When Catherine wouldn’t take her phone calls, Renee wrote a letter to her granddaughter. The letter was in the spirit of the times, not acknowledging guilt or shame, but begging Catherine to understand that if Renee had done anything that distressed Catherine, it was done out of love for Calvin and the ideals they shared. The letter upset Catherine so much that we had to stay up until three the next morning discussing it. I’d forgotten how much emotional energy adolescents absorb.

Geraldine and I both put such muscle as we had into trying to convince both Illinois and Wisconsin authorities that Renee had shot Benji only to protect herself from his testimony, but we were no match for the government’s itch to shed Islamic blood. And Catherine, while bitter with her grandmother over Benji’s death, wasn’t going to try to send Renee to prison: she refused to testify.

Marc’s death was also a sticky matter. Despite his frosty words to me, Bobby had dispatched his right-hand detective, Terry Finchley, to work with the DuPage sheriff on looking for evidence. The tape I’d found in the Saturn of Marc’s interview with Olin helped piece some of the story together-the part I’d learned from MacKenzie Graham’s suicide note I kept to myself.

I was hopeful when Terry found a cabdriver who’d picked Renee up at Thirtyfifth and King the night Marc died, but I still knew we were facing an uphill struggle, as I tried explaining to Amy Blount and Harriet. The three of us got together for frequent strategy sessions, and to try to make sense of why or how Marc had died.

“Why did Renee take Marc out to Larchmont?” Amy asked.

I shrugged. “My guess is, she figured he’d be there for months before anyone found him. The house was empty, and in this economy no one was looking to buy it. The agents aren’t doing a lot of maintenance on the grounds, so it was a good bet that Marc’s body would disintegrate to where it would be hard to identify him, or get a real cause of death. It was just one of those pieces of luck that Renee’s granddaughter was also using the deserted mansion.”

“I hate it when you talk like this, like it was a game,” Harriet said. “Sorry. But it was a game to Renee-her wits against the world. She drove Marc’s car back to his house in the middle of the night, let herself in and destroyed all his notes and computer files. She killed Olin with the phenobarb in his nightcap and destroyed the papers in his secret drawer and showed up at her office the next morning as bright as a new lightbulb. Her son says Renee has always prided herself on her organizational gifts. The last couple of weeks, she was in her element. Trouble was, she was trying to organize too much, and it started oozing out around the edges.”

One afternoon I took Catherine to see Father Lou, who left her in a