Everything Joe had learned tonight filled the gaps they’d identified. But this, he hadn’t seen coming. He’d thought Shaw had ordered his wife killed as a result of that night. By striking Don Kalfus, she’d become a liability to Shaw—yet another fall guy—which her jealousy over Cheri hadn’t helped. But this cold-blooded addendum of committing his lover to a blood oath?

“How did you do it?” he asked quietly.

“Lem said if I didn’t, he’d claim I’d done it anyhow. ‘I want you where I can find you,’ he said. He told me I didn’t have a choice. I had to do it so we were all in the same boat. Everybody with blood on their hands.”

Joe sat utterly still, the cruelty of what he’d heard escalating to a near-biblical vision of sacrifice, orchestrated by a puppeteer of monstrous dimensions.

“He said Donny was finished anyways. His head was crushed. He may have been breathin’, but he was dyin’ anyhow. Lem reminded me of what a turd Donny had been. He made it sound like no big deal, finally.”

“So, what did you do?” Joe asked, sensing he already knew the answer.

She confirmed it. “I used a plastic bag,” she replied. “There was one in the trunk, with some things in it. Lem emptied it and had me put it over Donny’s head. He didn’t struggle. He just stopped breathin’ after a while.”

She stayed silent after that, inert and closed down, emptied out.

Joe steered away from the black hole of such perversion and concentrated on the facts. This confessional moment with Cheri—complete with a shotgun resting against the wall—was never going to be repeated. He fought to put himself in the moment she’d just described, of a manipulated woman given to impulse, now a victim of her own unharnessed appetites, and thought of one outstanding detail—the piece of evidence he and his squad had used to open the case at the very beginning.

“Why did we find that old flip phone in the car?” he asked.

Her eyes opened. “You found that?”

“Yes.”

“It helped?”

“Yes. It was very important. But if Don didn’t rob the Shaws, you must’ve stolen it.”

“It was in a glass case,” she explained. “Really weird. An old, dead phone, like a trophy or somethin’, labeled ‘#1,’ with a bunch of other strange junk—a pocketknife, a comb, I remember there was a hat. They all had different numbers. Number one had to mean something, so, I grabbed it. And after Lem made me kill Donny, I took it out of my coat pocket, where I always kept it. I knew it was important. I dropped it into the trunk, hopin’ it might cause him some pain.”

She reached out and put her hand on Joe’s arm. “You tellin’ me it worked?”

He didn’t answer.

Her face was transformed by wonder. “I’ll be damned.”

ALSO BY ARCHER MAYOR

Marked Man

The Orphan’s Guilt

Bomber’s Moon

Bury the Lead

Trace

Presumption of Guilt