel that passed muster.

The death announcement was for Stavros Constantinou, eighty-one, a retired sanitation worker and Korean War veteran who’d died of lung cancer. He left behind a wife of fifty-eight years, Sofia—and nobody else. Balint looked up their home address on the Internet, then used an online mapping program to find a visual of Mrs. Constantinou’s house. He’d hit the jackpot: the elderly woman lived in a stand-alone bungalow situated near the end of a winding backstreet. On paper, Balint could not have asked for a more perfect target: it was as though Sofia Constantinou had been born for the sole purpose of helping him revenge himself upon Warren Sugarman.

WHILE BALINT was scouting for Nassau County widows, the police announced that they’d identified a “person of interest” in the previous slayings. For weeks, pressure had been mounting on the authorities to crack the case. At a personal level, Chief Putnam was extremely popular. His plainspoken candor and seemingly perpetual five-o’clock shadow instilled confidence that his officers were leaving no stone unturned. The pundits even predicted that after the chief made an arrest, he’d become a leading candidate for the open congressional seat in his district—although nobody even knew for certain to which political party he belonged. But as much as the public liked Chief Putnam, popular frustration had been growing with the lack of progress on the case. So as soon as it appeared that the authorities had identified a suspect, the killings once again became national headlines.

The police themselves revealed no additional information about their investigation. At first Balint feared he might be their “person of interest.” But then word leaked to the media that this “person of interest” had been interrogated by police in New York City. Two days later, the New York Post identified him as a twenty-five-year-old handyman from Brooklyn who’d been detained at a routine DUI checkpoint. The cops had reportedly found a spool of green ribbon in his glove compartment. When they searched his apartment, they also uncovered newspaper clippings describing both the Rockingham and McCord killings, as well as a collection of fake military outfits, a counterfeit NYPD badge, and an arsenal of semiautomatic firearms. In addition, someone had recently used the suspect’s computer to search for information on the victims and on strangulation methods. The handyman, whose name the Post did not release, was the sort of angry white loner who matched perfectly the predictions of the pundits. Two days after his interrogation, the district attorney filed felony weapons-possession charges against the suspect and officially detained him as a “material witness” in the Rockingham killings.

For Balint, the news could not have come at a worse time. If the police had apprehended this suspect after he’d killed Sugarman, that would have provided an excuse to halt his murder spree and permanently retire his strangling gloves with little worry. But being in custody afforded the suspect an unshakeable alibi for when Balint killed the surgeon. Of course Balint still hadn’t thought through what he’d do if the state charged the wrong man after Sugarman was dead. Would he really let an innocent stranger serve life in prison—or face possible execution—in order to secure his own peace of mind? The answer, he realized, was probably yes. That might be crueler, in some ways, than merely killing strangers, but it was another necessary evil. The alternative would be to contact the authorities anonymously in order to exonerate the accused—maybe supplying a detail that only the legitimate killer might know. But at the end of the day, it would be difficult to justify such an unnecessary—and even arrogant—risk.

This time around, Balint didn’t have to confront such ethical dilemmas: the case against the Brooklyn handyman soon fell apart. It turned out that he’d been hospitalized on the psychiatric unit at Bellevue for the entire month of December, providing an airtight alibi for the time of the Kenny McCord slaying. At first, the pundits predicted that he’d been plotting a copycat offense—but even that proved to be so much hot air. According to the Post, the suspect had informed police that he’d actually been planning to reenact the Emerald Choker killings in an effort to solve them. Further evidence for this claim emerged when the authorities discovered a list of potential “suspects” among his belongings. The list reportedly included the “real Zodiac killer” and “Satan.”

BALINT BIDED his time before paying a visit to Sofia Constantinou. He figured that the woman might have friends or neighbors who’d look after her during the first days of her widowhood, before returning to their own busy lives, so he allowed a window for these well-intentioned folks to offer their compassion. Fortunately, Amanda—obviously emboldened by his indifference—revealed plans to attend yet another “bridge tournament” in the middle of January.

“Maybe I’ll come with you to an event one of these days,” he suggested, seeking to rankle her a bit.

“That would be great,” Amanda replied as smooth as ever. “Not this time, of course—because we’d have to make arrangements for the girls. But maybe over the summer, when they’re at camp.”

“If you’re still into bridge by the summer,” said Balint.

A glint of hostility flickered across his wife’s face. “Do you really think I’d give up bridge that easily?”

