“Sailing on her new boat,” he said. “Over the bounding main.”

“Ever miss private enterprise?”

“The lack of red tape and paramilitary rigidity? The chance to make serious money? Why the hell would I miss that?” He stared at his phone, clicked it shut. “That comment Daney made about my sounding pretty confident. What was that, a taunt?”

“Or fishing for information. Or both,” I said. “He was clearly fishing when he steered the conversation to the topic of pay booths. Your line about being able to trace pay calls made his eyes jump.”

“Yeah, I noticed that.”

“Rand called me from a pay booth but Daney would have no way of knowing that unless he was there.”

His eyes compressed to surgical incisions. “Daney was with Rand the day he died.”

“Or nearby, watching Rand make the call,” I said. “Which got me thinking: What if he made up the story about the black truck to divert attention from the fact that it was him, not Barnett who followed Rand? Cherish told us he wasn’t home that afternoon.”

“Off at one of his nonprofit gigs.” He passed his phone from hand to hand. Tapped the table. Rubbed his face.

Finally, he said, “Daney did Rand, not Malley.”

“The only reason we focused on Malley is because Daney pointed us in that direction.”

“That and Malley’s mother-in-law said he was a scumbag dope dealer who was rough on Lara.”

“A scumbag dope dealer with no arrest record or known aliases who uses his own social security number,” I said. “Who registers his guns legally. In a sense, Nina Balquin was a character reference for Malley. She hates his guts but she’s never suspected him of murdering Lara.”

He slipped the phone in his pocket. Ungloved and grabbed a bear claw and chewed, spewing crumbs. “There’s still the eye color issue. Malley had to know he wasn’t Kristal’s daddy.”

“Maybe Daney’s right about him being too unsophisticated to figure it out. But even if he did know, unless we find something psychopathic in his background, it’s a long stretch to killing a toddler.”

“Unlike Daney, who we know to be an extremely bad boy.”

I nodded. “It’s also possible Malley knew about Kristal’s paternity and didn’t care.”

He put down the bear claw. “Guy has no problem raising someone else’s kid? That’s a stretch of another kind.”

“The Malleys had fertility problems for years. Lara eventually got pregnant but what if the fertility problem was Barnett’s and he came to accept the idea of a surrogate?”

“He let some other guy go to stud with Lara?”

“Or Lara slept with someone and got pregnant and Barnett accepted it. If Balquin’s dope suspicions are on-target, Lara and Barnett could’ve gotten into some alternative behaviors. Promiscuity, swinger parties. Or just plain old infidelity.”