My investigator was watching Odette’s building the afternoon it all came apart, and so I know how it went, in more detail than I ever wanted.

Roderick let himself into her apartment unannounced and found her throwing designer clothes into open suitcases.

She had not heard him come in.

She was on speakerphone, and the voice on the other end belonged to Weston Kingsley — Roderick’s fiercest rival in the commercial real-estate market, a man he had spent a decade trying to beat.

“Weston, he knows everything now!” Odette was crying into the phone.

“You promised me — once he was ruined, you’d move me and Nash out to the West Coast!