“Eric, I want to thank you again for your willingness to participate in The Orphans of Murder. Our goal is an honest, unrehearsed presentation of your thoughts and feelings. Nothing is off-limits, nothing is out of bounds. We’re in your home, not on a studio set. The story is yours, the emotions are yours. Begin wherever you wish.”

He took a long, shaky breath. “I’ll begin by answering the question you asked me when you walked into the kitchen a few minutes ago. You asked me how long I’ve lived here. The answer is twenty years. Half of those years in heaven, half in hell.” He paused. “The first ten years, I lived in a world of sunlight cast by a remarkable woman, the last ten years in shadowland.”

Kim let a long silence pass before responding in a soft, sad voice. “Sometimes it’s the depth of the pain that tells us how much we’ve lost.”

Stone nodded. “Mother was a rock. A rocket. A volcano. She was a force of nature. Let me repeat that—a force of nature. It’s a cliché, but a good one. Losing her was like having the law of gravity repealed. The law of gravity—repealed! Imagine that. A world without gravity. A world with nothing to hold it together.”

The man’s eyes were glistening with incipient tears.

Kim’s next words were a surprise. She asked Stone if she could have a cookie.

He burst out laughing—a giddy, hysterical outpouring that sent the tears down his cheeks. “Yes, yes, of course you can! My gingersnaps just came out of the oven, but there are also pecan chocolate chips, buttery-buttery shortbreads, and oatmeal raisin. All baked today.”

“I think oatmeal raisin,” she said.

“An excellent choice, madam.” He sounded like he was, through his tears, attempting to mimic a smarmy sommelier. He went to the far end of the kitchen and retrieved a plate heaped with large brown cookies from the top of the oven. Kim held up her third camera, keeping him in the frame all the while.

As he was about to lay the plate on the table, a thought seemed to stop him. He turned to Gurney. “Ten years,” he said, as if some new significance in the number had taken him by surprise. “Exactly ten years. A full decade.” The pitch of his voice rose dramatically. “Ten years, and I’m still a basket case. What do you make of that, Detective? Does my pathetic condition motivate you to find, arrest, and execute the evil fucker who murdered the most incredible woman in the world? Or am I so ridiculous you just want to laugh?”

Gurney tended to ice over at displays of emotion. Now was no exception. He answered with a matter-of-fact blandness. “I’ll do everything I can.”

Stone gave him an archly skeptical look but didn’t pursue the issue.