Evan and Alice left me after I’d told them where I’d been the night before, Alice to see to the boys and Evan to check that the police were following all the rules correctly and to file a response to the request for the longer hold.
“Once again, it’s you and me,” I said, to whichever officer was behind the mirror to babysit me. He, of course, didn’t respond, leaving me with my thoughts, which for once was exactly what I needed.
I’d let everything that happened to me exist in a swirling chaos for far too long. I needed order. I needed to pin everything I knew, like mapping equations on a graph, then draw the lines between the pins to reveal the pattern. I needed to solve for X.
No, I needed a time line. I needed to start from the beginning and order the steps of the crimes against me. I needed to see them all in sequence and find my connections.
I touched my finger to the table on the very left edge.
First pin: Constance Ross saw me throw my father’s sword in the lake.
I moved my finger an inch to the right and touched it down again.
Second pin: She told her husband, Charles Ross, who drew the scene like one of her fantasies.
And again.
Third pin: Charles Ross saw my father kill Sadie Mae and drew that scene as well.
Fourth pin: Someone killed Charles, cut off his hand, and took his drawings.
Fifth pin: Someone put the hand in my rubbish bin.
Sixth pin: Someone altered the drawings and sent them to me.
Seventh pin: Someone sent me threatening collage letters.
Eighth pin: Someone talked Constance into telling the police.
Ninth pin: When that didn’t work, someone medicated Constance to make her statement more believable.
Tenth pin: Someone killed Constance before she could make her more-believable statement.
I spent minutes walking through the pins in my mind, trying to make sense of them. But there were too many unknowns. Too many someones, and not all of them could be the same person. Would the person who killed the artist put his hand in my rubbish? Wouldn’t it be better for the killer if no one ever found any of him? Why had the artist been killed? Why use it to implicate me? What was the point of it? I could buy that the person who called in tips about me and brought Constance in to make a statement would make her take medicine to clarify her thoughts. But why would this person then kill her?
No. It was like two equations in one.
I sat up straighter.
I needed to group the sets.
Someone had put the hand in my rubbish, sent me threats, and found Constance to give a statement.
Someone else had killed Charles, altered his drawings, and killed Constance to keep her from giving her statement.
There were two. It was the answer to everything. There had been two people all along. The problem wasn’t solving for X. It was solving for X and Y, two forces working opposed to each other. X was trying to blame me for my father’s crimes. Y was trying to stop X. And Y was killing people in the process.
Which meant X was in trouble.
I stood up and walked over to the mirror. “Hey! I need Mallory. Tell him I’m ready to talk.” No response, so I knocked on the glass and got louder. “Go get Mallory! I need to talk to him. It’s important!”
Nothing.
I paced the room, sat for a while, then got up to tap on the glass again, but still there was no reply. I was starting to wonder if I had a babysitter after all. I tried counting down the minutes, to track time, tried to use all these wasted minutes and hours to think of what to do next, but there were almost too many contingencies and not all that much that was in my control.
Were I to be released, my first priority had to be getting Alice to take my brothers out of town. And then I needed to find X and . . . do what? Protect whomever it was from the threat of the equally mysterious Y? Would I really protect someone from a killer who was trying to protect me?
If I didn’t get out of this bloody station, I still had to find a way to convince Alice to leave me here and get my brothers out of town. And if Mallory wouldn’t listen or see reason? If I ended up being incarcerated for good?
I sighed and felt the drag of that hopeless thought on my mind. But it wasn’t only hopelessness that dragged me down. It had been days since I’d had a proper sleep in an actual bed. As much as I tried to keep my focus, my eyelids kept drifting shut, and closing them felt so good.
• • •
I didn’t know how long they let me sleep, or what time it was when Mallory next came in the room, but he was breaking the rules—I knew that for sure.
“Where were you between the hours of four and six yesterday morning?” he asked. He had slammed down his files as my wake-up call, which was bad enough. But he’d almost immediately shoved a microphone in my face and compressed some buttons on an ancient-looking machine I assumed would record our conversation.
I barely lifted my head in acknowledgment of his question, and, when I didn’t answer him right away, he leaned toward the mic and said, “Suspect refuses to answer the question.”
I grunted and Mallory asked, “What did you say to the victim to lure her from the park?”
I met his gaze and sat quietly.
“Suspect refuses to answer the question.”
“Where is the weapon you used?”
Nothing.
“Suspect refuses to answer the question.” He flipped open his file folder security blanket then, and I decided to take the opportunity to ask a question of my own.
I leaned as close as I could toward the microphone and asked, “Where are my attorney and guardian?”
Mallory flipped a page from his file and opened his mouth to say something else, but I cut him off.
“Inspector refuses to answer the question.”
