Gift of Gold

of absolute command. “I’ll get back to you soon, Mr. Kincaid.” He let himself out of the office with his usual sense of relief. So far Hatch had stayed afloat in the dangerous waters that surrounded the shark, but a man had to keep an eye on the beast at all times. It was too easy to start looking like shark food.
    Kincaid turned back to the window as the door closed behind his assistant.
    That damned ugly monstrosity of a house seemed fated to reappear time and again in his life. It was almost uncanny. Coincidences, he was forced to acknowledge, apparently did happen now and then but he instinctively found them disturbing.
    He let his mind drift back to the first time he had seen the place. That had been back when he was much younger and a little drunk with the power he was starting to accumulate. The house had belonged to Sandquist, who had been as close a friend as Kincaid had ever had. After Sandquist’s demise, Kincaid had been careful not to cultivate any more close friends. They were too dangerous.
    But in those days, Kincaid had been excited to learn that Sandquist shared a taste for the exotic when it came to sex. Neither man was cursed with any strong inhibitions or moral limits and the two of them had gone out of their way to construct a very interesting retreat at the house on the cliffs. It had proven easy enough to lure carefully chosen women to the house for the extravagant, thrilling orgies Sandquist had a talent for organizing. Drugs and money and the threat of violence had generally ensured silence from the victims, most of whom came from the streets.
    There had been only one exception, a woman who might have gone to the police if she had been allowed to do so. It had been a mistake to take Susan Connelly to the house. But Kincaid had been unable to resist. She had been perfect: beautiful, naïve, innocent, and wildly in love with him. Kincaid still got an erection whenever he thought about the methodical way in which he had stripped sweet Susan of her beauty, her naïve, her innocence, and her passion. It had been a glorious night but a potentially dangerous one.
    Kincaid had come to his senses later and realized he had to get rid of this particular victim. A car accident on a lonely stretch of coastal highway had taken care of the problem. The woman had died in the accident. Always a thorough man, Kincaid had checked the obituaries to be certain she had not survived.
    That experience had brought home to him that it was probably time to put a halt to the exotic weekends. He was moving up in the business world, busy with a balancing act that required creating a respectable facade while he cemented underground connections enabling him to operate in the shadows of legitimate business. Kincaid told Sandquist there could be no more weekends.
    Sandquist had accepted his friend’s decision, saying he understood. The two had gone their own ways until three years ago. Kincaid still remembered the gut-wrenching shock he had experienced when he received the blackmail message from Sandquist. Now, looking back on it, Kincaid could only pity the naïveté of his younger self. He had never guessed that Sandquist had filmed some of the violent orgies. There had been carefully hidden cameras in every bedroom.
    There had been only one solution, of course. Kincaid had once again entered the house on the cliffs. Sandquist had stupidly failed to install new security systems. The ones in place were the same ones that had protected the house earlier during the days of the weekend orgies. Kincaid remembered the systems well and bypassed them easily.
    He found Sandquist in the big corner room on the third floor. Sandquist, sunk in a foggy world induced by pills and booze, was so far lost in his dreamland that he didn’t even recognize his intended blackmail victim. Kincaid had simply led him downstairs and pushed him over the cliffs.
    The murder had been declared an accident brought on by an overdose of drugs. Very tragic. Who would have thought Sandquist had a drug problem? But then, drugs were so prevalent these days at every level of society.
    Kincaid had walked out of the cliff house that night certain that he had seen the last of the place.
    He hadn’t even been aware that the house had been sold until recently, when he heard the rumors in the art world that Caitlin Evanger was making plans to put her self-declared final painting up for sale.
    Kincaid already owned three Evanger pictures, although he