“Twelve.”

“You were almost a teenager when he was born.”

A shadow passed across his face. “What’s your point?”

“Not making a point, I just wonder how well you know him—now, I mean. A lot of siblings grow apart as they get older.”

“That didn’t happen to us.”

“Fair enough. So, Flynn. Why don’t you tell me what happened last night?”

That muscle again. It slid beneath the surface of his skin like an eel in shallow water. It wasn’t just that I didn’t like the guy for hiding up here while the rest of his family was downstairs. Something about Flynn’s body language made me edgy. “If I knew,” he said coolly, “you wouldn’t be here.”

“Why don’t you walk me through yesterday and we’ll see what we can turn up?”

“My brother’s been gone for hours. There’s a goddamn hurricane outside. It’s fucking freezing, and Jasper’s jacket and shoes are sitting in the mudroom downstairs. You’re wasting time. She’s right downstairs.” To make his point Flynn slammed the sole of his shoe against the floor. It was an oil-tanned leather moccasin dyed navy, fine, and out of season. No wonder he’d opted to join the search party that stayed indoors.

I’d been with Flynn ten minutes and already the ridges of my ears were tingling. He hadn’t relinquished the pillow, but the vulnerability I witnessed when I entered the room had been replaced with an aggression so intense it radiated from his body in waves. In my academy days, when we were learning to use our firearms, we’d compete to see who was the quickest draw. We would stand back-to-back, western-movie style, while an instructor manned the stopwatch, tapping his foot in wait. He was deadly serious about our reaction time on those drills—in the city, the fastest draw is the one who survives—but we had other motives for winning. Fastest draw was bragging rights, and bragging rights were currency in the academy. Plenty of times it was me who was flush.

It isn’t that Flynn’s hostility had me worried. I could be on my feet with my weapon trained on his chest in just over a second. What worried me was that this shifty witness would go to scratch his nose and I’d instinctively put a bullet in his big, hairy head. I was jumpier now than I used to be back in the academy. Before Bram.

Like my instructor during those drills, I tapped my foot, and waited. I figured Flynn for a hothead. He’d lash out, lean on his strength to get his way. But he didn’t. His shoulders began to relax.

“I was working yesterday,” he said at last. “I’m always working. I barely saw Jas at all.”

“Walk me through it anyway. The whole day. Give me every detail you remember.”

I crossed my legs and leaned back in the chair to make it clear I expected a long story. Flynn glared at me, sighed, then started to talk.

Interviewing a witness effectively hinges on a series of questions designed to draw out the who, what, where, when, and why of a crime. I let them do most of the talking and keep interruptions to a minimum. Some people call that free recall. It’s a good way to tap a person’s memory of the time frame in question, a kind of stream-of-consciousness exercise that helps me extract the details I need with as much accuracy as possible.