“Fourteen is fourteen. Do you know how old fourteen is? That’s how old I was when my father died. I was just a child. Would you have let Mullaney fuck me, too, if he had wanted me?” She spit out the words contemptuously.

Lindsay was silent. It was Ellie’s right to call the shots at this point. Hope would get her life back, but Ellie needed this, too, and Lindsay and Hope had decided they were going to trust that her plan would work, as dangerous as it was.

“Trust me, Emilia Lopez was nothing like you.”

“Because her dad was undocumented, and mine was a cop?”

“No, because there’s fourteen and then there’s fourteen. You know, even now, the age of consent in this state is sixteen. And we’re talking about twenty-plus years ago.”

“So you admit you knew Mullaney was a predator.”

“You’re putting words in my mouth.”

“Learned the job from the very best, Uncle Steve. You admit you know Emilia Lopez, which means you were the cop who looked after her little brother. He called you after Hope showed up on that boat.” Ellie’s finger was in the older man’s face now. “His cell phone records show it was a short call. A message on your office voice mail is my guess. ‘Sorry for calling after all these years. I know I promised I never would . . .’ Something like that? The next day, a new number appears in Lopez’s phone records. An incoming call from a Chicago-based number. You used a burner. You probably gave him a hundred reasons not to worry about Hope—maybe she wasn’t really Tara King, or she simply hadn’t recognized him. You talked him down and thought he’d go away. But then he called the burner again, a month later, after that same woman moved to town.”

Thompson started to reach for his beer mug but took a sip of water instead.

“You tried to calm him down again,” Ellie continued. “Maybe you even looked up her name and found out about the amnesia. Did you offer him money to stop asking questions? Because one thing you definitely could not allow was for his story to come out, or everyone would know that you aided and abetted a serial rapist and then covered up the motivation for his murder. Hell, you even got a new job out of it. Bravo, by the way.”

“Jerry would be ashamed to hear you talk to me this way.”

Ellie flinched as his words hit their target. Lindsay couldn’t hold her tongue any longer.