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Leonard turned when Ben and Sarah walked in. He was over six foot three, with a completely bald head. He wore jeans, sneakers, and a doctor’s green hospital shirt.

“Ben Harris,” he said. “Come for some photo tips?”

“Just to watch the master at work.”

Leonard turned to look at his models. He put his hand on his chin. “Don’t
think
they’re going to do anything newsworthy, but I’ll call if they do.”

“Got a minute for some questions?”

“I won’t tell you how much I’m making here.”

“Who’s the motorcycle client?”

Penn laughed. “You’re too literal for this side of the business. The image is
Performance.
Motorcycles represent performance, get it? Corporate account.”

“Goodhue?”

Penn shook his head. “Haven’t done anything for them for a few months. Fuckers pulled their ad campaign, want a different look. I’m out.”

“How about portrait work? Goodhue himself.”

Penn looked at him sharply. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Can we talk privately, Mr. Penn?” Sarah said.

“Who’re you?”

Leon’s back was to the models now. His body was still, and his eyes went quickly between Ben and Sarah.

“Leon,” Ben said. “Calm down. Can we talk in your office?”

Penn looked back at the shoot, and then said, irritably, “Two minutes.”

He led them back to a tiny glassed-in office area where he could see the studio. “All right, what’s this about?”

Ben looked around the office and out at the studio. At the ads up on the walls. Almost a whole wall devoted to the work Leon had done for Goodhue Corporation. The same stuff that had been up the last time Ben had visited Leon at his studio, more than a year back.

Ben looked back at the shoot. It was a good-sized effort by most standards. But Ben remembered when Leon would have had more than a half dozen assistants, plus agency types and a client or two eating and drinking on the sidelines while he held court.

“How’s business?” Ben said.

“Peachy,” Leon said. “Thanks for asking.”

Both Ben and Sarah were silent.

Leon picked at some invisible lint on his jeans, and then rolled his shoulders. “So what’s up?”

“We’re looking at Senator Cheever,” Ben said. “And possible links between him and Goodhue Corporation.”

“So, I’ve taken Goodhue’s picture. We talk about sailing when he poses, not politicians he’s bribed.”

“OK,” Ben said. He waited. Leon seemed like he wanted to say something. Sarah waited as well.

Leon looked up at the walls, at the ads, back through the glass at the shoot. “Look, if I tell you something, can you keep it to yourself? At least that it was me that told it to you?”

“Sure,” Ben said.

“Absolutely,” Sarah added.

Leon sighed. “My business took a major hit when I lost Goodhue. You know how it is. All this …” He made a vague gesture to the studio. “It’s like the entertainment business. Hell, it
is
the entertainment business. You’re hot, and then you’re not.”

Ben waited, and Sarah did the same.

Leon said, “The way I hear it was that Goodhue himself suddenly didn’t like my work. Told the agency the concepts, photography, everything, had to change. And suddenly Doug Stillwell has the great new look.”

Ben looked askance. “Doug Stillwell? Dougie Stillwell, your photo assistant?”

“You knew he had ambitions.”

“Who doesn’t? But I never saw the talent. Former model, right?”

Leon shrugged his shoulders. “Look, I’m not one to knock anyone’s lifestyle. I’m gay, everybody knows it. Who cares? Same with Doug. But Goodhue? Circles he moves in, that’s bad news.”

“You think Doug was involved with Goodhue?”

Leon nodded. “That was my impression. Nothing obvious, but at first Doug made a few jokes, that the guy was eyeing him. Then Doug suddenly stopped smirking and shut up about it. I got the impression there were dinners afterwards, some things going on. Hell, I didn’t care. It was very discreet, the guy’s a hawk, a captain of industry. But I think there was something there.”

“You think he just handed off the business because of that?”

Leon made a face. “No, actually I don’t. I’ve always had the impression Goodhue was a straight shooter business-wise. But I know Dougie can be a mean, manipulative piece of shit when he wants to be. And one day he’s living on what I pay him … and then he doesn’t show up to work. Next thing I hear, he’s invested almost twenty-five grand in Hasselblad equipment and he’s setting up his own studio. Took a while, after that, and I hear the work I’d been doing for the past three years isn’t ‘good enough for Goodhue’ anymore. And once one agency shut me down, the others fell off. I’m not making half of what I once was.”

“Let me ask you something,” Sarah said. “Do you know Teri Wheeler?”

Leon looked at her. “You know all this already?”

“No.”

“Because, yeah. I know Teri Wheeler. She was here during a couple of shoots we did for the Foundation. Including one with Goodhue himself. She was the one who introduced Doug to Goodhue.”

He gestured to the walls, the ads that were already beginning to yellow inside their frames. “Yeah, I know Teri Wheeler.”

CHAPTER 37

TERI FLIPPED THE CURTAINS BACK AND LOOKED OUT ONTO THE dock. She said, “I think this is a bad idea, Jimbo.”

They were in the cabin of his sportfisherman. He patted the cushion beside him. “Let’s stop thinking altogether.”

She gave him that look. Icy, impatient, but a touch of humor under it all. Made him want to slap her, made him want to screw her. So far he’d done the latter a half dozen times, but never the former, so he had to give her credit there. She knew a thing or two about controlling men.

“You could ruin everything I’ve set up,” Teri said. “He’s just one guy.”

“He’s
my
guy,” Jimbo snapped. “And it’s time he knows it.”

The fact was it pissed Jimbo off that Teri very likely saw Jimbo himself as
her
guy. She was discreet about it, but across the country she had other men like himself in place.

Teri had a couple years on him, maybe three or four. He liked that. Woman looking as good as she did, but just that bit of an age difference, that experience level. He figured in a few years he could move in the circles she did, work on a national level.

