Quentin stared at the ten-year-old standing next to her mother, a skinny kid with a pained, buck-toothed smile, a puffy-sleeved pink party dress that seemed to swallow her whole. Thick lashes behind plastic-framed glasses, dark eyes identical to his own.

He gritted his teeth. One picture. Out of this entire gallery, just one picture of Kate in a bent, cardboard frame. Anger bubbled within him, the kind a healing breath couldn’t fix, and Quentin had an urge to point that out—just one fucking picture of her—but he kept his mouth shut, remembering Reg’s rough voice over the phone. How he’d relented, finally, to thirty minutes and not a second more. Quentin needed those thirty minutes if this podcast was going to work. He needed to keep calm.

Quentin cleared his throat. “Back to my original question,” he said. “What did April Cooper do to make you think she was the real killer?”

“She didn’t do anything.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

Reg sighed heavily. “Gabriel LeRoy was all over the place. He was firing at everybody in that Arco station. He was consumed by rage. Out of control.”

“Okay . . .”

“She wasn’t.”

Quentin nodded slowly. “She could have stopped him, but she didn’t.”

“Yep.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “but I’m really trying to understand this. Can you explain to me why that makes a fifteen-year-old girl guiltier of murder than the legal adult who actually killed everyone?”

He drew a long, weary breath. “Think about a house on fire. It’s your house. Burning to the ground, taking with it everything you own. Everything you love. April Cooper—a fifteen-year-old girl as you point out—is standing next to the firehose, but she doesn’t make a move toward it. She just watches the flames and smiles.” Reg ran a hand through his hair and leaned forward, eyes blazing. “Who are you going to blame for all that destruction—the fire? It’s a thing of nature. It can’t exist without burning.”

Quentin took too big a gulp of the iced tea Reg had brought him—lukewarm and bitter. Hard to swallow. Everything you love.

“Kimmy was just eleven years younger than April Cooper,” Reg was saying. “She could have been her little sister, but that . . . that girl just stood there. Her boyfriend shot my daughter in cold blood. He took away everything I loved and April Cooper stood there, like she was watching a movie. Do you understand me now?”

Dark thoughts whirled through Quentin’s brain. He tried another of Dean’s deep, healing breaths. “Yes,” he said. “I understand.”

“Good.”

Quentin pulled his steno pad out of his pocket. With shaking hands, he thumbed through the pages he’d covered in notes from the hours he’d spent online, reading old issues of the San Bernardino Sun.