The smile shifted again. Amusement. Like he knew more than they did. Lindsay assumed he wanted to say something to make him feel smarter than them but didn’t want to implicate himself. She decided to wipe the smirk from his face with another brick.

“We’ve met with Melanie Locke,” Lindsay said. Melanie had kept her promise to contact her after their initial conversation at Wharton and was also cooperating fully with Carter Decker. “She says she never heard one word about these women being paid off. Whether that’s true or not, you know people will believe her. She’s laying every little bit of this at your feet. She’s the victim here, hoodwinked all these years by her husband’s wingman. Your job is gone.”

“The WPD will go after your pension, too,” Ellie added. “You saw how they fought my family after my father died.”

“Well, unlike my old partner, I’ve saved plenty of money.”

“When I told my father about that girl at school—what she said about her sister and the camp—he said he’d look into it.”

“And I told you he never mentioned it to me,” he said firmly.

“It took me a long time to come to terms with this, but my father was not a good father. He cared more about the job than he cared about us. Shit, he cared about you more than us. He didn’t even pretend to be the kind of guy who was going to show up to my school concerts or soccer games. But when he told us he would do something for us, he did it. And I remember the look on his face when I went to him about the camp. He was so disturbed. He got angry and told me that something so terrible should not be gossip on a school playground. That it was the worst kind of harm an adult could perpetuate against a child. So I know he looked into it.”

“And I told you that if he did, he never said a word about it to me.”

“You were his best friend on the force. And, unlike him, you were still helping out at the camp. He was way too far down the William Summer rabbit hole by then to have time for anything else.”

Thompson jabbed an index finger across the table. “Don’t you dare,” he hissed.