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So how are you going to do it?" the guy asked me.

"'Do it'?"

He paused, glanced around-there was no one else in my office-and muttered, barely audible, the words he didn't want to say aloud. "Kill him. How are you going to kill him?"

"The less you know," I said, "the better. For both of us. You don't have a problem with that, do you?"

He didn't answer me. "It has to look like an accident," he said. "Or a random . . . whatever."

I gave him a long, direct look, blinked once. He'd told me that three times already.

Mort Vallison was sixty, but he looked ten years older. He was a once-handsome man under a lifetime of stress. He had short gray hair, neatly parted, and sincere brown eyes, but they were haunted. Hollow. He wore an expensive-looking navy-blue blazer and pricy shoes. He was not born to wealth, which was probably why he always dressed expensively.

He looked away. Vallison had insisted on coming to my office rather than have me come to his company headquarters. My firm, Heller Associates, is located in an old brick building in Boston's financial district, a renovated nineteenth-century lead-pipe factory with a steampunk look to it: the bare brick walls, the exposed ductwork, the big factory windows. The office used to belong to a dot-com that sailed high and crashed and left behind their Humanscale chairs.

"He's embezzling," he said. "But we haven't been able to catch him at it."

Vallison was the co-owner of a chain of excellent restaurants in Boston and down the East Coast, Neptune Seafood, a Boston institution. He was a wealthy man, with an impressive home in Chestnut Hill. He was convinced that his partner, Herb Martz, was cheating him out of millions of dollars. But he wasn't able to prove it. This on top of animosity that had accrued over the years had driven him to extreme measures. He wanted me to arrange Martz's death, and do it undetectably. He was offering a lot of money for the job.

"I don't need to know," I said. "The less contact we have, the better. And I'm going to need you to pay me in cryptocurrency-bitcoin, Ethereum, or whatever. The last thing we need is a money trail." He didn't seem to understand, so I explained it to him. He was a restaurateur, not a tech guy.

Herb Martz, his partner, kept to a routine. He lived with his wife in a condo in the Four Seasons. He saw a personal trainer three times a week, early in the morning. He went into work at ten, to their offices on the waterfront. He usually had lunch at one of the Neptunes around the city: a hamburger, most of the time. I guess he was tired of seafood.

The next day, late morning, I followed him from the Neptune Seafood at the Prudential Center to a sketchy hotel in Kenmore Square not too far from Fenway Park. I took my gray Toyota Camry. I have two cars; the other one is a truck, a Land Rover Defender in Coniston green. But that's a distinctive-looking vehicle. Whereas the Camry is so anonymous it's nearly invisible in traffic. That's the superpower of an ordinary car.

Martz parked his black Mercedes S-Class in a garage next to the hotel, and I pulled into the garage a few cars behind him. I followed him out of the garage and into the lobby. The guy at the desk asked him if he had luggage, and he said no. He checked into the hotel and checked out half an hour later.

He was, I assumed, seeing a mistress. And given how quick the assignation was, I figured it had been going on for some time. They knew each other, so they could get right down to business. Skip the preliminaries.

I...