It probably wasn’t fair to use what Jesse had told me about her mother’s dating habits against Christy, but she hadn’t been playing fair, either. The tears had been cheating, and when she’d realized just how many of the pack had started to filter into the kitchen behind her, she would doubtless use them again.

“He approached me,” she said defensively—not to mention falsely.

“Are you stupid? How long did you live with the wolves?” I asked her incredulously. “You do know that most of the people in this room can tell that you are lying, right?”

Stupid. She wasn’t stupid, just self-absorbed and unwise. She didn’t like people thinking badly of her, so she lied.

I stalked away from her, incensed that most of me wanted to play fair instead of just ripping her to shreds the way she’d ripped into Adam. It felt disloyal to Adam. It felt like I might be letting her manipulate me into feeling sorry for her.

As I turned back toward Christy, I saw Jesse standing a little behind her. Jesse was Christy’s daughter, and I wouldn’t do anything to hurt Jesse. With a good reason not to destroy my enemy, I paced back until I was face-to-face with Christy again.

“Look.” I tried to keep my voice gentle. “No one cares if you sleep with a football team, none of whom you know and all of whom are half your age.” I repeated it so she could hear the truth in my words. “We don’t care.”

Christy went pale in genuine hurt, making me reexamine what I’d just said.

“That doesn’t mean that we don’t care if one of them hurts you. That’s another matter entirely. Call us, and we’ll go take care of it. But you have to quit flinging blame around.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” she said, quietly, believing it. But then she aimed her venom at me and increased the volume. “Not my fault. It wasn’t.”

“Juan came after you because you slept with him, then you ran,” I told her, but then I started thinking about what that meant. “If you had waited and told him you weren’t interested, he might have left you alone.” I worked through the germ of the idea. “If he’d been leaving bodies everywhere he went, Warren would have figured it out. But there weren’t bodies, there weren’t fires until you ran.” I knew there hadn’t been bodies, because Warren had looked for bodies left the same way as his victims here in the Tri-Cities. Why hadn’t there been any other bodies? “That’s not your fault,” I told her, “but it is interesting.”

She stared at me, her fists clenched.

“Had your friend slept with him before?” I asked.