“Thanks, pal, I appreciate it.” Dino nodded toward the door. “Look who’s coming.”

Stone looked toward the door to find Lance Cabot and Holly Barker approaching.

“May we join you?” Lance asked.

“Sure.” Stone waved them to chairs. Lance was in charge of some sort of New York CIA unit that Stone didn’t really understand, and Holly had left her job as a chief of police in a small Florida town to work for him. Both Stone and Dino were contract “consultants,” and Stone didn’t really understand that, either, except that Lance sometimes asked him to do legal stuff. Stone and Holly were, occasionally an item.

Lance ordered drinks.

“Why do I perceive that this isn’t a social visit?” Stone asked.

“Because your perceptions are very keen,” Lance replied.

“What’s up?”

“Tell me everything you know about Richard Stone.”

Stone blinked. It was the second time that day that Dick Stone’s name had come up. “He’s my first cousin,” Stone replied.

“I said everything you know,” Lance pointed out.

“Okay, he’s the son of my mother’s older brother, now deceased; he grew up in Boston, went to Harvard and Harvard Law. I think he’s something at the State Department.”

“How long since you’ve seen him?”

Stone thought about it. “We had dinner eight, nine years ago, when I was still a cop. Last time before that was a little more than twenty years ago.”

“Did you know him as a boy?”

“Okay, let me tell you about it. The summer after I graduated from high school my parents sat me down and told me I was going to spend the summer in Maine with some relatives of hers. This came as a surprise, because my mother’s relatives had stopped speaking to her years before I was born, because she had married my father, who had been disowned by his family, because he was a Communist. He didn’t seem too happy about my spending the summer with a bunch of Stones.”

MALON BARRINGTON WAS, indeed, unhappy. “Why would you want your son to spend ten minutes with those plutocratic sons of bitches, let alone a whole summer?” he asked his wife.