“Don’t bother lying to me, Judith,” I said tiredly, holding up one hand. “I know everything. I know about your affair with Alan Bennet. I know you’ve been terrorizing your sister-in-law and attempting to destroy your brother’s marriage. I know you’ve been raiding the accounts of Feed the Need and pulling the funds into Smythe Incorporated. So don’t lie to me any more—I know too much. Now, where’s Carlos?”

She was speechless, her mouth literally hanging open. After a long pause, she closed her mouth, swallowed hard, then looked at me imploringly, lowering her voice to a whisper.

“Okay,” she said. “Alan and I did those things to Derek and Sidra. And maybe I did have a hand in the money issues with Feed the Need. But I would never, ever in a million years have done anything to harm Carlos. He’s my nephew.”

“Why the vandalism?” I asked. “Why the black roses and the cut up coat and the ruined car paint?”

She hesitated, sucking fiercely on her cigarette. Finally, she blew out a thick stream of smoke and lowered her voice to just above a whisper.

“To distract attention,” she said. “It was Alan’s idea. He said Derek would be less likely to find out about the accounts at work if he were distracted at home. Once we started, it worked so well, we just kept it going. Derek has been, like, in la-la land for two months. He never noticed a thing.”

I just looked at her.

“Okay,” she whispered. “I’m not proud of myself. But it was just little things—petty vandalism. Not like kidnapping.”

“What about the theft from Feed the Need?”

“We were just restructuring,” she said, but when she saw my face she hesitated then spoke again. “Okay, so we were stripping out funds from Feed the Need. It’s a matter of priorities. We had to find some low-interest—okay, no-interest—money, to bolster up some of our ventures in the clothing business. We didn’t take that much. But Feed the Need is such a monumental waste of money anyway, it didn’t seem like that big of a deal. We would’ve paid it back eventually.”

“What about the faked records, the closed-down district offices?”

Judith shrugged.

“Alan handled all of that. I just gave the authority for the money transfers.”

“Never mind that by stealing from Feed the Need you stole food from the mouths of starving children all over the world.”

“Starving children,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Daddy was ready to kiss away his fortune to starving children. Give me a break.”

I couldn’t even think of a response to that. I wondered what would make a person so totally devoid of conscience.

“That’s all I can say, Callie,” she told me. “I may have done some dishonest things, but I didn’t do anything to my nephew.”