That’s when another thought hits me. “Dana’s phone must have been turned off at the office, right? Otherwise, it would have pinged after six and shown us where she went after work. But it didn’t. How could Stuart have done that? There’s no evidence he was anywhere near Dana’s office on the day of the murder.”

Gabriel smiles at my concern, as if to tell me that this is not something to worry about. “When I was a kid, I was into model making,” he says, a seeming non sequitur, but one which I’m sure will reveal its purpose soon. “I don’t think anyone does that anymore, but I could spend hours. I was really good at following directions and piecing things together. Shocker that I became a detective, right? But my point is that, when I finished, I’d always have some leftover pieces. My model would look exactly like the picture on the box, and the directions didn’t say that there were extra pieces, in case you lost one or something, but there they would be, just sitting there, mocking me. Once, I even took a model back apart. I literally broke it after I’d finished it, because it was glued together. But I just had to know if I’d missed something. I hadn’t; there were just some pieces that didn’t fit. They weren’t even duplicates. They were . . . extras. Maybe pieces from a different model even, that had somehow found their way into my box.”

“And that’s relevant to the murder why?” I say.

“Sometimes all the evidence doesn’t fit either, Ella. Maybe Dana’s phone lost its charge. That’s not something Dana would remember, right? She’d just take her phone home and plug it in. But when she got home, maybe Stuart took it off her nightstand and made sure it was turned off. In that case, the evidence fits without Stuart needing to be some criminal mastermind thinking through every angle. He’s just a guy who got lucky. Or more likely, he saw the opportunity and took advantage of it.”

56. DANA GOODWIN

56.

DANA GOODWIN

“My guess is that it’s to explore a plea,” LeMarcus says from the back of a cab on our way downtown to meet Ella Broden.

It’s at least the third time he’s expressed this view since Ella called about a half hour ago and requested that we meet with her right away. I don’t know why Ella suggested this meeting, but I’m reasonably sure it’s not to offer me a plea. The case is going too well for her to cut me a break now. Something else must be going on.

“Yeah, maybe,” I say.

There’s no reason to rack my brain with possibilities, however. I’ll find out within the hour why she’s asked us to come see her on a Sunday morning.