It crossed Balint’s mind that his wife understood exactly what he was talking about—that they were both speaking in the same code—but that as long as neither acknowledged it, their marriage remained on safe ground. “I have no idea,” he replied. “I gave up figuring out what games you’re into a long time ago.”

That concluded their discussion. Two weeks later, Balint deposited his daughters with their grandparents, kissed them each on the head, promised to make them hot chocolate before bedtime, and drove the two hours and twenty minutes to the working-class hamlet of Queensferry, New York. He paused on the outskirts of the town and wrapped burlap over the license plates of the Mercedes.

The nineteenth-century coastal village had once been a whaling port, the final stop for harpoon vessels bound from Nantucket and New Bedford to their hunting grounds in the southern Pacific. Following the Second World War, the hamlet had remade itself as a bedroom community for teachers and firefighters from New York City. Low-slung, one-story dwellings sprung up on the farmland that ringed the original town, including the tidy bungalow on Crescent Court where Sofia Constantinou lived under the shade of two towering Norway spruces. When Balint pulled up at the curbside, shortly after one o’clock, the trees already cast long shadows over the shingled roof.

Balint glanced up and down the block. Not another human being in sight. In fact, the nearest house was hardly visible around the bend. He pulled on his leather gloves—which would have to suffice, as latex was bound to draw the widow’s attention. Then he strode rapidly up the brick path and rang the front bell.

Half a minute elapsed. Then a minute. Balint thought he saw movement at the drapes in the bay windows. Finally, the door opened a crack and a throaty voice addressed him from behind the chain. “Yes?”

“I’m looking for Mrs. Sofia Constantinou, the wife of the late Stavros Constantinou,” said Balint—striving to sound calm. “I’m Dr. Balint with the New York City Municipal Workers’ Benefits Fund.”

“Do you have identification?”

Balint removed his hospital ID card from his wallet and slipped it between the door and the frame. That appeared to satisfy her. A moment later, the door shut and he heard her slide open the latch.

Mrs. Constantinou was a tall, big-boned woman with distinctly masculine features, whose face appeared to be frozen in an expression of mild displeasure. She wore a threadbare terrycloth robe.

“What can I do for you, Dr. Balint?” she asked.

The widow stood in the doorway, arms akimbo. She did not invite Balint inside.

“As I said, I’m from the New York City Municipal Workers’ Benefits Fund. Your husband had an insurance plan with us—and I’ve come to settle the policy. Would it be all right if I stepped inside for a moment?”

Mrs. Constantinou raked her eyes up and down his body, then seemed to decide that he posed no immediate threat, and beckoned him into the house. He followed her through a dimly lit foyer into an equally dim parlor. Balint felt his heartbeat accelerating, but at the same time, he enjoyed the thrill of pretending to be something that he was not.

As he trailed the widow along the narrow passageway, he might easily have wrapped his hands around her throat. That’s what a novice would have done—at his own peril. But Balint held back because he wasn’t yet certain that the woman was alone in the house.

At his host’s urging, he seated himself on a sofa shrouded in a plastic cover. The widow sunk into the armchair opposite him. The room was too warm and smelled oppressively of lavender and potpourri.

“You’ll have to forgive me,” said Mrs. Constantinou, “I don’t have anything to offer you. I’ve been meaning to go shopping all week . . . but I just haven’t . . .”

“I fully understand. You don’t have anybody to help you?”

The widow stiffened. “I’m well looked after,” she said defensively. “Now what’s this about an insurance policy?” Balint removed his handheld computer from his jacket pocket and punched in a few random numbers as though pulling up Constantinou’s account.

“New York City salaried employees have an option to buy into a life insurance program,” he explained, spinning his carefully premeditated tale. “I am delighted to say that your husband bought into our plan when it was first offered . . . and that you’re the beneficiary. The amount should come out to $88,471.15.”

“What’s the catch?” demanded Mrs. Constantinou.

“No catch. All I need is to verify the death certificate and I’ll have them send you a check within thirty days.”

His host’s expression softened. “Sammy was a wonderful man, Dr. Balint. He promised to take care of me forever and he did—even now . . .”

Balint assured himself that Sofia Constantinou’s death, if not as unequivocally a public service as Kenny McCord’s, was nonetheless a net positive. The widow had apparently led a good life. By promising her the insurance payout, he was enabling her to die happy—rather than alone and demented someday in a nursing home.

“If you could just show me the death certificate,” prompted Balint.

