I wanted to defend Caro. She was an honest person, and I knew she devoted herself to helping people. Jude had mentioned all the money my sister had given Diotima, and it wasn’t the only charity. But I felt bile rise in my throat as I contemplated Caro’s awareness of her in-laws’ criminal ventures. I could hear her voice when I’d called her in a panic about the letter our mother had written. Ignore it. Focus on your own life. Maybe it wasn’t fair of me to think about that—Caro had been all of twenty when she’d said those words to me—but I knew my sister was willing to turn a blind eye to issues that didn’t concern her.

I took a drink. “I don’t understand the scam.”

“Hotels are a shady business,” Ben said. “Their clients can be from anywhere in the world, and you can’t prove they exist. They play it like every room is full, and everyone’s ordering room service and flowers and getting massages. You can launder millions through one hotel that way.”

I swallowed hard. Going over the spreadsheets with Reagan, we’d assumed the lowball number was fake and that the Thraxtons were hiding money from the tax man. It hadn’t occurred to us that they’d fake the profits.

“How long have they been doing this?”

“Years. When I expose them, Theo’s going to jail.”

“But Theo’s the one who left the family business,” I pointed out. “How’s he responsible?”

Ben’s mouth tightened in a snarl, like he was ready to curse me out. “Are you on his side?”

“Of course not. But I don’t understand how this implicates Theo. It’s the rest of his family who’d go to jail.”

“Fuck the Thraxtons,” Ben said, spitting out their name contemptuously. “They think they’re better than everyone else, but they’re just a bunch of crooks.”

I sat there, trying to make sense of it. “Ben, my sister wrote me a message saying that her husband had murdered someone else. She was afraid he’d do the same thing to her.”

“He did.”

“Then why are you obsessing about the business? Because that doesn’t touch Theo.”

“What’s your big idea?” He kicked at a pigeon, who stood its ground and gave him a dirty look.

“Theo killed a woman—girlfriend, wife, whatever you want to call her—in Berlin when he was a student there. His father admitted it to me.”

“Caroline told me about it. She couldn’t even get the woman’s name. It’s a dead end.”