“She killed him because she wanted to. And we can sit here and have a pity party, or we can figure out what we’re gonna do before she whacks the next one of us.”

But my niece was not to be consoled. Indirectly, she had exposed all of us to Carrie a long time ago.

“Carrie wants you to blame yourself for this,” I said to her.

Lucy did not respond, and I turned around to look at her. She was dressed in dirty BDUs and boots, her hair a mess. She still smelled of fire, because she had not bathed. She had not eaten or slept, as best I knew. Her eyes were flat and hard. They glinted coldly of the decision she had made, and I had seen the look before, when hopelessness and hostility made her self-destructive. A part of her wanted to die, or maybe a part of her already had.

We reached my house at half past five, and the slanted rays of the sun were hot and bright, the sky hazy blue but cloudless. I carried in newspapers from the front steps and was sickened again by this morning’s front-page headline about Benton’s death. Although identification was tentative, it was believed he had died in a fire under very suspicious circumstances while assisting the FBI in the nationwide hunt for the escaped killer Carrie Grethen. Investigators would not say why Benton had been inside the small grocery store that had burned, or if he might have been lured there.

“What do you want to do with this?” Marino asked.

He had opened the car trunk, where three large brown paper bags contained the personal effects collected from Benton’s hotel room. I could not decide.

“Want me to just put them in your office?” he asked. “Or I can go through them if you want, Doc.”

“No, no, just leave them,” I said.

Stiff paper crackled as he carried the bags into the house and down the hall. His footsteps were burdened and slow, and when he returned to the front of the house, I was still standing by the open door.

“I’ll talk to you later,” he said. “And don’t go leaving this door open, you hear me? The alarm stays on and you and Lucy shouldn’t go out anywhere.”

“I don’t think you have a worry.”

Lucy had dropped her luggage in her bedroom near the kitchen and was staring out the window at Marino driving away. I came behind her and gently put my hands on her shoulders.

“Don’t quit,” I said, and I leaned my forehead against the back of her neck.

She did not turn around, and I felt grief shudder through her.