She stared at the phone, checked the caller ID. It said "private." That told her nothing. But to a.s.sume it was Gordon? Even if he could break away from his party long enough to make a personal call, why would he call her?

Her hand trembled as she reached for the receiver. "h.e.l.lo?"

"Ms. Halstead?" an official voice asked.

"Yes?"

"This is Detective Hadman of the Nineteenth Precinct. I'm sorry to call you at this hour. But there's been an accident."

"An accident?" It was the last thing Taylor had expected. Still, her insides went cold, and she gripped the phone more tightly. "What kind of accident?"

"A boat explosion. It took place off Long Island, on a yacht belonging to a Gordon Mallory. The boat was anch.o.r.ed about twenty miles south of Montauk. The Suffolk County Police Department notified the Nineteenth and Twentieth Precincts because most of the pa.s.sengers were residents of the Upper East or West Side." A weighted pause. "One of those pa.s.sengers was your cousin Stephanie Halstead."

"Yes. . . that's right." Taylor sank down to the floor, her knees up, her back propped against the wall. "Was Steph . . . was anyone . .. hurt?"

"I'm very sorry. Everyone on board was killed."

G.o.d, no. This couldn't be happening. Not to Steph.

"Are you sure?" Taylor managed. "Isn't it possible that some of the pa.s.sengers were thrown clear of the explosion and--"

"I'm very sure. The accident happened around dusk. The coast guard's been combing the waters since then. They've recovered .. . partial remains and personal property. Trust me, there were no survivors."

Taylor gagged as the image of floating body parts flashed through her mind. No. Not her beautiful, vibrant cousin. So full of life--working her way up to become the Broadway star she'd always dreamed of being. Filled with hopes and dreams. With so much to live for. She couldn't be dead.

"Ms. Halstead?" the detective prompted. "Are you all right?"

"Did the coast guard recover anything that belonged to Steph?" Taylor demanded. She was grasping at straws and she knew it. "Maybe she wasn't on board. Maybe she decided at the last minute not to go. Maybe--"

"She was on board," Detective Hadman confirmed. "Witnesses saw her on deck when the yacht left the dock. They described her--tall, slender, with bright red, shoulder-length hair. Wearing a turquoise silk c.o.c.ktail dress."

Taylor squeezed her eyes shut. She'd bought Steph that dress for her birthday. Steph had been saving it for a special occasion.

"Your aunt and uncle have been notified. They're out at the scene now. I agreed to call you, since they're not up for conversation. I'm terribly sorry," he added.

"Thank you," Taylor replied tonelessly. She was beyond hearing. Beyond comprehension. Beyond feeling. She was numb.

"If you're up to it, I'd like to come by and speak with you later this morning."

"What?" Taylor couldn't process Detective Hadman's words. She was struggling for rational thought.

She had to call her parents, to reach her aunt and uncle, to make arrangements. No one was as close to Steph as she was. It was up to her.

"I have a few questions for you."

"Questions?" Taylor forced her dazed mind to focus. "About what?"

"Not what, who," the detective corrected. "The owner of the yacht. Gordon Mallory. He's among the deceased. I ran a victomology on him. I understand you filed a complaint against him earlier this evening."

"What difference does that make now? He's dead."

"I'm just doing my job, Ms. Halstead. You called in an a.s.sault. Officers Hillman and Slatter of the Twentieth filed a report. I'm helping them out, following up on this so the case can be closed. I'll only take a few minutes of your time."

"Fine." Taylor's control was crumbling. She had to crawl off to her bed, to be atone. "Come by early, by eight a.m. After that, I have to take care of things. For Steph. She's counting on me."

It was true. Steph always counted on her.

Only this time she'd let her down.

CHAPTER 3.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 19.

4:55 P.M.

746 PARK AVENUE, NEW YORK CITY.

Taylor Halstead. In counseling.

The whole idea still seemed so ironic to her, even after two months of weekly sessions with Dr. Phillips. As a therapist herself, she knew better than anyone just how essential these visits were, and how very much she needed them.

The holidays were approaching. It had been three months since Steph's death. And still she couldn't shake the nightmares or the feelings of guilt. If anything, both were getting worse, in frequency and intensity. As a professional, she knew the signs. She needed help.

