“Keep her father’s name out of your mouth. We know everything. You tried to keep Alex quiet, but his mind was made up. He confronted Hope. She was terrified. She had no idea what he was talking about. She thought he was trying to kill her. He realized then that she wasn’t faking. She had lost fifteen years of her life because of what he did. He called his sister to say he was turning himself in. And then he called you. You couldn’t allow that to happen. You killed him the next day.”

“You can’t possibly believe this.” Thompson reached for Ellie’s hand on the table, but she pulled it away.

Instead, she reached her purse for a set of printouts, unfolded them, and slid the papers across the table. “We have the flight records, Steve. You flew to Boston Sunday morning—just hours after Alex told you he’d made his decision to confess.” She flipped to a second page. “You rented a car at the airport. The mileage was just about right for you to have taken the ferry over to Long Island.” Carter Decker had shared the documents after they told him what to ask for.

“You mean this happened while I was in Boston? I went to see my brother. I go there every few months. You know that, Ellie. And I have no idea how many miles I put on the car, but I drove out to the Cape to see the ocean. Not exactly beach scenery around here, as you know.”

Lindsay could see that Thompson was getting nervous. She stacked yet another brick in the walls they were building around him. “Carter Decker just left your brother’s house.”

“Mark only hung tough for twenty minutes before he broke,” Ellie added. “Your trip wasn’t planned. You called him Sunday morning and told him you had vacation time you needed to use or lose and to expect you late that night. The reality is that you were already in Boston when you called. The early direct flight from KC landed at eleven a.m. You didn’t show up to your brother’s until nearly ten at night.”

Thompson forced himself to smile as if he were laughing off a ridiculous conversation, but the effect was unsettling. Lindsay was convinced that she was looking into the face of a sociopath.

“You’re too good of a cop for this, Els Bells. It’s a nice theory, but it’s not proof.”

“Well, I’m apparently a better cop than you are,” she replied. “It was a stupid move to plant that necklace on Lopez’s boat. It was the only thing that tied him to Mullaney’s murder, which eventually brought us here—to you.”