Fiona stared. When she could, she said, panting for breath, “No. Hang on. Conor? What … Under arrest for what?”

“We’ve arrested him for the attack on your sister and the murders of her family.”

Fiona’s hands jumped; for a second I thought she was going to slap them over her ears, but she pressed them on the table again. She said, flat and hard as a brick slamming down on stone, “No. Conor didn’t.”

She was as certain as she had been about Pat. She needed to be. If either of them had done this, then her past as well as her present was a mauled, bleeding ruin. All that bright landscape of ice creams and in-jokes, screams of laughter on a wall, her first dance and her first drink and her first kiss: nuked, humming with radioactivity, untouchable.

I said, “He’s made a full confession.”

“I don’t care. You— What the fuck? Why didn’t you tell me? You just let me sit here talking about him, let me yap away and hoped I’d say something that would make things worse for him— That’s shit. If Conor actually confessed, then it’s only because you messed with his head the way you’ve been messing with mine. He didn’t do this. This is insane.”

Good middle-class girls don’t talk to detectives that way, but Fiona was too furiously intent for caution. Her hands were fisted on the table and her face looked bleached and friable, like a shell dried out on sand. She made me want to do something, anything, the stupider the better: take it all back, push her out the door, spin her chair to the wall so I wouldn’t have to see her eyes. “It’s not just the confession,” I said. “We have evidence backing it up. I’m so sorry.”

“What kind of evidence?”

“I’m afraid we can’t go into that. But we’re not talking about little coincidences that can be explained away. We’re talking about solid, unarguable, incriminating evidence. Proof.”

Fiona’s face shut down. I could see her mind speeding. “Right,” she said, after a minute. She pushed her mug away on the table and got up. “I have to get back to Jenny.”

I said, “Until Mr. Brennan is charged, we won’t be releasing his name to the press. We’d prefer that you don’t mention it to anyone, either. That includes your sister.”

“I wasn’t planning to.” She pulled her coat off the back of her chair and swung it on. “How do I get out of here?”

I opened the door for her. “We’ll be in touch,” I said, but Fiona didn’t look up. She headed down the corridor fast, with her chin tucked into her collar like she was already shielding herself against the cold.

14

The incident room had emptied, just the kid manning the tip line and a couple of others working late, who upped the paper shuffling when they saw me. Richie said bluntly, as we got to our desks, “I don’t think she had anything to do with it.”