“Bastard knocked us both up at the same time. Otherwise, I would have left him.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this the first time I came here?”

“Why should I have?” Patty fired back. “I never seen the other kid. Didn’t know for sure it was her. I never wanted to see her.”

“But you knew when I showed you the picture.”

“She had my baby’s eyes. His eyes, the prick.” She faced Decker, hate oozing from every pore. “So now you come over here and mess everything all up.” She began to cry. “Make me suffer it all over again. Why, if you found out who the kid was…why in the hell did you come back here? To torture me?”

“Linda Darcy is dead,” Decker said.

That snapped her out of her self-pity. “Dead?” Patty sank onto the couch. She sat there for a minute, then eventually said, “Jesus, you don’t know how many times I wished her dead. God, do I feel weird.”

“You ever act on your wish?” Decker asked.

“Oh God, no,” Patty insisted. “No, no, no!”

Decker said nothing.

“God, I don’t know a thing about this Linda Darcy, other than the fact that my husband had screwed her. I’d never even seen her ’cept in a pitchure. A pitchure my husband kept in his wallet, till I made him rip it up.”

Decker said, “I need to talk to your husband.”

“No, Sergeant.” Patty Bingham was crying again. “No, you got it all wrong if you think Cliff had something to do with it. Cliff makes mistakes, he’s not perfect. But he’d never, ever do something like…”

“Like what?”

“Like murder!” Patty shrieked. “Why? What for? He loved her, for godsake! The affair ended three years ago. As soon as she got knocked up. She was the one who broke it off. Said she didn’t need him anymore. Cliff told me all about it six months later, cried on my shoulder, can you imagine such nerve? I was six months pregnant with this son of a bitch’s kid, and he was bawling in his soup that his whore mistress didn’t love him no more. Then he told me she was carrying his child.” Patti wiped tears from her eyes. “I threw up all over him.”

“What made him think it was his kid?”

“I don’t know. I guess she told him it was his,” Patti said. “I always thought that maybe she was lying until I saw that pitchure of that little kid. My gut knew who she was.”

“I still need to talk to your husband, Mrs. Bingham.”