But the truly ironic part of all this was that it was the first time in her life that she was in the position of being the dependent one, rather than the one who was depended upon. She was always the strong one, the together one, the leader. The one who dealt with her own problems--and everyone else's--without missing a beat. The one who learned since childhood to keep her vulnerabilities under wraps.

With good reason. In all ways that mattered, she'd been on her own all her life.

Financially, she'd lived like a princess. Raised in a penthouse on Central Park West, fussed over by a string of nannies. She was an only child, and while money was present in abundant supply, her parents were not. Her mother traveled madly; her father worked obsessively-- which suited both of them just fine. They divorced when Taylor was eleven, after which she was shipped off to boarding school and summer camp.

End of childhood. On to adolescence--and to her tight friendship with Steph.

Her cousin's life was pretty much a carbon copy of hers. Not a surprise, since Anderson and Frederick Halstead were more like clones than brothers. Ambitious, self-absorbed clones. Steph had grown up in a palatial manor in Bronxville, New York, where her parents still lived, when they weren't abroad. They'd stayed married--probably because neither one wanted the monetary ha.s.sles of dividing up their a.s.sets.

The two families hadn't gotten together much when Taylor and Steph were kids, even though the girls were both only children and the same age, and the drive from Bronxville to Manhattan was less than an hour. Even so, they'd bonded during those sporadic get-togethers. They used to tease each other about being City Mouse and Country Mouse, except that neither of them really wanted to go home.

Their relationship was, hands down, the best thing to come out of both their childhoods. So when their parents decided to send them off to the same boarding school, they viewed it as a chance to solidify their friendship, maybe even to become surrogate sisters. Heaven knew, they both needed some constancy in their lives.

And, in Steph's case, some stability.

Emotionally fragile, Steph was starved for attention. Always looking for something to fill the void, she was impetuous, wild, besieged by more highs and lows than Taylor could keep up with--traits that seemed to intensify as the years went by. Her drop-dead beauty didn't help--it just ensured that she was continuously hooking up with the wrong crowd, getting herself into trouble. And Taylor was always there to get her out. Funny, sometimes she felt as if Steph were a kite and she the one at its strings, constantly yanking her cousin back to safety.

Steph's one healthy outlet was her acting.

She'd wanted to be an actress since playing Pippi Longstocking in her fourth-grade play. "It's not just because I'm a redhead," she'd confided to Taylor back then. "It's because I'm good. Honest, Taylor, it's like I become Pippi. It's kinda hard to explain. But when I'm up there, everything else goes away."

Taylor understood, better than Steph realized. The need to escape was as real as her hair color.

Motivation aside, the truth was, Steph was talented. Taylor saw that firsthand in boarding school, where her cousin snagged the lead in every play--and became every character she portrayed. When they graduated, she'd gone on to study at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. She was dead set on becoming a Broadway star. She probably would have succeeded, too, if her life hadn't been s.n.a.t.c.hed away.

Taylor sighed, sinking back in the armchair as she waited for Dr. Phillips. She gazed out the window of the expensively appointed office, watching the snow flurries blow by--tiny white flecks in the darkening sky--and the commuters hurrying toward Grand Central as rush hour hit its peak. She felt wistful. In the past she used to be full of that kind of energy. These days, the only energy she could muster was for her students and her radio audience. When it came to her own life, she was treading water.

"h.e.l.lo, Taylor. I'm sorry to have kept you waiting." Dr. Eve Phillips strolled in, wearing a tasteful camel suit. She gave Taylor a friendly smile as she went over to her desk and flipped open Taylor's file. She was a top-notch psychiatrist with an extensive and impressive client list. No shock there. Taylor's father had selected her. And Anderson Halstead always chose the best.

Taylor hadn't planned on involving her father in the process of finding a therapist, or even telling him she intended to see one. But, as luck would have it, he'd called to discuss some aspect of Steph's estate and caught Taylor at a weak moment. Her voice had been quavery, her mind unfocused and far away. Oh, she'd held it together; breaking down to her father was unthinkable. But he was acute. He'd pressed her until she admitted that she still wasn't herself.

Her father had been all over that like tar. He'd insisted on finding Taylor the best psychiatrist in New York and paying for her sessions. Taylor hadn't had the strength to put up a fight.

So here she was.

"No apology's necessary," she a.s.sured Dr. Phillips. "I arrived early. I enjoyed the five minutes of downtime."

Dr. Phillips nodded, perching at the edge of her desk. "You look tired. Rough night?"

