“I gotta move on,” Earl said. “But not before I take care of a few unfinished matters.”

I swallowed, hard. I took my eyes off the gun and looked into Earl’s. “How could you do it, Earl? Or should I call you Devlin from now on?”

“Do what?”

“How could you murder a five-year-old girl?”

“She saw me.”

“Saw you what?”

“I was breaking into someone’s house, forced the back door open, and there she was in the yard, standing there. Says to me, you’re not supposed to do that. Says she’s going to tell. I tried talking to her, but she started to cry, and I had to stop her from doing that.” Earl shook his head. “Women are always ratting me out. Young, old, doesn’t matter.”

“So you killed her.”

“I had to hold my hand over her face to make her stop making noise. I told her to stop crying but she wouldn’t pay any attention.”

“And Stefanie,” I said. “Why did you kill her?”

Earl’s eyebrows shot up. I guess he didn’t realize that I’d figured that part out as well.

“That didn’t work out with her. We went out a couple times, nobody knew. But I don’t know, I just can’t figure out what it is about women. They don’t connect well with me. I don’t think many women have the capacity to understand, do you know what I mean?”

I said nothing.

“And then I found her looking through some of my stuff, she found these other IDs I had, for Daniel Smithers and Danny Simpson, and she asked about them, said she’d heard those names on the news, that they were other names some guy the cops were looking for had used. Stefanie, she was in no position to judge me. She fucked guys so they could be blackmailed. She was of very low moral character.”

The smell of gas was reaching me, and I was further away from the barbecue than Earl. Couldn’t he smell that?

“But I guess even Stefanie couldn’t abide a child-killer,” I said. “That’s why she was on the run. She was scared of what she’d found out about you. She was scared of what you might do. So she printed herself up some cash, grabbed the ledger with the idea of maybe selling it back to Greenway, and decided to get as far away as possible.”

Smythe reached up with his left hand, took out his cigarette for a moment, exhaled. The tip glowed red as he put it back in his mouth and drew in. And I thought, No, he can’t smell it. He couldn’t smell that rotting food in his refrigerator. He had no sense of smell.