We arrived at a single unisex bathroom, complete with a windowed door that eliminated any chance of an inmate’s—or visitor’s—privacy. I’d been hanging around the prison long enough to know the facilities. I stuck to washing my hands and nothing else.

D.D. waited in the corridor.

“Do you think she really knows something?” she asked when I reemerged. “A connection between your father’s forty-year-old crimes and these recent killings?”

I hesitated. “Do you know a reporter by the name of Charlie Sgarzi?”

The detective shook her head. We worked our way back to Phil and Superintendent McKinnon.

“He’s the cousin of Shana’s twelve-year-old victim, Donnie Johnson,” I explained as we walked. “He’s been writing to Shana for the past three months now, requesting permission to interview her for a book he’s writing on his cousin’s murder. Given how much damage Shana did to his family, he feels she owes him one.”

“Okay.”

“Shana never replied to his letters, so he showed up on my doorstep last night in order to plead his case in person. He also claims to have interviewed other inmates who once served time with Shana. According to him, they say she knows things she shouldn’t know. As if she still has connections to the outside world and can manipulate things from behind bars.”

“Like a crime boss?” D.D. asked, frowning.

“Possibly. Except here’s the issue: Shana doesn’t bond with fellow inmates, exchange notes with pen pals or entertain during visiting hours. I am her sole guest each month. Otherwise she spends twenty-three hours a day locked in the isolation of her cell. I can’t picture her having the capability, let alone the opportunity, to forge the kind of complex social network required to reach beyond the prison walls. And yet . . .” My voice trailed off.

“Yet?”

“She does know things. Small, random things, say, the color of a new sweater I recently purchased. The kind of details that are slightly worrisome, but not significant. And easy enough to explain away. Maybe I mentioned the sweater purchase and just forgot. Except . . . There have been more and more of those kinds of observations lately. The past few months, each time I’ve visited, my sister has known something about me that, in theory, she shouldn’t.”

“You think she’s watching you? Or, more accurately, having someone else watch you?”

“I don’t know what to think.”

“One hundred and fifty-three,” D.D. prodded.

I shook my head. “I don’t know what that means.”

“Nothing about that number that reminds you of Harry Day?”

“No. I’ll have to check the case files.”