Bobby talked to Officer Blodel. To my face he might poohpooh my detecting, but he would support me-support Tony and Gabriella’s daughter-to an outsider.

After talking first to Bobby, and then to the lawyer Freeman had recommended, the tenor of Blodel’s questions began to change. He stopped addressing me as cop to perpetrator, and began speaking as one law professional to another.

Finally, around six in the morning, someone collected Benji’s body to deliver to the county morgue. It took two officers to move Catherine away from him. When they finally lifted her from the table, she started to follow them to the hearse. One of the deputies picked her up and carried her back into the kitchen. She stumbled over to me, clutching me as an infant would. 1 put my arms around her and murmured those senseless coos one gives to aching children.

An ambulance came to take Geraldine to the local hospital. The EMS techs wanted to take Catherine with them as well, to treat her for shock and check on her wound, but she burrowed deeper into my arms, her cast digging into my breast.

Renee bustled forward, the Cannonball in full throttle. “Come along, darling. Let’s get you checked over by a doctor and then we’ll charter a plane for home.”

Catherine clung to me. “Go away! Don’t come near me. You shot Benji,

you shot him like he was a horse with a broken leg. I don’t want to see you again. Go away, go away, go away!”

I didn’t know if the law would ever catch up with Renee Bayard, but Catherine’s outburst shocked her as nothing else had all evening. For a brief moment, her face collapsed; she looked like a stricken old woman, not the brigadier in charge. This wasn’t retribution that I could offer to Harriet Whitby or Benji’s mother, but it was a small offering on the scales of justice.

Renee tried to argue with Catherine, but her granddaughter began to scream. Two officers hustled Renee away. They weren’t charging her with anything, they said, but they wanted to question her more about her gun.

Blodel saw that he couldn’t possibly take me to the station for a formal statement, unless he was prepared to deal with more hysteria from Catherine. In the end, he talked to me in the living room at the cottage while a deputy took notes. I finally had a chance to recount everything-well, almost everything-that had happened since Geraldine and I left Chicago. I left out the tape we’d found in the Saturn, because I wanted to take that home to Chicago with me.

While Blodel and I finished talking, a woman officer fetched clean clothes for Catherine from her own teenage daughter’s closet. She also roused a local motel owner to get us a bedroom.

In the motel, the woman officer helped me bathe and undress Catherine and get her into a nightshirt. I spent a long time under the shower myself, trying to stop my skin from feeling as though it were turning inside out. When I got into bed, I collapsed into sleep so fast I couldn’t even remember lying down. I woke once around noon, because Catherine’s cast was digging into my back, but was asleep again as soon as I turned over.