In April 1986, Heyward got a call that the restaurant had burned down. Harvey was hurt in the fire and in the hospital, but he'd be okay. Heyward flew to Florida to make sure Harvey was all right. But about a week later, after he'd returned home, Heyward got another call. This time it was to let him know Harvey had been arrested for arson. He was charged with burning down his own restaurant.

Harvey's story was that he was out delivering his cleaning-business payroll, drove by the restaurant, saw the smoke, ran in to try to put the fire out, and got burned. At the time of the trial, the girlfriend filed a complaint against Harvey for threatening her with a gun over what she might say. Her father made a deal with the insurance company to recoup his money and testified against Harvey.

"He'd become completely ruthless," says Steven. "He didn't care about anybody."

Harvey was acquitted, but his relationship with his father was never the same. The trial forced Heyward to take a long, hard, unblinking look at his son.

At the same time, Brown Industrial Maintenance, Heyward's business, was foundering. Always more the outgoing, affable salesman than the hard-nosed, focused financial manager, he'd made some decisions that hadn't worked out and then compounded the difficulties with his profligate spending. Perhaps the best evidence of this was that he not only hired Harvey at a time when he couldn't afford to -- after the mess in Florida was over -- but bought him a new Corvette, thinking maybe it would help him get through his problems.

By 1989, the company was unable to meet its debts and Heyward filed for bankruptcy. But Heyward and Steven and Howard Fensterman had a plan: The Browns would start a new company that, given Heyward's financial difficulties, would be in Steven and his mother's names. Though the new business seemed to solve one problem, it created two others.

Heyward had to accept that Steven, his 22-year-old son, would be in charge. "I had to tell my father this is the way it's going to be," says Steven. "I told him I knew how to manage money and that I'd make all the financial decisions. And the first thing he'd have to do was scale back. No country clubs, no fancy cars, no vacations. He felt demeaned by this at first, but we developed a different relationship at work. We weren't father and son there."

The other problem was Harvey. He was left out of the new company. "From the day he went to work for my father after the trial was over," Steven says, "he did absolutely nothing. He was no help. Most of the time, he didn't even show up."

Nevertheless, Steven says Harvey felt he was entitled to a piece of the new family business. Since he wasn't getting it, Steven claims, he stole a couple of accounts, along with some cleaning equipment, and started his own company. Harvey then told his father if he tried to retaliate he'd go to the IRS and claim there were irregularities in his business.

"So my father was in a pretty rough spot," says Steven. "He's got one son who's turning against the family and the other one, the little one, is taking over. My father lost it with Harvey at that point and told him he was disowned. Harvey said, 'Listen, you cocksucker, I never needed you anyway. You're a failure, you let the family down, and you'll probably end up coming to me for a job.' "

Despite the efforts of Steven and his mother to keep the family together, it never quite worked anymore. There'd be holidays and special occasions together -- Harvey was best man at Steven's wedding in 1994 -- but the tensions kept escalating. "His behavior just got worse and worse," Steven says. "He'd use foul language at really inappropriate times. He'd pass gas at the table. He'd berate waiters in restaurants. He was unbelievably rude and obnoxious. And his belief that we'd screwed him became more and more of an issue."

In early 1997, Harvey finally managed to alienate even his mother. They'd gone out to lunch and he was being particularly belligerent. "He was telling her how he got screwed. How the family was doing so well and he got nothing, he was left out in the cold," Steven says his mother confided to him.

"She was telling Harvey, as she had many times before, that he really needed help. That he needed therapy. And at some point he said to her, talking about my father, 'How can you sleep with that filthy animal?' And that was it. My mom called me, crying, and said she was never going to speak to him again."

Months passed without any communication. Then in November, just before Thanksgiving, Steven persuaded Harvey to make some kind of apology to his mother. Harvey didn't go to the family's Thanksgiving dinner, but the first step toward a rapprochement had been taken. In December, Steven made a decision he says he'll regret for the rest of his life.

Eastco was having its best year, and Steven, flush with feelings of success, raised the possibility with his father of inviting Harvey to the company's holiday party. Heyward wasn't happy about it, but he didn't say no. "So when Harvey walks into Mario's, a restaurant in Suffolk, what does he see?" asks Fensterman.

"He sees a big successful company that now has hundreds of employees. Harvey meanwhile has no job -- at least none that we know of -- and he's a failure. Steven was home with hepatitis. So Heyward gets up to make a speech, and while he's talking, Harvey is disparaging him to people he's standing near. Then he sees a guy named Frank Mancuso, who's a recently hired Eastco executive vice-president, and he says to someone, That guy is sitting in my chair. He's got my office.

Two days later, Heyward and Ellen Brown were dead.

Detective Norman Rein was at home, getting ready to work his third consecutive 5 p.m.-1 a.m. tour, when he got a call around four that there'd been a homicide on Eliot Drive in Lake Grove. Rein, a 38-year veteran of the Suffolk Police Department, arrived at the scene just before 4:30.

Once he was briefed and had a short conversation with Debbie and Steven Brown, he did a walk-through to familiarize himself with the crime scene. "We entered through the front door, and there was a real heaviness inside the house, the air felt cold and wet, and we were sloshing around in water," says Rein, a bullet-hard, just-the-facts kind of cop.

The water that Debbie Brown had seen running down the driveway was coming from a bathroom where the killer had turned on the water in the tub. It had been running for nearly 24 hours; the house was flooded. The killer was either very clever or just very lucky. Either way, the water destroyed nearly all of the forensic evidence.

"The kitchen ceiling had collapsed, and the place almost looked like a fire scene," says Rein. "And my initial feeling was that there'd been a significant amount of staging done at the scene."