He licked mayo off his thumb and held it up. “First off, the unknowns on the outside of the suitcase. They could be nothing, but if this were my investigation, I’d want to identify them before I closed the case out.”

I was pretty sure who had left those unknowns, but I didn’t feel like sharing. I said, “So would I. Anything else?”

“Yeah. The other thing is, right”—a finger went up—“why no prints on the first page of the note? Wiping the second page makes sense: if anyone starts getting suspicious and reports Rose missing, Kevin doesn’t want the cops finding his prints on her good-bye letter. But the first page? He takes it out from wherever he’s been keeping it all this time, he’s planning to use it as a suicide note and a confession, right, but he wipes it clean and uses gloves to stick it in his pocket? In case what, someone connects it to him?”

“And what does Detective Kennedy have to say about that?”

“He says minor anomaly, no biggie, every case has them. Kevin wipes both pages that first night, hides the first one away, when he takes it back out he doesn’t leave prints—people don’t always. Which is true enough, except . . . We’re talking about someone who’s about to kill himself. Someone who’s basically confessing to murder. I don’t care how cool you are, you’re going to be sweating like a motherf—like mad. And when you sweat, you leave prints.” Stephen shook his head. “That page should have prints,” he said, “end of story,” and he went back to demolishing his sandwich.

I said, “Just for fun, let’s try something. Let’s assume for a moment that my old friend Detective Kennedy is off base for once, and Kevin Mackey didn’t kill Rose Daly. Then what’ve we got?”

Stephen watched me. He asked, “Are we assuming Kevin was murdered too?”

“You tell me.”

“If he didn’t wipe off that note and put it in his own pocket, someone else did it for him. I’m going with murder.”

I felt that sudden, treacherous flood of affection rush through me again. I almost got the kid in a headlock and tousled his hair. “Works for me,” I said. “And what do we know about the murderer?”

“We’re thinking it’s the one person?”

“I sincerely hope so. My neighborhood may be a little on the freaky side, but I’m hoping to God it’s not freaky enough to have two separate killers doing their thing on the one road.”