Mistress of the Game

A flashing light on her PC screen in the living room caught her attention.

New message.

Grabbing a towel, Lexi leaped out of the bath and ran, dripping, across the polished walnut floor of her apartment. Unlike mommie's-boy Max, who still lived at home with Eve, Lexi had her own place on the Upper East Side and reveled in her independence. A sleek, modern two-bedroom in a classy building on Seventy-seventh Street, between Park and Madison, it was decorated in neutrals and whites with huge floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city. A delicate Christopher Wray chandelier in glass and stainless steel hung from the living-room ceiling above a cream pony-skin rug. In the far corner, perched on a Danish Modern desk was Lexi's white Mac - her portal to the hearing world. She'd often wondered how on earth the deaf had managed before the advent of the Internet and thanked God she'd been born in the age of the text.

Scrolling past e-mails from Robbie and her father, her Harvard professor Dr. Fairford, and countless lovers, Lexi said a silent prayer.

Please be from him.

Finally, she reached the new message. Clicking it open, her heart gave a little leap of excitement. The subject heading read:

I've found him.

Tommy King did not like Thailand.

There was only so much Asian pussy that one man could enjoy. Once you'd seen the first hundred girls fire Ping-Pong balls out of their assholes, smoke cigars with their pussies, and exhaust the rest of their repertoire of bizarre sexual party tricks, it actually got kinda tame. And then what were you left with? Fried bugs, stinking hot weather and friggin' dysentery, that's what.

Tommy King wanted a Big Mac, Monday Night Football, Fox News and sex with a white woman over thirty who considered her asshole to be an exit not an entrance. After five long years, he wanted this godforsaken assignment to be over. The guy was obviously dead, like his two buddies. Why couldn't the Templeton girl just accept that?

When Tommy King first met Lexi Templeton at her sixteenth birthday party, he thought he was onto a cash cow. Little had he known that the search for the girl's kidnappers would take five long, fruitless years. Years that had seen the sallow-skinned PI clock up more air miles than Henry Kissinger, and for what? Sure, the job had netted him a tidy little nest egg. But he was sixty-two already and tired as all hell. Besides, what use was money in a dump like Phuket?

Agent Edwards, the FBI hero (schmuck) who pulled Lexi out of the burning mill all those years ago had tried to warn him. Tommy King went to visit Agent Edwards at his place on Long Island, a huge French Country pile paid for by the girl's grateful father. Crunching his way up the graveled drive, Tommy King thought: Jeez, Blackwell money goes a long way. Then he saw Agent Edwards's barbecued face and thought: But not far enough.

"You'll never find them. Believe me, we've tried."

They'd sat outside in the garden on a joyously warm spring day. A maid brought them fresh lemonade. Tommy King watched Agent Edwards sip it with what used to be his mouth and tried not to wince.

"What makes you so sure?"

"The fire destroyed everything, all the physical evidence. All we had to go on were Lexi's own descriptions. They were fairly detailed in some respects, but it wasn't enough." Agent Edwards shook his head sadly. "We're as sure as we can be that none of the major crime syndicates were involved."

"No Mob?"

"Definitely not. We looked into everyone close to the Blackwell family who had a grievance. Real or imagined. It's a long list."

"I'll bet." Tommy King took a sip of his own lemonade. It was ambrosial.

"Kruger-Brent employees, household staff. We even looked at Dr. Templeton's old patients. He was a psychiatrist, you know, before his marriage. We figured maybe some whack job with a thing for little kids?"

Tommy King shivered.

"Anyway, after two years and a pretty much unlimited budget, we dropped the case. I wish you luck. But you're looking for three needles in a haystack the size of Canada."

Two years later, Tommy King found the first two needles: William Mensch and Federico Borromeo. Billy Mensch was a small-time drug dealer turned contract killer from Philadelphia. Borromeo was a friend Billy had made in juvenile detention in 1970, a con artist and compulsive gambler with no known history of violence.

Both had died in a car crash in Monaco in 1993, the year after Lexi's rescue.

When Tommy King first told her, Lexi, then aged eighteen, refused to believe it. She wrote to Tommy, demanding to see pictures of the bodies. After four months spent painstakingly grooming the lonely, overweight receptionist at the Monaco Medical Examiner's Office, Tommy obliged. Along with the pictures he sent a bill, and a note of his own, asking if Lexi wanted to continue to search for the third man.

