“I’ve thought about it most of the night, and this is what I think happened,” she said after she’d taken a sip. “I’ve looked back over the news coverage of the deaths at Vespers, including Rachel’s. Of course I stayed out of sight when the police and press arrived at first about the Devlins. But I think I was in the background of one of the news stories about Rachel’s death, because there were several reporters there already to cover the double murder.” She said this without the least trace of self-consciousness, as if she had nothing to do with the deaths of the man and his wife. “I think that I was spotted—maybe by facial recognition software. Since the story was about the huge coincidence that the same hotel had had a murder/suicide and a sudden death in the same twenty-four hours, the people looking for me covered all the bases.”

“You think they’re somehow hanging around the Devlin house, too?” Manfred said. He didn’t know what to think. Maybe Olivia had worried herself into a mental corner.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” she said. “I wondered if they’d staked out the Goldthorpe house, but after I thought about it, I decided the man, Falco, asked Lewis, or the maid, some questions about anyone who’d come by the house lately. Lewis would definitely have blabbed about the stranger who’d been there that day, the blonde who’d been asking about Rachel’s application for home health care. So I think this guy was posted there just in case, and he got lucky.” She smiled. “Or so he thought.”

“I kind of followed that,” Manfred said, after working it through. “So you have a long-standing enemy who has a lot, a lot, of money and persistence.”

“Yeah. My dad. And most specifically, my dad’s shadow, Ellery McGuire.”

“Didn’t see that coming,” Manfred said after a moment’s silence. He knew that Olivia would be angry when she realized how much she had told him; he could only blame her talkative bout on the lack of sleep and the shock.

He had no idea who his own father had been, but that had left him at liberty to imagine his father loved him and had had to be absent for some fabulous reason. At least his father had never sent a henchman to capture him. “And you told me this because?”

“Because you were able to tell I was in trouble last night. You somehow knew. How’d you do that?”

“The piece of paper with the phone number on it. You told me not to enter it in my phone. And you’d written on the paper yourself, which made it a personal object. When I held it, I knew you were in trouble.”

She nodded, just a quick jerk of her head. “Okay. I won’t doubt you again.”