The widow stood up. “It should be with the other papers.”

Mrs. Constantinou crossed the room to the television and removed a shoe box from the shelf below. She began to sort through the contents. “I’ve got Sammy’s naturalization papers, his Medicare card, his hospital bills . . .” Balint now felt confident that they were alone in the house. He eased himself off the couch and took three rapid steps across the carpet. “I know they gave it to me. It’s just that I was so overwhelmed and—”

He had his gloves around her throat. She reached her hands up, and at first he thought she was going to grab his fingers, but then he noticed a medallion hanging just above her sternum. It was one of those medical panic buttons. He managed to block her hands at the last second, but that meant releasing half of his grasp on her neck.

She screamed and dug her nails into his cheek. Instinctively he used the full force of his body to ram her head face-first into the front of the mantelpiece. The blow proved strong enough to knock the fight from her.

Blood trickled down Balint’s right cheek—warm and unpleasant. He finished the job quickly, squeezing until his victim yielded her carotid pulse. Then he dragged her cadaver into the kitchen and scrubbed her right hand for twenty minutes, hoping that the scalding water would wash any traces of his DNA from under her fingernails.

As a final touch, he retrieved the ribbon from his pocket and cut off five identical strands, wrapping each one around her neck. Only his fourth killing, but five ribbons. That, he mused, should keep the authorities scratching their heads.

THE CLAW marks on his cheek were too severe to pass off as a shaving injury. He’d managed to stanch the blood flow on the drive home, but the bandages that covered the wound also hid half of his face. At first he considered blaming the marks on one of Bonnie Kluger’s numerous outdoor cats—of actually scooping one of these noxious beasts off her lawn and knocking on the peculiar woman’s door to complain. Yet that required interacting with his wife’s former friend, an owl-like creature whose piercing gray eyes and lack of an appropriate filter always gave him the willies. Instead he attributed the scratches to a feral raccoon that had assaulted him as he carried trash bags to the curbside. When he picked up the girls that evening and his mother grilled him on his injury, he described in vivid detail how he’d surprised the animal during its midday meal and how it had escaped down a sewer grate. Later, in narrating the episode for Amanda, he added that he’d received a full round of prophylactic rabies shots in the Laurendale emergency room.

Nobody questioned his story. This confirmed what he’d already suspected: small lies usually unravel quickly, but big lies often survive without scrutiny. He repeated the tale of the rabies shots again at the hospital: Who could second-guess him? If anyone dared look in his medical chart, their snooping would trigger the instant investigation that occurred when an employee accessed the health records of a colleague.

The one person who raised any doubts was Delilah. He’d taken her out for dinner that Sunday night, foisting the girls on Amanda. Since his wife had been away all weekend at her tournament, she couldn’t reasonably object when he claimed that he needed to check up on a few patients at the hospital. But the closest he got to Laurendale-Methodist was a Turkish kabob house in Pontefract Beach.

“Did you really get scratched by a raccoon?” asked his mistress. “I’ll understand if it was something else . . .”

Balint wondered if his story truly seemed that transparent.

“Of course it was a raccoon. What else could it have been?”

Delilah reached her hand across the table and wrapped her fingers around his. “I thought you might have gotten into a fight with a person . . . maybe another woman . . .”

Balint wondered how much his mistress already knew—if she knew anything at all. He suspected that she was merely fishing. “What would I want with another woman when I’m in love with the most beautiful woman in the world?”

“Some men like variety.”

“You’re the only variety I need,” pledged Balint.

He paid the bill and they strolled along the moonlit avenue toward his car. The evening was warm for January, yet the air carried a hint of impending snow. He savored the feeling of Delilah’s hands in the pocket of his overcoat.

“Can we discuss something serious?” she asked.

Balint let his breath out slowly. “Sure.”

“I don’t mean to pressure you, but you haven’t said anything about my father in weeks. Is he going to get a heart? I want the truth.”

So that was all.

“Of course, he’s going to get a heart,” Balint reassured her. “There were a number of obstacles to overcome before we could list him—but now that he’s on the list, all we need is a heart . . . and a suitable organ could come along any day now.” He had just boxed himself in, time-wise, he realized—but he was glad that he had. “I promised you that I was going to get your father a heart and I am going to get your father a heart. It’s not a matter of if, only of when . . .”

“You sound so certain,” said Delilah.

“Because I am certain. As far as I’m concerned, your father might live another thirty years.”