“That’s right,” I said, my mouth still a half inch from her ear. “That’s right. I’m a bastard, Simone. I held your sister in my lap while she died and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it, and I earned the right to be a bastard. But, you, you don’t have any excuse. You picked her execution spot and stayed out here, sixty miles away, while she screamed her final breath. You told them where she was going and you let them kill her. Didn’t you, Simone?”

She blinked.

I screamed, “Didn’t you?”

Her eyes rolled back in her head for a moment and then her head dropped, the sobs tearing out of her as if someone was reaching in there and pulling them out. I stepped back because there was nothing left of her now. The sobs grew louder, gasping wracks from her heaving chest. She balled into a fetal position and banged her fists against the arm of the couch, and every time the sobs seemed to have subsided they picked up again, only louder, as if each breath pierced her like something heavy and sharp.

Angie touched my elbow, but I shrugged it off. Patrick Kenzie, great detective, able to terrorize a near-catatonic woman into hysterics. What a guy. For an encore, maybe I’d go back home and mug a nun.

Simone turned on her side, her eyes closed, speaking with half her mouth still buried in the couch. “You were working for them. I told Jenna she was a fool, trusting you and those fat white politicians. Ain’t one of them ever gave a damn for a nigger, ain’t one of them ever will. I figured as...as soon as you got what you wanted from her, you’d...”

“Kill her,” I said.

Her head stretched out onto the arm and gagging sounds emanated from her throat. After a few minutes, she said, “I called him, because I figured no man could... “

“Who’d you call?” Angie said. “Socia? Was it Socia?”

She shook her head a few times, then nodded. “He... he said he’d take care of it, talk some sense into her fool head. That’s all. I figured no man could do... that to his wife.”

His wife?

She looked at me. “She never could have won. Not against all them. Not her. She... couldn’t.”

I sat on the floor beside the couch and held up the photograph. “Is this Socia?”

She looked at it long enough to nod, then buried her head back in the couch.

Angie said, “Simone, where’s the rest of it? Is it in the safety-deposit box?”

Simone shook her head.

“Then where is it?” I said.

“She wouldn’t tell me. She just said, ‘In a safe place.’ She said she put just the one picture in the safety-deposit box to throw them off the scent, case they ever follow her there.”

I said, “What else is there, Simone? Do you know?”

She said, “Jenna said they were ‘bad things.’ That’s all she’d say. She’d get all tight lipped and antsy if I asked her about it. Whatever it was, it shook her up every time she talked about it.” She raised her head and looked past my shoulder as if someone stood behind me. She said, “Jenna?” and began sobbing again.