His head swayed, side to side.

“Neither do I. For all I know, it’ll push her mind so far over the edge that she’ll never find her way back, but I don’t have a choice. You do, Conor. You can save her from that, at least. If you love her, now’s your time to show it. Now’s your time to get it right. You’ll never have another chance.”

Conor vanished, somewhere behind that face as angular and immobile as a mask. His mind was going like a race car again, but he had it under control now, working efficiently and at furious speed. I didn’t breathe. Richie, pressed back against the wall, was still as stone.

Then Conor took a quick breath, ran his hands over his cheeks and turned to look at me. “I broke into their house,” he said, clearly, matter-
of-factly, as if he was telling me where he had parked a car. “I killed them. Or thought I had, anyway. Is that what you were after?”

I heard Richie let his breath out, with a tiny unconscious whimper. The hum in my skull rose, screamed like a whirl of diving wasps, and died.

I waited for the rest, but Conor was waiting too: just watching me, with those swollen red-edged eyes, and waiting. Most confessions begin with It wasn’t like you think and go on forever. Killers fill up the room with words, trying to coat over the razor edges of the truth; they prove to you over and over that it just happened or that he asked for it, that in their place anyone would have done the same. Most of them will keep proving it till your ears bleed, if you let them. Conor was proving nothing. He was done.

I said, “Why?”

He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter.”

“It’s going to matter to the victims’ family. It’s going to matter to the sentencing judge.”

“Not my problem.”

“I’ll need a motive to go in your statement.”

“Make one up. I’ll sign whatever you want.”

Mostly they loosen, after the river’s been crossed. Everything they had went into clinging to their safe bank of lies. Now the current’s ripped them away, buffeted them dizzy and gasping, smashed them down with a tooth-cracking jolt on the far bank, and they think the hard part is over and done with. It leaves them unraveled and boneless; some of them shake uncontrollably, some of them cry, a few can’t stop talking or can’t stop laughing. They haven’t noticed yet that the landscape is different here; that things are transforming around them, familiar faces dissolving, landmarks vanishing into the distance, that nothing will ever be the same again. Conor was different. He was still gathered like a waiting animal, made of concentration. In some way that I couldn’t spot, the battle wasn’t over.

If I got into it with him over the motive, he would win, and you don’t let them win. I said, “How did you get into the house?”