She dropped the ring back in the bag, opened his wallet, and started going through it. Nothing that said “suicidal,” or “troubled,” or, for that matter, “fucked-up teen.” She slipped out a California driver’s license, two credit cards, an ID from the radio station he had worked for, $300 cash. A cloth handkerchief like her father’s father used to carry. No pictures. Who carried pictures in their wallets these days? Though she’d figured a guy with a cloth handkerchief might. There were a few business cards, many of them clearly from this trip. Someone from the New York Public Library. A woman named Edith Brixton. Detective Morasco. Nicola Crane. Behind the business cards, she found a movie ticket stub. She set it on the table and read the faded print, her throat tightening. 6/24/76. Easter Parade. A ticket stub for her mom’s favorite movie. From close to twenty years before Quentin had been born. “Nothing weird about that,” she said out loud.

Then she saw the name of the theater.

She heard footsteps outside the door and shoved everything back into the wallet, the wallet into the plastic bag. By the time Morasco came in, everything was in its place.

“Everything work out okay?” Morasco said.

“Fine,” she said. “Thank you.”

Behind him stood several other cops, plainclothes and uniform, among them a blond, handsome, devastated-looking man she recognized instantly as Dean Conrad. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said to her.

“I’m sorry for yours.”

She aimed her eyes at the ground and started to pass. “I’m going to tell you what I told these detectives,” he said quickly. “I spoke to Quentin a couple of days after the shooting. It was the last time I talked to him. He said he was feeling guilty because he hadn’t told the police everything about that night.”

“Yes?”

“He went to your parents’ house. He watched them from outside. Your mom left at one point—she kind of stormed out of the house and he followed her in his car until he lost her. Then he went back to the hotel. That was all he did.”

“Why did he confess to killing them?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why didn’t he tell the police that he’d been outside their house?”

“I think he thought it made him sound like a stalker. Which he was, kind of . . . But he wasn’t a killer. I know Quentin better than anyone. And he isn’t. He wasn’t . . .”

Robin looked into his eyes, red-rimmed, as though he hadn’t slept for days. I thought I knew my husband better than anyone too. She didn’t say it, of course. But she understood him. She knew how he felt. “Thank you,” she said. And then she quoted Eric. “The truth will out.”