The backseat of the car served as his chrysalis.

When he’d emerged an hour later, gone were the ponytail and door knocker. He’d shaved his head, leaving only a ring of hair on the lower third. He covered the tan line on his scalp with a khaki Gilligan hat.

He’d dressed in a pair of unshapely cargo shorts and a loud Hawaiian print shirt he’d bought in Key West two and a half years ago, when he’d determined that his next target would be the lovely Talia Shafer who lived in Charleston, a city that attracted thousands of tourists wearing ungodly attire. He’d padded the front of the shirt to simulate middle-age spread. He slid his feet into a pair of rubber flip-flops. He’d chosen eyeglasses that were nondescript and could be purchased for a few dollars in just about any retail outlet.

When he’d looked at himself in the rearview mirror, he’d laughed out loud. Not even his wife, not even the woman he’d just drowned, would recognize him.

He replaced everything he’d used in the roll-aboard for disposal later. Before closing it, he took out a wallet, an old and well-used one that he’d bought at a flea market, and checked to make sure the necessities were there. The driver’s license had been issued in Georgia, the photo taken after disposing of the fuzzy wig he’d worn as Marian Harris’s shy money manager, Daniel Knolls, and before he grew out his hair and beard to become Jasper Ford.

He had a credit card in the name of Howard R. Clement. The card was over a year old and had just enough charges on it to remain active. The wallet also contained the modest amount of currency that Jasper Ford had withdrawn from an ATM three days ago. He’d put the wallet in the back pocket of his shorts.

Last, from a zippered pocket in the lining of the suitcase, he’d taken a small velvet drawstring bag and transferred it to the front pocket of his cargo shorts, sealing it inside with the Velcro strips attached to the fabric. He’d patted the pocket with affection and smiled.

As of tonight, his collection had a new addition.

After locking the roll-aboard into the trunk, he’d driven off the beach. His initial plan had been to head straight up the coast, perhaps traveling as far as Myrtle Beach tonight, where he would get a room and lay low for several days, at least until the hubbub had died down and the search for him and Elaine was discontinued.

Then he would return and choreograph Talia’s suicide. Acquaintances would conclude that she’d been led to it by grief over the deaths of her good friend and husband, whose body, regrettably, had never been recovered.

It had been a very workable plan. But as Howard Clement had been chugging along a major thoroughfare in his clunker, a convoy of emergency vehicles had forced him and other motorists to pull onto the shoulder so they could pass. They had been headed in the direction of the shore and the marina.

Could it possibly be? he’d asked himself.

Over the course of his illustrious career, he had never made a spontaneous decision. Never. But this one time, he had yielded to temptation. Acting on impulse, he had changed his route.

Now, as he gazed down at the body on the beach, he supposed it had been Elaine’s fake tits, acting as flotation devices, that had caused her body to wash ashore so soon. He had reckoned on it taking a day or so, if indeed it ever did.

But there she lay, faceup, covered with a yellow plastic sheet. A police helicopter flew over. Its downwash flipped back a corner of the sheet to reveal her hand. No one except Jasper seemed to notice.

“Jesus, you just never know, do you?”

Jasper turned. Standing close behind him was a gum-smacking redneck wearing jean cut-offs, combat boots, and a tank top featuring a coiled cobra with dripping fangs. Revolting. “Sorry?”

“When you get up in the morning, you don’t figure on it being your last.”

“You’re right there, buddy,” said Howard, in the nasally twang of his newly assumed persona.

He turned away from the redneck and watched with mounting pleasure as the activity on the beach increased. The audience of onlookers on the pier expanded. Jasper delighted in the comments he overheard.

If they only knew who they were rubbing shoulders with, he thought.

He had been on the pier for over an hour when he was jostled along with others near him who were being elbowed out of the way by a man plowing his way to the railing.

Drex.

Jasper experienced a jolt of alarm.

But he soon realized that Drex wasn’t looking for him. He was fixated on what was taking place on the beach. He’d made it just in time to catch the final act: that of the body being carted away.

Once the ambulance was gone, Jasper allowed himself to be shuffled along with the crowd as it vacated the pier. A bottleneck formed at the steps. Jasper waited his turn, then flip-flopped down. But he didn’t go far, because Drex had stayed behind, gazing out across the water, hands gripping the railing, his body as taut as a bowstring.

Which confirmed what Jasper had suspected all along. He wasn’t who he claimed to be, and he wasn’t writing a novel. One didn’t bug one’s neighbor’s house unless one had a reason for doing so. And now this drowning death had left him obviously upset, which was disproportionate to how long he’d known Elaine.

From the start, the timing of his arrival to the neighborhood had made Jasper uneasy because it had coincided so closely—mere months—with the discovery of Marian Harris’s remains.

That had come as a shock. One evening he had returned home from an errand to find Talia in her study, crying her heart out.

“Remember I told you about my friend Marian who lived in Key West?”

“Of course. The one who went missing a couple of years ago.”

“I just heard from a mutual friend,” Talia had said as she blotted up tears. “They found her remains buried in a shipping crate. It was horrible.”

It certainly had been horrible news to him. None of the others had ever been found. This was an unwelcome first, and it had rattled him. He was brilliant. He didn’t make mistakes. But he would be a fool to ignore the possibility that he might.

He wouldn’t commit a major gaffe. No, the oversight would be something minor, inane, ridiculous, something that, because of its sheer triviality, a genius like him would never think to avoid.

That evening, while Talia was mourning the grisly death of her friend, he had resolved that the time had come for Jasper Ford to evaporate.

His marriage to Lyndsay had been brief, but rife with drama. After her, he’d sworn to remain a bachelor and, for thirty years, he had. Then, ill-advisedly as it turned out, he’d experimented with matrimony again. The intimacy of the union, inside the bedroom and out, spawned risks he hadn’t foreseen when he’d asked for Talia’s hand. Choosing her in particular had been a miscalculation. He would have been better off selecting a bubblehead like Elaine.

Talia was far too perceptive. He had sensed her gradually increasing mistrust, which had resulted in last night’s accusation of an affair. He had never slept with Elaine, but that Talia sensed something amiss was his cue that it was time to bid farewell to Jasper Ford.

But how to go about it had presented him with a unique problem: He had two women to dispose of this time. He couldn’t leave either Talia or Elaine alive to search for him. He was confident that he was up to the challenge of their termination, but the solution had to be well thought out, methodically planned, and precisely executed.