Excerpt:

“You have been quite busy since I’ve been gone Candy, beneficiary of all those insurance policies and such.  For a girl from Baltimore, you’ve made quite a bit of money Candice. Ah, but I know it wasn’t easy, fucks for bucks never is.” His tone condescending, mocking really, but she couldn’t deal with subtly just now. Quite recently everything in her life was reduced to unrelenting pain.

“After all, with all that screwing cheating, and oh my Candy, even murder and mayhem, you’re quite a girl, why don’t we count the ways. Let us do it together shall we.” From the screen on the wall the man’s voice hushed now, as if they were sharing a secret no one else could ever know, a conspiracy just between old lovers.

In the cage, naked and struggling she’d raised herself up from the floor. Candy Icelander stood gripping the bars and with disbelief staring in complete disbelief at the man on the screen. Outside her cage mounted to the wall of the small windowless room she recognized the voice and now the man. After all these years she’d recently heard it when introducing her along with others at the party she’d attended in D.C. Even now, forty years later there were traces of the Boston Brahmin accent. Impossible as this was it was him all right, Fredrich Templeton the third. Boy wonder, Yale, Harvard Law, London School of Economics, Fredrich had it all back then when Candy wanted it all too.  Like brigands of yore, she’d taken it the old fashion way. She murdered and stole it.

Years ago, Freddy, as he was known to his friends, had been lost and never found. His plane went down somewhere in the far north, where he and a friend went to hunt muskox and caribou. They flew out of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories of Canada, refueled in Fort Good Hope and on to Coleville Lake. Somewhere, out there the plane, a pilot and two trophy hunters disappeared. The wreckage and bodies never found, most likely eaten by wolves, and covered with snow. Subzero weather was fierce and unforgiving, just as she had hoped, and Candy was a good planner.

It would be years before anyone other than Friedrich Templeton, missing lawyer from Boston, knew what happened. On the way to their drop off sight, the pilot Richard Cavendish, the only black Australian pilot in that region, had a change of heart.  Setting the plane on autopilot he turned in his seat and spoke the truth to Templeton and his companion. They were not friends, but “Freddy” had used his services several times. If nothing else Richard appreciated his business and was one of few men in the wild north who at least had some scruples.

“Mr. Templeton I can’t go through with this.”

Over the roar of the engine Freddie shouted back, “With what Richard, what is it you want to tell me?”

Shouting over the plane’s engines, “I was paid sir, paid to fly back in a week to pick you up as scheduled but actually fly to another place just to burn off fuel and return without you and Jeb. Supposed to leave you there to die. $50,000 to just leave you and say you never showed up as planned.”

In a calm but loud voice Freddy paused and then said, “Well Richard what do you propose we do about this?”