"That's an understatement." Taylor rose, ma.s.saging the back of her neck and walking over to the cream-and-taupe love seat, where she enjoyed sitting during these sessions. "I feel like I survived a train wreck."

"More nightmares?"

Taylor nodded.

"Anything different?" Dr. Phillips didn't mince words. She knew Taylor had a master's degree in family counseling. There was no point in implementing standard techniques that her patient would see right through.

"Not different. More intense." Taylor sighed, crossing one leg over the other. "I kept hearing Steph scream. I tried to get to her, but something was weighing me down, stopping me from going."

"Something or someone?"

"Either way, it was Gordon, whether symbolically or actually. He's the reason I couldn't reach Steph in time." Taylor inclined her head in the doctor's direction. "The reason it was so bad last night is that I got a copy of the final accident report. Detective Hadman faxed it to me."

"Really." Eve Phillips propped her chin on her hand. "And what did it say?"

"Just what the coast guard suspected. Their investigation suggests there was no terrorism--just a malfunction of the bilge fans. Gordon's new yacht was as flashy and live-on-the-edge as he was--a seventy-foot Hatteras, gasoline-powered for speed. Gasoline is highly combustible, much more so than diesel. The malfunction let gasoline vapors acc.u.mulate, and when they started the engine, the yacht blew to bits." Taylor's voice trembled as she spoke, but she didn't avert her gaze from the doctor's.

"Now you're going to ask if seeing that report brought me some measure of closure. The answer is, not really. The 'how' was never my thing. My thing is the 'why.'"

One of Dr. Phillips's brows arched. "Actually, it never occurred to me that a piece of paper filled with engineering details would bring you closure. Your cousin's dead. You feel responsible. You also feel afraid, impotent, and angry. All those emotions tie in to one person--Gordon Mallory. Unfortunately, he's not around to vent your anger at."

"Then why do I feel like he is?" Taylor asked helplessly.

"For the same reason you feel no closure about Stephanie. Because there are no bodies. If there were, you'd be forced past denial and shock and into acceptance. And, in Gordon's case, into relief. He a.s.saulted you, Taylor. Even without rape, he violated you. Yes, he was indirectly responsible for your cousin's death. But this isn't only about Stephanie. It's about you. Gordon Mallory attacked you. You're allowed to feel angry for yourself, not just for Stephanie."

"I know," Taylor said quietly. "And I do. I can't stop reliving what went on in my bedroom that day.

He was only there for a little while, but it felt like an eternity. I hated that I had no control. I couldn't do a d.a.m.ned thing to stop him. He would have raped me if Steph hadn't shown up." A painful pause. "On the other hand, maybe if he'd stayed and finished, he'd have missed the boat trip and Steph would still be alive." Taylor broke off.

"More likely, he'd have left you a physical and emotional wreck, then taken the boat trip an hour later," Dr. Phillips replied calmly. "Then you'd be in worse shape than you are now and Steph would still have been killed."

Taylor squeezed her eyes shut. She knew what Dr. Phillips was saying was true. "I feel like he's a ghost that won't stop haunting me," she whispered. "That's why I did that background check. I felt like I needed something tangible. And I got nothing."

Nothing but a bio fit for the National Enquirer.

Gordon Mallory had grown up on a palatial estate in East Hampton, Long Island--an estate owned by millionaire investment banker Douglas Berkley. His mother, Belinda Mallory, now deceased, had been a maid at the Berkley estate, and his twin brother, Jonathan, was some hotshot international trade consultant--no surprise, given that Douglas Berkley, though not their father, had bankrolled both guys through school. An M.B.A. from Harvard for Gordon, and a B.S. from Princeton and a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics for Jonathan. The end result was that Gordon became an investment adviser and Jonathan became a specialist in international trade.

The bio made for great gossip. But Taylor wasn't looking for gossip. She was looking for ... she didn't know what. Prior complaints filed. A history of violence. Incidents involving other women. Anything.

None of those things was there.

That should have brought her comfort. It didn't.

Background checks only revealed facts. They didn't delve into a person's psyche, or explore the impact of childhood events. No one understood that better than Taylor. The kids she saw in her office each day were living proof. Background checks didn't touch on emotion. They didn't describe a person's mental profile. Not unless that state of mind propelled him to act in a criminal manner. Criminal and doc.u.mented.

