“She’s a mess,” Olivia said. “Dead, of course. Was that Lewis pounding on your door? I couldn’t tell.”

“Yeah, he’s in here.” Manfred stood aside, and Olivia could feel herself smiling as she looked down at Lewis. “You’re a mess, too,” she said. And he was. He smelled like pee, his clothes were wet and dirty, and he was clearly very shocked by what had just happened. But she’d met a few Lewises before, and she knew that very soon he’d revert to being his disagreeable and unbalanced self.

She was right.

“You, you, you . . . crazy people!” Lewis was pulling himself up as he sputtered.

“Why’d you come here, Lewis?” she asked.

Manfred said, “Good question, Olivia. Lewis?”

“To tell you . . . to tell you . . .” he began, but he couldn’t think of a good ending for his sentence.

“Do you think he came to kill me?” Manfred asked Olivia.

She patted Lewis down. It was unpleasant to touch him, but she was not one to flinch at unpleasant things.

“No,” she said. “Unless words can turn to stones. I don’t think Lewis has the balls to kill someone. He likes to screech at ’em, though.”

“You people should be locked up,” Lewis said. But it had no force behind it. He was exhausted, at least for the moment. He did muster up a spark of defiance, just enough to make him draw his hand back to slap Olivia, but she caught his arm with no trouble at all and bent it the wrong way. He began to sob.

“Olivia,” Manfred admonished her. “I think we’ve heard enough from him for one night.”

“I agree,” she said. “Lewis, pipe down.”

Lewis made a poor effort to do so.

She opened the door. “Just go home,” she said. “And never talk to anyone about tonight. Or Manfred will bring charges for trespassing and assault against you. You know, I bet you’d really, really hate jail.”

Lewis staggered out the door and to his car, moving with almost frantic clumsiness to pull open its door and dive inside. He locked the doors. In the quiet night, Olivia could hear the click. He didn’t even glance over at the mangled corpse.

“I wouldn’t want to be on the road with him driving tonight,” she said, as they watched the car lurch backward and then go to the intersection. Lewis turned south, probably going to the interstate.

“And yet we’re not stopping him,” Manfred said. He sounded angry. Surprised, Olivia swung around.

“You have issues with the way I handled that?” She was beginning to get angry herself.