“My half brother,” I said. I didn’t want to claim even that much of Geoff, but we had the same mother. The thought made me want to check into a hospital, have all my blood drained out and replaced with somebody else’s. “And yes, Tucker, it was Geoff. He tried to pass himself off as Steve Roberts, but I know who he was.”

Tucker took a notepad from his hip pocket and scrawled the name on a page, but I knew what he was thinking. There were probably a dozen Steve Robertses in Phoenix alone, never mind all the once-separate cities butting up against its sprawling borders—Scottsdale, Mesa, Tempe, Chandler, Glendale.

“Google,” I said, catching sight of the computer across the room, and started to get off the couch.

Tucker pressed me gently back onto the cushion. “Take a few minutes to catch your breath,” he said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

An hysterical laugh bubbled out of my throat at the irony of that statement. Then I started to shiver.

Tucker got off the ottoman, disappeared into the bedroom and returned with an afghan, which he wrapped tightly around my shoulders. I snuggled in.

“Did he threaten you?” Tucker asked.

“Not exactly,” I answered, huddling inside a field of yarn daisies. Jolie had made the afghan for Nick and me, years before, as a wedding gift. God, I wished I could talk to Jolie, but she was a workaholic and probably busy in her Tucson lab, sorting bones.

“How come you never told me what happened to your parents?” Tucker asked. At the same time, he went to the computer, perched on the edge of the desk chair, and logged onto my Internet account. The password was stored, so there was no delay.

“The time never seemed right.”

“Uh-huh,” Tucker said tightly.

I bristled. “We were only together for six weeks,” I reminded him. “What was I supposed to say? ‘Oh, by the way, when I was five, my half brother slaughtered our parents, and a neighbor kidnapped me, and I’ve been living under an alias ever since’?”

Too late, I realized that I’d given away a lot more than I’d intended.

Tucker spun around in the desk chair. “What?”

“I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

“You’ve been living under an alias?”

“Not now, Tucker.”

He glared at me for a long moment, then spun back to the computer and started punching keys. On TV, cops usually use the hunt-and-peck method, but Tucker knew his keyboard, and all ten fingers tapped at a steady clip.

“Don’t think for one damn second,” he warned, without turning around, “that I’m going to pretend we didn’t have this conversation.”

He paused after a while, and peered at the screen.

“Is this him?”

I got off the couch, letting Chester roll unceremoniously to the cushions, and padded over to look at the monitor.