"I've been looking him up on the Internet. He's a killer. His name is Lucas Davenport, he's been around a long time," Dannon said. "Works for the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. There's a ton of newspaper clips. He's killed a bunch of people in shoot-outs. He seems to be the guy they go to, when they need somebody really smart, or really mean."

"But what could he find out?"

"Worst case, he could find the thread that leads from Tubbs to Smalls," Dannon said. "Everybody's looking for Tubbs, but they don't know about the connection. We can't do anything about it. They'll probably come and talk to you, Taryn. If they think there's something fishy about the porn, this campaign is where they'll look. If they find out that Tubbs is connected, and Tubbs never shows up ... then they'll be asking about murder."

"But Tubbs will never show up," she said.

"No. No chance of that," Dannon said.

TARYN GRANT, DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE for the U.S. Senate, suffered from narcissistic personality disorder, or so she'd been told by a psychologist in her third year at the Wharton School. He'd added, "I wouldn't worry too much about it, as long as you don't go into a life of crime. Half the people here are narcissists. The other half are psychopaths. Well, except for Roland Shafer. He's normal enough."

Taryn didn't know Roland Shafer, but all these years later, she sometimes thought about him, and wondered what happened to him, being ... "normal."

The shrink had explained the disorder to her, in sketchy terms, perhaps trying to be kind. When she left his office, she'd gone straight to the library and looked it up, because she knew in her heart that she was far too perfect to have any kind of disorder.

NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITY DISORDER:

Has excessive feelings of self-importance.

Reacts to criticism with rage.

Takes advantage of other people.

Disregards the feelings of others.

Preoccupied with fantasies of success, power, beauty, and intelligence.

EXCESSIVE FEELINGS OF SELF-IMPORTANCE? Did that idiot shrink know she'd inherit the better part of a billion dollars, that she already had enough money to buy an entire industry? She was important.

Reacts to criticism with rage? Well, what do you do when you're mistreated? Shy away from conflict and go snuffle into a Kleenex? Hell no: you get up in their face, straighten them out.

Takes advantage of other people? You don't get anywhere in this world by being a cupcake, cupcake.

Disregards the feelings of others? Look: half the people in the world were below average, and "average" isn't anything to brag about. We should pay attention to the dumbasses in life?

How about, "Preoccupied with fantasies of success, power, beauty, and intelligence"? Hey, had he taken a good look at her and her CV? She was in the running for class valedictorian; she looked like Marilyn Monroe, without the black spot on her cheek; and she had, at age twenty-two, thirty million dollars of her own, with twenty or thirty times more than that, yet to come. What fantasies? Welcome to my world, bub.

THAT HAD BEEN more than a decade ago.

Taryn was now thirty-four. She still had those major assets-she was blond, good-looking, with interesting places in all the interesting places. She'd graduated from Wharton in Entrepreneurial Management, and then from the London School of Economics in finance. Until four years earlier, she'd worked in the finance department at Grant Mills, the family's much-diversified agricultural products business, the fifth largest closely held company in the U.S.

She'd spent six years with Grant Mills, six years of snarling combat with a list of parents, uncles, and cousins, about who was going to run what. She might have won that fight, eventually, but she'd opted out. There was a lot of money there, but she couldn't see spending her life with corn, wheat, beans, and rice.

She'd quit to start Digital Pen LLC, which wrote apps for smartphones and tablets. She employed two hundred people in Minneapolis, and another hundred out on the Coast, and had stacked up a few more tens of millions, on top of the three-quarters of a billion in the Grant Mills trust.

But even with Digital Pen, she'd grown bored. She'd turned the company over to a hired CEO, told him not to screw it up, and turned her eyes to politics.

Taryn had watched the incumbent U.S. senator, a Republican named Porter Smalls, stepping on his political dick for five consecutive years. She thought, Hmmm. She had an interest in the Senate, as a stepping-stone, and it was clear from early on that the main Democratic candidates would be the usual bunch of stooges, clowns, buffoons, apparatchiks, and small-town wannabees-and a witch-who couldn't have found Washington, D.C., with a Cadillac's navigation system and a Seeing Eye dog.

Taryn had everything she needed to buy a good, solid Senate seat, and start looking to move up. She'd pounded the field in the Democratic primary, taking fifty-one percent of the vote in a four-way race; the witch had finished third. She'd been a weekly visitor on both local and national talk shows, was good at it, and people started referring to her as a "rising star."

She liked that. A lot. As anyone with narcissistic personality disorder would.

There was one large, juicy fly in the ointment. Three weeks before the election, she was losing. The thing about Smalls was, he was likable. Okay, he'd screw anything that moved, and in one case, allegedly, a woman who said she'd been too drunk to move. But then, what did that mean, anymore?

SO TARYN, WORKING ANONYMOUSLY through the shadow campaign, had hired Bob Tubbs to do his thing, to win the election for her. Tubbs didn't know the man who passed him the 100K in twenties and fifties.

But Tubbs was a political, and had been around a long time, and knew how to follow a trail. It took a while, but he eventually followed it back to Dannon and thus to Taryn.

He showed up at her house at midnight.

He wanted more money.

Like this:

DOUG DANNON WAS A sandy-haired man of medium height with a trim, sandy mustache and a wedge-shaped body, marked with a few shrapnel scars from nearby explosions. On the particular night that Tubbs showed up at the door, he was sitting on a twenty-thousand-dollar German woven-leather couch that was soft as merino wool, his feet on a seventy-five-thousand-dollar Persian carpet as delicately brilliant as a French cathedral's stained-glass window. He looked out through the faintly green, curved-glass porch windows at the billion-dollar woman, who looked like a million bucks.

She was topless, and the bottom of her bathing suit was not larger than a child's hand. She'd just pulled herself out of the deep end of the heated pool, after forty laps, and stood shaking off the water. Tall and blond and tanned, she had muscular thighs and small breasts tipped with erect pinkish-brown nipples.

Hansel and Gretel sat on the pool's flagstone deck, watching everything. The dogs made people a little nervous. Agitated, they could tear a rhinoceros apart, and they loved Taryn more than life itself.

Taryn knew Dannon was there behind the glass, watching, and that Ron Carver was someplace in the house, but paid no attention to that set of facts. Carver, who worked security with Dannon, was also part of the shadow campaign. Carver had suggested to Dannon that she could do this-swim topless, and occasionally nude, while they were in the house-because she was an exhibitionist.

Dannon thought that was probably true.

He was wrong.

She did it because, in the larger scheme of things, Dannon and Carver were irrelevant. The fact that they'd seen her nude meant nothing, because they meant nothing. They were tools; it was like being seen by a hammer and chisel.

TARYN HAD BEGUN TOWELING off when Carver came into the living room carrying a glass of bourbon; in fact, a glass of A.H. Hirsch Reserve, Dannon knew, which Carver had been regularly pouring from Taryn Grant's liquor closet. Carver had a deal going with the housekeeper, who would order additional bottles as necessary. Taryn need not know.

Dannon disapproved: but Carver had told him that he needed a bit of booze on a daily basis to keep his head straight and the Reserve was what he'd chosen.