He rubbed his face hard. “Still, it’s a tough one, pinning Kristal on Barnett. Here’s a guy waited years to be a father. He went so far as to borrow money for fertility treatment.”

“Nina Balquin suspects the money was never used for treatment.”

“Barnett and Lara must’ve done something, Alex. They had a kid. If Cherish is Little Miss Hitler I can see her trying to eliminate the other chimp’s baby. But Barnett doing his own kid for her?”

I heard the question but my brain was somewhere else. His mention of Nina Balquin had flashed me back to her house. The rear wall.

I said, “Oh, my.”

“What?”

“Kristal’s baby photo. Her eyes. Big and brown. Barnett’s blue-eyed and so was Lara. I remember seeing her in court, she had huge, gray-blue eyes that she was constantly wiping because she was always tearing up. Two brown-eyed parents can produce a light-eyed child but the opposite’s only remotely possible, through spontaneous mutation.”

“Kristal wasn’t the cowboy’s kid?”

“It wasn’t until six years after they borrowed the money that Lara got pregnant.”

“Lara got herself a different kind of fertility treatment.” His smile was vicious. “Both of them fooling around but Lara left evidence and Barnett couldn’t handle it.”

“Barnett dominated and isolated Lara,” I said. “Another reason for her to go looking for love elsewhere. Any husband would be enraged by his wife having another man’s baby, but someone like Barnett— asocial, bad temper, gun freak— would’ve been especially prone to a violent reaction. He punished Lara twice. First by eliminating the fruit of her infidelity, and when that didn’t put out the fire in his belly, he got rid of her. And if he needed encouragement, Cherish was there to egg him on.”

“Pillow talk,” he said. “ ‘I’ve got a solution, honey.’ Yeah, makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“It makes stomach-crawling sense.”

“So how did Rand figure it out?” he said.

“He must’ve recalled something from the time of the murder,” I said. “Spotting Cherish with Troy shortly before the abduction. Or seeing Cherish and Barnett together. For all we know one of them went to the mall that day to make sure everything went down smoothly. Or Barnett’s involvement was more direct. Lara said she only turned her head for a minute before Kristal disappeared. What if someone Kristal knew and trusted lured her away?”

“Come to Daddy,” he said. “Then Daddy hands her over to Troy and Rand. Jesus . . . and Rand came to all this spontaneously, after years of sitting behind bars?”