Ten minutes later, they pulled into the strip mall lot. Myron put the car in park and smiled at Mickey. Mickey looked out the windshield, then back at Myron.

“You’re taking me for ice cream?”

“Come on,” Myron said.

“You’re kidding me, right?”

When they entered the SnowCap ice cream parlor, Kimberly wheeled over to them with her big smile and said, “Hey, you’re back! What can I get you?”

“Set up my nephew here with your SnowCap Melter. I need to talk to your father for a minute.”

“Sure thing. He’s in the back room.”

Karl Snow was going over invoices when Myron entered the room. He looked up at him over his reading glasses. “You promised you wouldn’t be back.”

“Sorry about that.”

“So why are you here?”

“Because you lied to me. You kept trying to peddle how pragmatic you’d been. Your daughter was dead, you said, and nothing could bring her back. There was no way Gabriel Wire would go to jail for it. So you took the hush money to help Kimberly. You explained it beautifully and rationally—and I just couldn’t buy a word of it. Not after I saw how you were with Kimberly. And then I thought about the order.”

“What order?”

“Lex Ryder calls Suzze and tells her that Gabriel Wire is dead. Suzze is in shock. She’s skeptical, so she visits Kitty to confirm that Lex is telling the truth. Okay, I get that.” Myron tilted his head. “But why then would Suzze go immediately from Kitty—the only one who witnessed Gabriel’s murder—to you?”

Karl Snow said nothing. He didn’t have to. Myron knew now. Lex had thought that Ache and Crisp killed Wire, but that made no sense. They had a good thing going with HorsePower.

“Gabriel Wire was rich and connected and going to get away with killing Alista. You saw that. You saw that he would never face justice for what he did to your daughter. So you acted. It’s ironic in a way.”

“What is?”

“The whole world thinks you sold out your daughter.”

“So?” Karl Snow said. “You think that matters to me? What the world thinks?”

“I guess not.”

“I told you before. Sometimes you have to love a child privately. Sometimes you have to grieve privately.”

And sometimes you have to get justice privately.

“Are you going to say anything?” Snow asked.

“No.”

He didn’t look relieved. He probably was thinking the same thing as Myron. The ripples. If Snow hadn’t gone vigilante—if he hadn’t killed Gabriel Wire—Kitty wouldn’t have witnessed it and run away. Myron’s brother might still be alive. Suzze T too. But you could only take that sort of logic so far. Myron’s own father had expressed the outrage of a parent outliving a child. Karl Snow’s daughter had been murdered. Right, wrong, who knew anymore?