As Kimathi spoke, I realized that was what my house-and-office wreckers had been hunting: the picture that showed who killed Harmony Newsome. That’s why Petra wanted to see my childhood homes, to see if Tony had taken that vital piece of evidence away, a picture that proved who killed Harmony. Would it be his brother in the frame? Would Tony go that far, out of loyalty to his family, and steal evidence and hide it at home?

“What happened to Lumumba?” I felt as though I were splitting in two, between the emotions pounding inside me and my calm investigator’s voice asking questions.

Curtis shook his head. “Johnny knows. It happened during the blizzard, that much I can tell you.”

“You were at the Waltz Right Inn the night before the storm,” I said.

Rivers nodded fractionally. “Lamont came in with Johnny, like Sister Rose said. They went off into the back room, talked between themselves, then came out, joined the party. Lamont took off about two a.m. And that was the last time we saw him.”

“Johnny went with him?”

“No. And they weren’t fighting. Believe me, if Johnny had wanted to put a hit out on Lamont, we all would have known. But we were scared about what was happening to Steve … to Kimathi. I think Johnny and Lamont were talking about that, talking about whatever pictures Lamont said he had.”

“You think Lamont is dead?”

“I’m sure Lamont is dead,” Curtis said. “Brother didn’t have anyplace to hide that we didn’t know about. Miss Ella, she had family in Louisiana. They would have taken him. But we still would have heard. If anyone knows what happened to Lamont, it’s Johnny. I thought Johnny had seen a demon himself, when the snow cleared and we all crawled out again. After that storm, he would never let anyone mention Lamont’s name on the street around him.”

I squeezed my forehead with my hand. “What can I possibly offer Johnny Merton that would get him to talk to me? He wants the Innocence Project working for him, but frankly—”

“He’s not innocent of what they sent him down for, but he never killed Lamont Gadsden.”

I fished in the handbag, looking for a tissue, before remembering the bag belonged to the shop. The machinist chess player pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and let me wipe my face and hands. All four of us knew what I could offer Johnny Merton: proof of who really killed Harmony, proof of who killed Lamont and where his body rested.

Kimathi telling his story, me collapsing in the face of it, that had shifted the relationships in the room. Rivers and his friends weren’t on my side, exactly, but I was no longer an enemy. I guess you could say I was on probation.