They canvassed the neighborhood well into the night, woke up every family, went into their homes, scared the shit out of them, to see if anyone saw Patrick moving things, to see if anyone ever saw someone in a suit, walking around.

No one had.

And then the lab techs came back with nothing. No fingerprints, no hairs, no blood.

The police had everything and nothing.

But there was no doubt now that he was the killer. No thought that they’d gotten it wrong somehow. No. He simply was the killer, and the pieces were falling into place.

“Do you need me anymore?” Izabel asked Paz. She was tired and wanted to go home. She wanted to see Cami and Jana. For the first time in a long time, she wanted to feel like a mother.

“He’ll only talk to you,” Paz said. “And I need motive.”

“I don’t know what else I can get you,” Izabel said. “I don’t feel like I’m good at this.”

“I think you are,” Paz said.

Andy said, “He’s almost nice. And he’s definitely smart. If they take him to court with a circumstantial case, he could walk.”

“You need a confession,” Izabel said to Paz.

“You think you can get me one of those?” Paz laughed. “Look, don’t think about that. Think about motive. And ask him more directly about the murders. We don’t have to come at him sideways anymore.”

“Does he know we found everything?”

“No,” Paz said. “I don’t want him to know yet. Reveal it as you want to. If you’ll go in again.”

Izabel nodded.

“Watch out,” Paz added. “He’s had some time to think this through.”

As soon as Izabel and Andy came into the room, Patrick said, “Hi, Izabel,” and he sounded more like her mother than ever, like he’d spent the hours practicing her name.

“I want to ask you about the murders now,” she said.

“What about them?”

“If you weren’t scared, then how did they make you feel?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did they annoy you? How they disrupted things?”

“No, that’s a shitty thing to say,” he said, mimicking her back to herself.

“So they upset you?”

“They upset everyone.”

“Did you know anyone who was killed?”

“No.”

“Would you have been upset if you had killed someone you knew?”

“What?”

“I’m going to have to protest to this line of questioning,” his lawyer said.

Izabel ignored them both. “It seems like the houses were chosen at random, and you said you date pretty frequently, so you could have easily—”

“Wait a second,” Patrick said.

“—accidentally picked the house of someone you knew and killed them.”

“I didn’t kill anyone.”

“Ms. Kalloe, I’m going to insist—”

“I said I didn’t want you to talk,” Patrick said to him.