“That’s preposterous,” Finch said.

Now there was a word you didn’t hear every day.

“Why is it preposterous?” I asked, watching a sailboat pass in the distance.

“As you said yourself, you haven’t been in on this from the beginning,” Finch said, starting to sound slightly patronizing. “Believe me, if I ever thought that was germane, this stick business, I would have raised it. But frankly, it was never even on our radar.”

“So you didn’t consider this in the boy’s defense, not for a second.”

“What did I just tell you? I formulated a defense, and it worked very well. Perhaps you’ve noticed that Jeremy is with you and not in prison.”

“Yeah, there’s that,” I said.

“And Jeremy never brought this issue to my attention. You’d think if anyone was going to do it, he would have.”

“I don’t think Jeremy even knew. The only time he ever got near the car, he was drunk, so he wouldn’t have remembered. He never took note of it. And it’s not something he would have intrinsically known. He’s not a car nut. Other people, people who are into cars, you just know an old 911 is likely going to be a stick shift.”

“Listen,” Grant Finch said, unable to keep his impatience with me out of his voice, “if you had been there, at the trial, you would have heard testimony from several witnesses who saw what happened.”

“What did they see, exactly?” I asked.

“I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.”

“Humor me.”

“At least five people from that party saw Jeremy get out from behind the wheel of that car. Blood from his forehead was on the steering wheel. There was a DNA match.”

I said nothing.

“And,” Finch continued, “earlier in the evening, he was seen in the Porsche, fumbling with the keys, trying to start it, before he was stopped.”

“I know. The keys were left in the ashtray.”

“Right.”

“And even after that, Galen Broadhurst left the keys in the car.”

“A decision he has to live with the rest of his life,” Grant Finch said. “Don’t think for a moment he isn’t haunted by that every single day.”

“Yeah, I met him yesterday,” I said. “He seems pretty tormented.”

Finch let that one go. “Despite that lapse in Galen’s judgment, the real responsibility, I’m afraid, rests ultimately with Jeremy.”

“You say at least five people saw him get out of the car after Sian McFadden had been run down.”

“That’s right.”

“How many people witnessed him getting into the car?”

Was that a sigh I heard? I was clearly trying the man’s patience. “It would seem self-evident that if he was getting out of the car, he had, at some earlier point, gotten into it,” he said. He made no effort not to be patronizing.

“That’s not my point,” I said.