And I was Mom. And Mom was worse.

I couldn’t help myself. My thoughts drifted to glass vials and their floating dermal contents, tucked in a shoe box beneath my closet floor. What would Shana think to know that my life wasn’t quite as bland and lily-white as she thought? That she, Dad and I had something in common after all?

I pulled myself together, refocusing on the letters.

“What does he want?” I asked now.

“To ask her some questions.”

I held up the letters. “Did he?”

“No. He just keeps including information for her to contact him.”

“And he doesn’t admit that he’s the victim’s cousin. You found that out on your own.”

“Exactly.”

“So already, his motives are suspect.”

“I’d be suspicious,” Superintendent McKinnon agreed.

“Do you think Shana knows?”

The superintendent paused, regarded me anew.

“Why do you think she’d suspect a personal connection between the reporter and Donnie Johnson?”

I shrugged. “According to you, these letters upset Shana. Why? Just some reporter asking her to get in touch? You know Shana as well as I do. She’s bored, she’s clever, she’s highly manipulative. I guess I would’ve assumed that she’d find this kind of outreach . . . intriguing.”

“You ever talk to her about Donnie?” Superintendent McKinnon asked me.

“We’ve danced around it from time to time.” But maybe not as often as other topics, such as our family.

“She didn’t answer your questions.”

“That’s never been her style.”

“She doesn’t talk about him. Never has. In all her years here, the counselors and psychologists and social workers who’ve cycled through . . . Shana doesn’t talk about him. The boy she stabbed when she was eleven, I know about him. The ho, in her terms, she had to gut when she was first incarcerated at sixteen, I know about her. But the Johnson boy. She never goes there.”

I frowned, considering. Shana could be very explicit in her talk of violence. Fantasies about gutting this person, killing that person. There didn’t seem to be anything too shocking, too graphic, too offensive, for her to say. Then again, if you boiled all her words down, parsed them away . . . She babbled. She offered forth exactly the kind of violent chatter you’d expect of a multiple murderer. Homicidal white noise that drowned out the rest of the conversation and kept you from continuing.

I could tell you now that if I asked Shana why she killed Donnie Johnson, she’d shrug and say because. Shana considered herself to be a superpredator, and superpredators didn’t apologize. Superpredators didn’t feel they owed their prey that much.

But it might be interesting to ask her why she didn’t talk about the boy. Or why she hadn’t responded to the journalist. Or perhaps even more interesting, why she had never mentioned any of the letters to me.