“Come on,” he said, smiling at her. “Let’s pass the time.” She was wearing the cutoffs and halter top that she left on the boat from last time. So different from her usual look, and he liked to think she was being herself when she was with him.

She walked over and put a knee onto the cushion beside him. Her voice softened. Trying to work him. “Listen, why don’t you just let me do this myself, all right? You stay up at the helm and be the hired captain. He’s the type to find religion. Better that I break down, tell him I’ve got a confession. That I took some liberties helping him out with the town-house deal, that there were more strings attached than I let on before. That he’s got to save me by playing ball. Stock- ard’ll get this last contract and you’ll stay hidden.”

“Hmmm,” he said, letting her think he was considering it. As if she called the shots in his town.

She straddled him. God, the
heat
that came off her for such a cool-looking piece. She whispered, “You’ll see, I know what I’m doing.”

She kept sliding back and forth on him, kissing him, making him lose himself in the scent of her hair. Then she pulled back like some sort of high school tease. “Hey, you take care of that photographer?”

This too pissed off Jimbo. She thought she was riding him so tight she could set the pace.

“Better than you,” he said, keeping the huskiness out of his voice. “Got the guys sweeping up and down in front of the club, looking for that scabby old van. Besides, the guy doesn’t know shit.”

“I guess.” She shrugged. “Sounds like we overreacted before.”

He caressed her hair, and then took a handful of it and twisted. That had to hurt some, but he saw no fear in her eyes. Just impatience. He said, “What do you mean,
we?”

“Tough guy,” she said. “A gentleman would let me forget.”

“Who said I’m a gentleman?”

“Not me. Never.” She smiled a little now as he released her hair and smoothed it along her shoulders. He unfastened her halter top.

“I don’t care if he walks in on us,” McGuire said, hoarsely. “Hell, it might even be a real good way of letting him know.”

She leaned forward to give him a taste, and for a time, McGuire was truly lost. Recalcitrant senators, stalled construction contracts, and even the question of who was running who slipped out of his mind with the hardening of her small pink nipples.

But then she pulled away. A sound on the dock, footsteps. When Jimbo looked past her, through the slit in the curtains, he saw the guy walking down the ramp from the pier to the dock, wearing dark glasses and a baseball cap down low over his eyes. Windbreaker with the collar turned up even though it was almost eighty goddamn degrees out there. Should’ve been wearing a sign that said, “I’m wearing a disguise.”

Jimbo sighed. “He’s here.” He reached down and handed Teri her halter top.

She stood, looking down at him. “You’re sure you want to play it this way?”

“Positive,” lie said.

She straightened herself out, and tossed her hair back. “All right. It might be for the best. Not having to dance around him so much.” She lifted her eyebrows. “Been a while since I just cut the bullshit and snapped on the leash. Used to be fun.”

Jimbo grinned. He remembered the first time she dropped her mask on him. This cool little number who had come to Stanford to teach a graduate-level workshop on the use of foundations as marketing tools. He thought he’d been seducing the teacher only to find she’d been setting up the student. She had hinted about it then, but it wasn’t until months later that he worked the entire truth out of her—that for all her Nordic good looks and sophistication, her roots were as twisted and vulgar as his own.

That first time together with Jimbo, she had simply suggested there was a story to be told. “I think we’re in a unique position to help each other,” she said, lying beside him in bed. “Between your contacts and mine, we can make a fortune.” She smiled that quirky little smile she kept for only her closest friends.

She gave him that smile now, and bent swiftly to give him a kiss, before turning for the door, ready to let the fool in.

“OK, Ms. Wheeler,” Jimbo drawled. “Go out there and get Cheever on the boat before he trips over his dick. I’ll be listening up on the flybridge while you open him up for me. You know how.”

“Yes, I do.” She smiled, wryly. “Don’t get jealous on me now. I’ll be thinking about you the whole time.”

Jimbo laughed. “Sure, I believe that.”

Piss him off, she did. But he couldn’t help but like her. He said, “Listen, figure about a half hour, forty minutes. I’ll be down to tell him the facts of life.”

CHAPTER 38

“YOU’RE GOOD AT THIS,” BEN SAID.

“I’m good at a lot of things,” Sarah said, pushing the throttles forward. The bow lifted on the little cruiser. The two of them had already charted the simple course to Nahant.

He brushed her hair back from her face and she smiled up at him. They had stopped off at an Army/Navy store before picking up the boat and she was wearing a pair of faded jeans, a pink tank top, and sneakers.

He said, “So it was true what you told him? About your dad?”

“Sure. He had a boat not too different from this on Lake Michigan. Wooden though, and slower. My dad would’ve loved this.”

They were in a twenty-six-foot twin-engine cabin cruiser. It was far from new, but well maintained. The owner, a hard-eyed man named Palmer, had taken them out on a brief checkout run and luckily had also been impressed with Sarah’s skill. The boat was perfect from Ben’s standpoint: it was reasonably fast, nondescript, and had large portholes that were shaded by an inflatable dinghy lashed down to the deck.

They reached Nahant in about forty-five minutes. Ben went below as they entered the yacht club harbor. It was a small, laid-back-looking club with a long single pier with just a few floating docks off that. Ben looked at the docked boats through his binoculars. “There it is,” he said, quietly.
“Speed Dreams.’’

Sarah deftly spun the boat around, went up on deck, and dropped anchor. She came back and went into the routine they had planned before, where she stayed out in the open, wearing a straw hat and sunglasses. She read from a paperback she found in the cabin.

Ben peered out at McGuire’s boat through his binoculars. It was a powerful-looking sportfisherman, not as flashy as he would have expected. The curtains were drawn so that he couldn’t see inside. Occasionally the curtains moved, he believed by a woman’s hand. But he couldn’t see much more than that.