me to Catherine shivering in her blankets, then limped over and draped her sable coat across the girl’s shoulders. I tucked it around Catherine as best I could. She wouldn’t move or look at me, but stared straight ahead, Benji’s head in her lap.

I’d seen a set of wicker chairs in one corner of the living room. I brought two of them over to the arch connecting living and dining rooms, so we could sit but still keep an eye on Catherine. I pulled over a coffee table for Geraldine to prop her foot on. She’d lost the towels I’d tied around her wound; blood oozed onto the glass tabletop.

“That was a terrible deed, shooting the boy in front of her own granddaughter,” Geraldine said, adding in a conversational tone, “I wasn’t able to kill Renee. What are we going to do with her when she revives?”

“Try to get our story in first,” I said grimly. “The law will be here soon, and she’s going to be spinning her line about Benji as a terrorist kidnapper.” “Was he a terrorist?” Geraldine asked.

“I think he was an orphan boy far from home who got caught in a war he didn’t know was going on. All he wanted to do was make money to help his mother and his sisters.” Tears pricked the back of my lids. I shook them off angrily-I needed my wits, not my emotions, for whatever lay ahead.

Geraldine and I sat silent, both of us exhausted. At one point, she said, “How odd Darraugh and Edwards will find it, to know their mothers have been fighting.”

I grunted, but didn’t move or speak until I heard Renee stirring on the upper landing. I got up, gun out, as she staggered down the front stairs, disheveled but haughty.

She looked past me to Geraldine. “You have a knack for hovering around my family when you are least wanted, Geraldine. You may leave my granddaughter to me now”

I felt my temper rising. “Renee, I don’t know if you’re insane or just giving a good impersonation, but a high-handed act isn’t going to work tonight. Catherine is in shock because she saw you murder Benjamin Sadawi in cold blood. We will not leave you alone with her.”

Renee looked at me loftily. “I thought you and that terrorist had kidnapped her; I shot him in the belief I was protecting her.”

“I should have hit you harder, Renee,” Geraldine said in her flutey

voice. “It brought me such satisfaction, I should have hit you forty years ago. Perhaps I could have beaten some sense into you. I understand what you’re doing; I understand you believe you can persuade a policeman and a judge of what you are saying, because you have the power and position of the Bayard name behind you. You think Victoria is a servant of no account who can be belittled and discounted the way my mother treated detectives forty years ago. But times have changed; detectives are sophisticated nowadays, and Victoria stands high in my son’s and my estimation. Very high. We are prepared to support her version of tonight’s events.”