She made frantic little muffled noises. Peaty’s hand slapped her so hard, her eyes rolled back. With one hand, Peaty pulled her up by her hair. The other edged closer to her throat.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Perfect,” said Brad. “This is Reynold. The two of you are going to improvise a little skit.”

I flicked off the picture.

Milo was wide awake, looking sadder than I’d ever seen him.

I said, “You told me so,” and walked out of the room.

CHAPTER 46

CHAPTER 46

The next week was emotional bouillabaisse.

Trying, with no success, to get Billy Dowd more appropriate lodgings and regular therapy.

Fending off Erica Weiss’s requests for another deposition, so she could “slam the final nail in Hauser’s coffin.”

Ignoring increasingly strident calls from Hauser’s defense attorney.

I hadn’t been to the station since viewing the DVD. Six minutes watching a girl I’d never met.

The day I moved Robin in, I pretended my head was clear. After I schlepped the last carton of her clothes into the bedroom, she sat me down on the edge of the mattress, rubbed my temples, and kissed the back of my neck. “Still thinking about it, huh?”

“Using unfamiliar muscles. The ribs don’t help.”

“Don’t waste energy trying to convince me,” she said. “This time I know what I’m getting myself into.”

* * *

My contact with Milo was limited to one eleven p.m. phone call. His voice, thick with fatigue, wondering if I could take care of some “ancillary stuff” while he coped with the mountain of evidence on what the papers were calling the “Bomb Shelter Murders.”

One nitwit columnist in the Times trying to connect it to “Cold War paranoia.”

I said, “Sure. What’s ancillary stuff?”

“Anything you can do better than me.”

* * *

That came down to being a grief sponge.

A forty-five-minute session with Lou and Arlene Giacomo lasted two hours. He’d lost weight since I’d seen him and his eyes were dead. She was a quiet, dignified woman, hunched over like someone twice her age.

I sat there as his rage alternated with her anguished accounts of Life With Tori, the two of them trading off with a rhythm so precise it could’ve been scripted. As the time ground on, their chairs edged farther and farther apart. Arlene was talking about Tori’s confirmation dress when Lou shot to his feet, snarling, and left my office. She started to apologize, changed her mind. We found him down by the pond, feeding the fish. They left silently and neither answered my calls that night. The clerk at their hotel said they’d checked out.