“It’s not that simple.”

“Oh, well, thank heaven. Look, Mr. Kenzie, twenty-five years ago I asked out Carol Yaeger of Chevy Chase, Maryland, and she laughed in my face. But that doesn’t—”

“Hard to believe,” Devin said.

“—mean I thought it perfectly logical to wait a couple of decades and kill everyone she ever knew.”

“Bolton,” I said, “I’d love to keep watching you dig yourself a hole here, but time is short. You bring the Hardiman, Rugglestone, and Morrison files like I asked?”

He patted his briefcase. “Right here.”

“Open ’em.”

“Mr. Kenzie—”

“Please.”

He opened the briefcase, pulled out the files, and set them on the kitchen table. “And?”

“Check the ME’s report on Rugglestone. Specifically look at the section on unexplained toxins.”

He found it, adjusted his glasses. “Yes?”

“What was found in Rugglestone’s facial lacerations?”

He read: “’Lemon extract; hydrogen peroxide; talc, mineral oil, stearic acid, peg-thirty-two, triethanolamine, lanolin…all consistent with ingredients of white Pan-Cake makeup.’” He looked up. “So?”

“Read Hardiman’s file. Same section.”

He flipped a few pages and did.

“So? They were both wearing makeup.”

“White Pan-Cake,” I said. “The kind mimes use,” I said. “And clowns.”

“I see what—”

“Cal Morrison was found with the same properties under his fingernails.”

He opened the Morrison file, leafed through it until he found it.

“Still,” he said.

“Find the photograph of the van found outside the murder site—it was registered to Rugglestone.”

He leafed through the file. “Here it is.”

“It’s missing the windshield,” I said.

“Yes.”

“But the van had been hosed clean, probably that day. Sometime between the hosing and the time the police found it, someone chucked some cinderblocks through the windshield, probably while Rugglestone was being murdered.”

“So?”

“So, I’d marked the windshield. I threw the baseball and put a spiderweb in the center. That was the only thing to suggest Hardiman and Rugglestone were the clowns. Remove the mark, remove the motive.”

“What’s your point?”

I didn’t truly believe it until I said it.

“I think EEPA killed Charles Rugglestone.”

“He’s right,” Devin said eventually.

The hail had turned to rain shortly after eight, and the rain froze almost as soon as it hit. Streaks of water bled down Angie’s windows and rippled into veins of crackling ice before our eyes.

Bolton had sent an agent back to the RV to make copies of the Rugglestone, Hardiman, and Morrison files, and we’d spent the last hour reading them in Angie’s dining room.

Bolton said, “I’m not so sure.”

“Please,” Angie said. “It’s all here if you look at it right. Everyone goes on the assumption that Alec Hardiman, loaded up on PCP, does the work of ten men when he kills Rugglestone. And if I was convinced Hardiman had killed several other people, I probably would have been swayed, too. But he had nerve damage in his left hand, seconol in his system, and was found passed out. Now, you look at Rugglestone’s wounds with the idea that maybe ten people—or, say, seven—were involved, and it makes perfect sense.”