She wanted to a.s.semble a full and objective picture of Gordon Mallory. Maybe then she could move on.

Speaking with Gordon's colleagues revealed nothing. He was ambitious, fast-track, launching his way to the top at supersonic speed. He loved great-looking women, fast vehicles, and taking risks. Close friends? Nope. Trusted business a.s.sociates? It appeared not. Just a fast crowd--one that changed from month to month.

At her wit's end, Taylor had driven out to East Hampton and tried to speak with Douglas Berkley or his wife, Adrienne, after reading about the private service they'd held for Gordon. She'd given her name to the butler, explaining that her cousin Stephanie had been one of the pa.s.sengers who died in the boat explosion and that she just wanted a few minutes of the Berkleys' time. But the servant had shaken his head, saying that the Berkleys weren't seeing anyone regarding this matter. He then offered her his condolences and bid her good day.

Another dead end.

She was on the verge of going online and looking up Jonathan Mallory through his Manhattan-based consulting firm when she found an archived newspaper clipping that mentioned that he and Gordon were identical twins. The very thought of facing a mirror image of Gordon was more than she could bear. Besides, from all accounts the brothers traveled in completely different circles, so she wasn't even sure they stayed in touch. And, even if they did, even if she mustered up the nerve to meet Jonathan Mallory, what would she ask him: Forgive me, but did your brother ever display any aggressive or unbalanced behavior? That would certainly go over well. Jonathan would have her tossed out of his posh Chrysler Building offices in record time.

So where did she go from here?

She was beginning to obsess. It was unhealthy, and she knew it. She had seen it in others.

But how could she explain to Dr. Phillips--or anyone--the impact Gordon's final words had had on her? It was bad enough she could still see him, still smell the Scotch on his breath, still feel his hands on her body. But those words, the way he'd said them, the look in his menacing dark eyes when he told her he'd be watching her--they haunted her, awake and asleep. Sometimes she even found herself peering over her shoulder, as if he could still be out there--somewhere--somehow--watching her as he'd promised.

Of course that was impossible.

"Taylor." Dr. Phillips's voice cut into her thoughts. She was studying Taylor, searching her face with a knowing look. "Christmas is next week. What are your plans?"

Christmas? That seemed like an alien concept. "None in particular."

The doctor sighed. "Look, I know how committed you are to your jobs--both of them. But like all schools, yours will be closed until mid-January. So there'll be no kids to counsel. As for your radio talk show, I'm sure the station can do without you for a few days. Why don't you spend some time with your family?"

Her family. Taylor felt the usual bittersweet twinge at that word. Her mother didn't "do" Christmas; she spent the holiday season at the Canyon Ranch in Ma.s.sachusetts, renewing herself. Her father, as per usual, was on a business trip, this time in London. Her uncle was somewhere in j.a.pan, solidifying some big corporate merger. And her aunt, who owned an elite travel agency that catered to the Park Avenue crowd, was in Acapulco, checking out a new resort--for her clients, of course.

Nope. A family Christmas was out, even under the best of circ.u.mstances. And this year, it was the last thing she wanted.

"I appreciate the thought, Dr. Phillips," she said. "But I really need some time alone. And not just to think. To unwind. Racing from one job to another is exhausting. I'm looking forward to sleeping late, catching up on some reading, and then hanging out with the gang at the radio station before and after my show. Besides, there'll be tons of call-ins that week. You, better than anyone, know that the holidays are a source of major depression for lots of people."

"I do indeed." Dr. Phillips nodded ruefully. "I'll be seeing patients most of the week as well. I'm just taking off the twenty-fourth and the twenty-fifth." A quizzical look. "So we can have our regular Thursday-evening session if you'd like." Seeing Taylor's confirming nod, she added, "I'll bring you a piece of my famous banana-walnut loaf. In fact, I'll bring you a whole loaf--you can take it with you to the station. I'm a once-a-year baker. And that once-a-year is Christmastime. The problem is, I tend to get overly enthusiastic. My family complains that they can't move until mid-January. So you'd be doing them a favor if you'd take the bread."

A slight smile touched Taylor's lips. "You don't have to twist my arm. I accept, with thanks. My WVNY coworkers are eating machines. They scarf down everything that isn't moving. They'll be thrilled."

"You're a pretty close-knit group, aren't you--friends as well as colleagues?"