She found the town borderline monstrous in its perfection these days, a gracious matriarch who’d undergone one too many facelifts. And the Tarry Ridge police headquarters was a perfect example. She remembered visiting the station with her fourth-grade class, and it had been a third this size back then—a simple brick colonial building with a patch of lawn out front. Perfectly reasonable for its purposes. Now, it had a rose garden out front—ten varieties of roses!—and the inside was even sillier in its excess. The interview room where Morasco had taken her could have probably held an entire New York City precinct house. She peered around the room—the freshly painted cream walls, the leather cushions on the chairs, the enormous plexiglass table that looked as though it had been shipped in from MoMA. One chair had been pulled up to the table, on which had been placed a digital recorder and some bagged items—a belt, a watch, a wallet, and wedding ring, and various other items that had been found on Quentin. “Thanks for setting this up for me,” Robin said.

“Actually,” said Morasco, “this is all for Dean Conrad. I’m sneaking you in early.”

“Oh yes. Of course.”

“How’s your mom doing?”

Robin looked at him. “She says she remembers less now about that night than when it actually happened.”

“That’s a blessing.”

“I guess.”

“If you don’t mind my asking,” he said. “What made you decide to listen to the recording?”

“Well . . . I read about the note in the New York Post.”

“Yeah, we’re thrilled about that.”

“I know. The leak sucks,” Robin said. “But I was glad I saw it because there was something weird about the note. I want to see if he talks the same way in the audio.”

“What do you mean by weird?”

“Okay.” She set the headphones down. “So, I did a little research on Quentin Garrison online. This was before the suicide. Back when I was just curious about him.”

“Yeah?”

“He doesn’t seem like the kind of person who’d apologize to ‘friends and family.’ I mean, what family?”

He blinked at her.

“I guess when I say it out loud, it doesn’t exactly sound like a smoking gun.”

Morasco gave her a sad smile. “He was a troubled guy,” he said.

“You’re sure about that.”

“He had a record. We didn’t see it right away because it happened when he was a minor. Shoplifting. Selling pot. An assault charge—a street fight, I guess. After a concert.”

That son of Kate’s was a handful and then some. Pretty much scared me off having kids of my own. “None of those things were murder,” Robin said.