Tanner and Mendez pulled a pair of tall stools in beside Lauren’s bed, and settled in to listen, the pair of them madly scribbling notes in little spiral notebooks, even while a cassette recorder on the tray table absorbed every word she said.

“I let him into our lives,” she said of Greg Hewitt. The guilt was sharp and terrible.

“You couldn’t know what he was, Lauren,” Tanner said, her voice softer than Lauren remembered it. Her impression of Tanner had always been that she was brash and contentious. Or maybe that was me, she thought. “He was a predator, same as Ballencoa. That’s what they do. They take advantage of people.”

Lauren didn’t argue. She knew she could have checked Hewitt’s credentials. She would have known in a phone call whether or not he had his private investigator’s license. Would it have mattered? He had been willing to do what she wanted him to do. Her focus had been so set on Ballencoa, she would have made a deal with the devil himself.

Turned out, she had.

She wanted to go find Greg Hewitt’s body and kill him all over again for the beating he had given Leah. But at the heart of it, Lauren still believed it was her own fault. Her mission on behalf of Leslie had cost Leah a terrible price.

“Let me tell you something, Lauren,” Tanner said. She paused for a moment, glancing at Mendez out of the corner of her eye, as if weighing whether or not she wanted to share what she had to say with him as well. She took a deep breath and sighed, and began her story.

“When I was fourteen I was walking home from school with my best friend. Molly Nash. Molly was a really sweet girl. A girly girl. And I was . . . me. A tomboy. I picked the way home that day. I wanted to take a shortcut that took us through a not-so-great area. Molly didn’t want to go that way, but I teased her into it.

“So we were walking along and talking about boys, and we both had a crush on the same boy, and of course he didn’t know either one of us was alive,” she said, smiling at that part of the memory. Then the smile went away. “And . . . uh . . . these two men grabbed us off the street, and . . . we got raped. And I managed to get away, and I ran for help. But when I brought the police back to where it happened, the two men were gone, and my friend Molly . . . She didn’t make it. She died. And . . . um . . . the men were never caught. They got away with it. And I had to live with that. It had been my choice to go that way. If anybody should have died, it should have been me.”