In two years, I've discovered no trace of him. As you know, the FBI also drew a total blank. I feel it only right to advise you that, in my opinion, we will not be able to track down this individual and that continuing the case would be a waste of both my time and your money.

One week later, Tommy King received a check for $20,000 from Lexi Templeton, along with a one-word note.

Continue.

Two years later, he got a lead on a man calling himself Dexter Berkeley, a known rapist and petty thief from the San Francisco area. Berkeley regularly visited the Far East as a sex tourist.

Tommy King booked a flight to Bangkok.

In Thailand, Dexter Berkeley had disappeared again like a fish swimming into a sewer. Every few months, Tommy King saw him leap like a salmon out of the river of filth. In Bangkok, he surfaced as Mick Jenner, insurance salesman; in Pattaya, he was Fred Greaves, toy manufacturer; in Phuket, he was Travis Kemp, taxi driver. Only in his latest incarnation had Tommy King been able to get any sort of grip on his slimy, sewage-slick form:

John Barclay, aka prisoner 7843A.

John Barclay had taken a ten-year-old hooker back to his five-star hotel room and been arrested at gunpoint by a Thai vice squad fifteen minutes later with his pants around his ankles.

Ten years. No parole. No prepubescent pussy.

Too bad, Dex. Or whoever the hell you are.

Tommy King sat at the bar, waiting for his BlackBerry to buzz.

One thing you could say for Lexi Templeton. She wasn't one to let the grass grow under her feet. Not with news like this.

Sure enough, within sixty seconds, Tommy's phone jumped to life. He allowed himself a single, gold-toothed smile.

Thank you. Your employment is now terminated. I will wire the rest of the money to your Bahamanian account first thing Monday morning. Good-bye, Mr. King.

Tommy wondered briefly what would happen now. Would Lexi wait ten years for the guy to get out - assuming he lived that long - before taking her revenge? Or would she consider a decade taking it up the ass in a Thai jail punishment enough?

Whatever. It wasn't his problem anymore.

Good-bye, Ms. Templeton.

Good riddance.

Six blocks from Lexi's apartment, Max was having dinner at home with his mother.

"What's the matter, darling? You look tense."

Six feet of gleaming mahogany separated Eve from her son. The table was laid formally, as usual, with full silver service. A Cordon Bleu cook prepared all Eve's meals, taking care to keep her daily calorie intake below eighteen hundred. Keith may have stolen her face decades ago, but even now, at fifty-five, Eve was vain enough to obsessively maintain her trim figure. Unable to go to restaurants for fear of being photographed, she tried to make meals at home as luxurious and pleasurable as possible. She dressed for dinner, and expected Max to do the same. Tonight she was wearing a full-length jade-green evening dress with a high neck and deep V that plunged down her back, almost to the start of her buttocks. It was a young woman's dress, but Eve could carry it off.

"It's nothing." Max forced a smile.

Eve examined her son's handsome face, its predatory, sensual features accentuated by the stark black of his tuxedo.

He's breathtaking. Not an ounce of his father in him. But how could a son of mine be such a terrible liar?

"I don't think it's nothing, Max. Tell me what's wrong."

Max hesitated. "It's Lexi. We had a team meeting today. She kept trying to shoot me down."

Eve's scarred, stretched eyelids narrowed. "Go on."

"She's got August Sandford eating out of her palm. I'm sure Jim Bruton wants to screw her, too." Max shook his head. "At first I thought the board was just humoring her with this internship. But now I'm not so sure. She wants the chairmanship as much as I do. She's smart."

"She's deaf, Max." Eve's voice dripped with disdain. "Are you telling me you can't outwit a girl who slurs her words like a drunk? Like a retard?"

"Of course not, Mother. I - "

"She's a slut! She's a joke!" Rancor poured out of Eve like pus from a boil. "Falling out of nightclubs at five every morning with her skirt pulled up around her hips."

This wasn't exactly true. Lexi might be promiscuous, and she might enjoy a party or twenty, but she was very conscious of her public image. Not that Max was about to argue. He loathed his cousin every bit as much as Eve did. The fact that he wanted her sexually only made his loathing stronger. Lexi was all that stood between him and Kruger-Brent. Between him and his mother's love. Lexi was trying to take Eve away from him. She was ruining everything.

Eve raged on. "You're not a man. You're a queer like your cousin Robbie. Like your father."

"No! I'm nothing like Keith."

"You don't have the balls to run that company."