He slammed down the page in his hand and said, “Interview ended at seven thirty-nine,” then compressed another button to stop the recording. He sat back in his chair and stared at me. “I’ve done my due diligence.”
“A.m.?” I asked.
Mallory looked confused.
“Is it morning?”
He didn’t say, of course, but I guessed it must have been morning already, because Mallory was wearing a different-colored shirt from yesterday’s blue.
I asked, “Who brought Constance Ross to the station to give her statement?”
I didn’t expect Mallory would answer, and he didn’t. Though he did look at me oddly.
“Who was giving her medicine to bring her back? You know, right?”
“Why do you want to know?”
I studied Mallory’s eyes for a few moments. “I think that person may be in trouble.”
Mallory looked like he was about to answer when the door swung open and a rather triumphant-looking Evan Golding practically jogged inside the room.
“Let’s go,” Evan said, gesturing toward the still-open door.
I didn’t get up at first, half expecting Mallory to argue.
Evan smiled. “She’s free to go, isn’t she, Inspector?”
“How exactly am I free to go?”
“New evidence,” Mallory said, trying his hardest to seem nonchalant to the words, I was sure.
“And what exactly is this new evidence?” I asked.
Evan’s grin was back. “You’ve got an alibi.”
• • •
Evan led me out into the main office and right up to where Sherlock was standing. “It’s all down to him, I’m afraid.”
“As promised,” Lock said, gesturing to the desk next to us.
“Lily?” I hadn’t even noticed she was there. Lily Patel was sitting next to a DS at one of the many desks in the room, studying a white piece of paper carefully. She looked up at me and nodded slightly before going back to her reading. “What is she doing here?”
Sherlock smiled as Evan filled in the details. “She’s giving a statement about spending the night at your house. This lad talked her into it, of course.”
“But she left in the early morning.”
“She did,” Lock said, and his eyes brightened. “At four oh-nine a.m., exactly.”
“I have video,” he said, holding up his tablet. He tapped the screen and turned it toward me, and I watched a time-coded video play that looked as if it came from the cab’s black-box camera. It pulled up to the road where Lily was standing, looking like she’d spent the night vomiting in my house. She got into the cab, and it pulled away before Lock stopped the video. “That’s how I knew she didn’t do it.”
“Yes, yes. We already knew that.”
But Sherlock wasn’t done.
“It’s also how I got the idea to look for this.” The next tap on his screen started up another black-box video, though this one didn’t look to be from a taxi. The car didn’t move at all, just sat there, with the camera pointing down Baker Street. I could just make out our front stoop at the very edge of the frame, and only knew it was ours, really, because I watched Lily coming out of the house, waiting for the taxi, then watched the taxi pull away.
After about twenty seconds of nothing else happening on screen, I looked up at Lock. “The point of all this nothing?”
“Nothing is exactly the point.” He tapped to fast-forward and other than a couple of cars, a bus, and a few pedestrians, nothing happened on the street for at least ninety minutes.
“No doors opened,” I said, suddenly breaking through the mind-numbing effects of twenty-four hours in a police interview room. Then I smiled. It was rather brilliant, actually. Not that I’d ever feed Sherlock’s ego with that kind of compliment.
“Bloody brilliant,” Evan said. “I never would’ve thought to look for a parked car with a black box to prove you didn’t leave. That’s—”
“Actually rather obvious,” Lock said.
“You really need to stop telling people that,” I said.
Lock quirked a brow. “But there’s more.”
Just as the sky started to lighten a bit, a rather large shadow tromped up the street, stopping just outside our stoop. With slow, labored steps, the form moved up toward our front door, and then half of it was dumped on our top step.
“It’s too far away to see who it is, but it proves it wasn’t you,” Evan said. “And that’s all we care about, right?”
I exchanged a look with Lock, and then answered Evan’s question with one of my own. “What does all this do to my father’s murder case?”
He seemed surprised at the question. “I don’t imagine it’ll do much, really.”
“They’ve found the sword and a witness that caught someone else trying to get rid of it. No one could use that to spring him?”
“Well, I suppose that depends on the level of the other evidence they have against him.”
Not much, was the answer to that. Purely my supposition, of course, as I wasn’t privy to the police files. But my father had acted like I was the key witness against him when we’d had our little breakfast visit, which meant they couldn’t have had much other evidence. “Could you find out the status of his case for me?”
“I could ask around.”
“Why?” Lock asked me, suddenly on alert.
“I need to know if they’re going to release him. And if they are, I need to know when.”
Evan swung his briefcase a bit. “Sure. I can find out.”
I offered him the best smile I could, and said, “Thanks. Call as soon as you know anything.” I patted at my pockets and remembered that Alice had my mobile. “If Alice answers, tell her. I have to go home right away.”