Richie said, evenly and very quietly, “I took it to mean that Jennifer Spain could be our woman.”

“Not could be. Is.”

His shoulders moved restlessly, against the door. “It’s not definite. She could’ve picked up the wool some other way. Earlier on, when she put Emma to bed—”

“Jenny keeps herself groomed. Not a hair out of place. You think she’d have left a broken nail to snag on things all evening, gone to bed with it still ragged? Left a piece of wool caught in it for hours?”

“Or it could’ve been a transfer off Pat. He gets the bit of wool on his pajama top when he’s using the pillow on Emma; then, when he’s struggling with Jenny, she breaks a nail, the wool catches in it …”

“That one specific fiber, out of the thousands and thousands in his pajamas, on his pajamas, in her own pajamas, all over the kitchen. What are the odds?”

“It could happen. We can’t just drop the whole thing on Jenny. Cooper was positive, remember? Her injuries weren’t self-inflicted.”

“I know that,” I said. “I’ll talk to her.” The thought of having to deal with the world outside this room felt like a baton to the back of the knees. I sat down heavily at the table; I couldn’t stand up any more.

Richie had caught that: I’ll talk to her, not We. He opened his mouth and then shut it again, looking for the right question.

I said, “Why didn’t you tell me?” I heard the raw note of pain, but I didn’t care.

Richie’s eyes fell away from mine. He knelt on the floor and started picking up the papers he had dropped. He said, “Because I knew what you’d want to do.”

“What? Arrest Jenny? Not charge Conor with a triple murder he didn’t commit? What, Richie? What part of that is so fucking terrible that you just couldn’t let it happen?”

“Not terrible. Just … Arresting her: I don’t know, man. I’m not sure that’s the right thing to do here.”

“That’s what we do. We arrest murderers. If you have a problem with the job description, you should’ve got a different fucking job.”

That brought Richie up on his feet again. “That right there, that’s why I didn’t tell you. I knew that was what you’d say. I knew it. With you, man, everything’s black and white. No questions; just stick to the rules and go home. I needed to think about it because I knew the second I told you, it’d be too late.”

“Damn right it’s black and white. You slaughter your family, you go to prison. Where the fuck are you seeing shades of gray?”

“Jenny’s in hell. Every second of her life, she’s going to be in the kind of pain I don’t even want to think about. You think prison’s going to punish her any worse than her own head? There’s nothing she can do, or we can do, to fix what she did, and it’s not like we need to lock her up to stop her doing it again. What’s a life sentence going to do here?”