“Neither death benefits him. Maddox was his best customer. Johnson was his best product. He was making his own kind of killing on the little arrangement, so there was no reason for him to do any killing. It’d be putting an end to a serious paycheck.”

“Maybe they were going to tell.”

“I don’t think so. Maddox wouldn’t, because it was his secret too. A secret that he more than anyone wanted to keep quiet. He would’ve lost everything. And Johnson’s an inmate. Nobody would believe him, and he didn’t seem to mind it too much. He was being treated like a king—drugs, alcohol, no work, no trouble.”

“There’s always the possibility of a motive that we can’t see.”

“There’s always that, but . . . If it were just motive, that would be one thing, but it’s means, as well. If someone like Skipper wanted to kill an inmate, he wouldn’t do it in the garbage truck. He’d do it by having him killed on the rec field or shot during an escape attempt or beaten to death in Confinement.”

“Like he tried with you.”

“Exactly,” I said. “But there’s more. All but one of the murders were particularly bloody, and the third would’ve been. I think Skipper interrupted that one. They were all stabbed and disfigured. It’s personal, not business. A business kill is dispassionate. A single gunshot wound to the back of the head. But stabbings, beatings, cutting, knives, blood, pain, that’s personal.”

“So who do you think did it?” she asked.

“Someone who has a very personal stake in all of this,” I said. “This is about love that’s been twisted into hate, not money or a cover-up. Unless, of course, it was made to look like something it wasn’t.”

“You think all the brutality could be a cover?”

I shrugged. “Could be, but it feels like what it is—twisted love, dark passion, revenge. Because even when something is made to look like something it’s not, it usually still feels like what it really is. When Molly Thomas was explaining why she had made the accusation against me, that she’d do anything for Anthony, I thought about how much love and devotion was wrapped up in what she did. She loved him so much. I think that’s the key.”

“You don’t think Molly had it done, do you?” she said. “She could have hired someone to do it, then gotten killed by him.”

“Takes us back to Skipper again.”

“Everything in this case does, doesn’t it?”

After leaving Anna’s office, I walked out into the waiting room.

A couple of the men nodded at me.

I nodded back.

A few others were so were engrossed in paperbacks they never looked up.

I recognized Zane Gray, Robert B. Parker, and Stephen King.