But his effort went for naught. Predictably, the others were focused on Joe’s implication that too many loose ends remained.

“Why was Lucy killed?” Joe asked as an example.

“Why did they kill Kalfus?” Willy joined in. “He was just a thief.”

Sam added, “And why did Shaw do Seamus and not Herrick?” she asked.

Joe pointed at her. “I like that. What else?”

Lester joined in, if tentatively. “Why the fight between Kalfus and Shaw at the strip club?”

“Another good one,” Joe said. “And what about the passenger at Kalfus’s murder scene? Riding in the Mercedes with him? Who was that?”

He returned to Sam and repeated, “Why Seamus and not Herrick? What threat did one hold over Shaw the other didn’t? They each had long histories with both Shaws.”

“Geography,” Willy suggested. “Clyde told us he’d never been to the Shaws’ Gilsum house.”

“Seamus killed Lucy,” Lester said. “Clyde knew nothing about that side of things. It’s like the Shaws had two lives running in parallel—one involving stolen kids in Thomaston, the other more in plain view in Gilsum.”

“Seamus is the bridge between them,” Willy suggested. “Once a stolen boy, now a cat’s-paw of the lord and master, sidling up to an unsuspecting Lucy and killing her. If we’d been able to get hold of him before he went boom, he could’ve exposed everything.”

Joe picked up that. “Okay,” he said. “But by ‘everything,’ there’s more than what we’re seeing. To Lester’s point, there’s that fight between Shaw and Kalfus at the club. We never answered that adequately.”

“I was never satisfied Robin Whiteman was being straight, either,” Sam said. “She lied to us once, remember, when she first claimed she knew nothing about Don’s burglaries. Why not again? He did take her on one of his sprees. She could have been the mystery passenger in the Mercedes. If I’d been her, I wouldn’t have confessed to that trip.”

Joe was nodding as she spoke. “But then explain the body language. She’s on a joyride, like before, only this time, her boyfriend gets murdered by two people who meet up with him at a pull-off? And she stays in the car, even after one of them replaces Don behind the wheel and drives off? That doesn’t sound likely.”

“Not for the Robin Whiteman we’ve got in our heads,” Sammie argued. “But what if she’s playing a really dark, deep game? There may be a shitload more to that girl than we figured.”

“As there might be to Melissa Monfet,” Willy said. “Anybody remember her? She was having it all sorts of ways—screwing around with Don, looking away from what Buttner was doing to her own daughter. If anybody was designed to stay cool while her boyfriend’s beaten to death by a crazy old lady with a two-by-four, I say it’s Melissa. Could be she, Buttner, and the Shaws are all connected.”

“Okay, okay,” Joe responded, holding up both hands. “I like it. All of it. And it opens up the notion that the Shaws lived on three parallel tracks, not just two. But does any of it alter what we’ve got so far? Does it change any of our results?”