“Jesus Christ,” Lucy said again. “I don’t want to hear any more.”

“You wonder what she wants?” I would not stop. “I can tell you exactly. To manipulate. The thing she does best. And then what? She’ll be found not guilty by reason of insanity and the judge will send her back to Kirby. Then she’ll suddenly and dramatically improve, and the Kirby doctors will decide she’s not insane. Double jeopardy. She can’t be tried twice for the same crime. She ends up back on the street.”

“If she walks,” Lucy coldly said, “I will find her and blow her brains out.”

“What kind of answer is that?”

I watched her silhouette sitting straight up against pillows on her bed. She was very stiff and I could hear her breathing as hatred pounded inside her.

“The world really won’t care who or what you slept or sleep with unless you do,” I said to her more quietly. “In fact, I think the jury will understand how it could have happened back then. When you were so young. And she was older and brilliant and striking to look at. When she was charismatic and attentive, and your supervisor.”

“Like Teun,” Lucy said, and I could not tell if she was mocking me.

“Teun is not a psychopath,” I said.

4

THE NEXT MORNING, I fell asleep in the rented LTD, and woke up to cornfields and silos, and stands of trees as old as the Civil War. Marino was driving, and we passed vast acres of vacant land strung with barbed wire and telephone lines, and front yards dotted with mailboxes painted like flower gardens and Uncle Sam. There were ponds and creeks and sod farms, and cattle fields high with weeds. Mostly I noticed small houses with leaning fences, and clotheslines sagging with scrubbed garments billowing in the breeze.

I covered a yawn with my hand and averted my face, for I had always considered it a sign of weakness to look tired or bored. Within minutes, we turned right on 715, or Beaverdam Road, and we began to see cows. Barns were bleached gray and it seemed people never thought to haul away their broken-down trucks. The owner of Hootowl Farm lived in a large white brick house surrounded by endless vistas of pasture and fence. According to the sign out front, the house had been built in 1730. Now it had a swimming pool and a satellite dish that looked serious enough to intercept signals from other galaxies.

Betty Foster was out to greet us before we had gotten out of the car. She was somewhere in her fifties with sharp regal features and skin deeply creased by the sun. Her long white hair was tucked in a bun. But she walked with the athletic spring of someone half her age, and her hand was hard and strong when she shook mine and looked at me with pained hazel eyes.