My wife sees the tequila but doesn’t remark on it. Or say a word about my increasing need to drink. A finger wag. A headshake. Nothing more.

“Let’s go to bed,” she says. “You are fine, Connor. You are a good man. I need you to stop this train of thought right now. Okay?”

She reaches over and shuts off the computer.

I look up and soak in the light that Kristen has always been. “Right,” I say. “Okay. Right.”

She’s got my back, and I don’t deserve it. I know that too.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

LEE

I don’t recognize the number when the call comes through to my desk phone.

“I know you don’t give a shit,” the voice says right after I pick up. “But I didn’t do anything to Sophie Warner.”

The connection isn’t great. At once it crackles and fades. That doesn’t matter. I recognize the voice.

“Mr. Coyle? Is that you?”

He doesn’t answer immediately.

“It’s me, and I’m done,” he says. “I’m done being the whipping boy for investigators who have something to prove. I didn’t do anything wrong in that other incident, and I didn’t do anything to Sophie Warner.”

The word incident sticks in my brain.

“You need to come in,” I say, straining to hear any background noise, any clues as to where Jim Coyle might be. His truck is moving. That much I can tell.

“No point in it,” he says. “I’m about done anyway. You’re just making things move along faster.”

“Please,” I say. “You need to come in. You need to clear yourself.”

“Look, Detective. I don’t need to do anything. My life has been fucked up since I went to prison. I’m dying, lady. I’m about done.”

“What do you mean? Dying?”

A long pause. “Cancer,” he says, spitting out one of the hardest words anyone can utter when it’s taken over their life. “If you really need to know. Probably caused by the likes of you and all the bullshit that I went through.”

As the phone crackles and his voice fades in and out, he tells me his doctor’s name and how he’s been seeking an alternative treatment because he had no medical coverage through the trucking firm. I don’t know how that could be, but I write down every word. He tells me how he kept it to himself because he didn’t want to lose his job.

“They’d bounce me out the second they could.”

“That’s against the law,” I say.