“No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

“I mean no. He couldn’t have. I left him at home at, I don’t know, nine-thirty. Ten. He called me at quarter past eleven. He was on video, North. He was here. At the office. Waiting for me to get home. And he couldn’t have made it all the way out to Hog Hollow by 11:37.”

“Maybe Regina waited for him.”

“And then I had to pick up Matty because somebody broke into his apartment—”

“He says.”

“—and he was scared, running through the streets in Soulard. That was quarter past twelve. You can’t have it both ways, North. He can’t be in the city at 11:15, drive out for a late killing with Regina, and magically get back to the city by 12:15 for me to pick him up.”

“There you go. There you fucking go.”

“What? What does that mean? You’re acting crazy, North. You’re obsessed. You’re not thinking about who else might be involved in—”

“Who? Give me one fucking name.”

“Brueckmann.”

“We put him in a fucking kennel.”

“Barr.”

North shook his head. “Give me a break. Give me a fucking break. The cop? You think Detective Bryce Barr, lead detective on the Metropolitan Police’s LGBTQ task force, he ran out and helped Regina kill Mark? And then, what, he made it back to the city in time for someone to allegedly break into Matty’s apartment?”

“It’s not alleged. And he would have had time. If he was already out at Hog Hollow Hocks at 11:37, if he helped shoot Mark and left right away, then he could have made it back to Matty’s in plenty of time.”

“He’s a cop.”

“So what?”

“So I asked.”

“What?”

“After I talked to him and Reck at Hog Hollow Hocks. Before they let us come back here. I asked the other cops what Reck and Barr had been up to the night before.”

“You asked—”

“Discreetly. Yeah. I asked. And you know what? They were in the substation doing reports where thirty cops could see them. Barr and Reck didn’t have anything to do with Mark. Yeah, I’ll give it to you, they’ve been weird as fuck about this whole case. Barr practically lost his mind at Hog Hollow Hocks. But they didn’t kill him. Matty, on the other hand—”

“Matty couldn’t have done it. We just went over this.”

“Yeah. He’s got an alibi. The perfect fucking alibi.”

“It’s perfect because it’s true. He was with me. What do you want me to do, lie about it? I don’t have anything to hide, North. I’m not like you.” And Shaw’s eyes flicked to the broken skin around North’s eye, to the lacerations on North’s hand.

Inside that frozen clarity, North felt an avalanche come down on him. It was a drift of anger that whited out everything else until he could barely see Shaw as a blur of chestnut hair and electric-fucking-blue. North heard himself speaking from behind that white-out anger.