Prologue
He sat in his car and watched them.
Just as he had yesterday. And the day before that. And the day before that.
Watched them and memorized their movements.
He didn't want there to be any slipups.
That was what had gotten him in trouble before. Thinking he hadn't made a
mistake when he had. He'd been too confident, too sure that he was smarter than
the people around him.
This time he knew better. Knew that he couldn't allow the fact that he was
more intelligent than the people he was dealing with to blur his caution, his
inbred sense of survival.
That had gotten away from him before, caused his downfall.
Pride went before a fall.
He still had his pride. And it was that pride he meant to avenge.
His pride and his life.
Because the man who lived in the house he was watching, whose comings
and goings he had quickly committed to memory, had taken it all away from
him. Taken away his life, his pride.
His daughter.
Payback time was finally here.
Very carefully he turned the key in the ignition. The vehicle he was sitting
in purred to life, ready to do his bidding.
He smiled to himself as he moved the transmission shift lever into drive.
He was through waiting.
It was time to act.
Chapter 1
Brenton Montgomery didn't generally oversleep.
Quite the opposite, in fact. Former decorated Aurora police officer, former
respected A.D.A. and presently, highly regarded criminal court justice, he had
been blessed with an inner clock that went off anywhere from two to five
minutes before the alarm clock on his nightstand. It had been that way ever since
he'd had a need for an alarm clock.
But every once in a while, after he put in a particularly long night poring
over briefs and struggling with his conscience over which was the right path for
him to take for all parties who stood before his scarred judge's desk in criminal
court, Brent discovered that sleep wouldn't come.
And then, when it finally did arrive, it brought with it an asbestos blanket
that smothered him, effectively separating him from the rest of the world. From
the rest of his life.
This morning he'd rolled over in the four-poster bed that Jennifer had
selected—the bed that was the single inanimate holdover from his brief mistake
of a marriage—and had hardly been aware of opening his eyes. He didn't
remember focusing on the clock beside his telephone. But the instant he did,
