“Can I go now?” He stands abruptly, looks from me to Glock and back to me. “I just attended the funeral of seven of my family members. And you have the nerve to drag me in here and question me like I was some kind of criminal.”

“I know this is tough,” I tell him. “I know you just lost your family. But it’s my job to get to the bottom of it. In order to do that I need to ask the hard questions.”

“I didn’t kill them.”

“Nobody said you did.” I take a breath, reel in impatience. “Sit down. Please.”

“You’re treating me like a suspect, for God’s sake.”

Aaron is not a suspect at this point, but I’m not inclined to tell him. I need to know all the family dynamics before I let him off the hook, especially the ones nobody wants to talk about. “You have motive. You have a record. A shaky alibi. What am I supposed to think?”

“I haven’t seen my family for nearly four years!”

“That’s a long time for anger to fester. Sometimes those emotions don’t go away.”

“Look, do I need a lawyer?”

“That’s your prerogative.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong, but I’m not going to let you or anyone else railroad me.”

I stare hard at him, trying to see inside his head, inside his heart. “Did you kill your family?”

“No!” His hand shakes when he scrubs it over his forehead, and he sinks back into the chair. “I loved them. All of them. I would never do anything to hurt them. Never.”

“You believe him?” Glock asks a few minutes later.

“I don’t think he did it.” I’m sitting at my desk, watching Aaron Plank through the blinds as he gets into a newish Camry. “But I think he might be holding out.”

Glock raises his brows. “You mean when you asked him about his sister having a boyfriend?”

I nod, relieved I’m not the only one who caught Plank’s moment of hesitation. “I think he’s lying about having been in contact with her.”

“Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know.”

He nods. “Hard to tell when someone is lying.”

“That’s the thing about liars. There are good ones and there are mediocre ones. What separates the two is that the good ones convince themselves it’s the truth. It’s like the Big Lie theory, if you repeat a lie enough times, people will start to believe it.”

“Adolf Hitler,” Glock says.

I watch Aaron Plank pull away. “If someone convinces himself a lie is true, he’s basically not lying.”