I tried to move away, went to the front porch and stood looking at the wall of rainforest across the road behind my car, a tall, impenetrable tangle of green. Someone had finally come to join Michael Bell, another graying, rough-edged man who was trying to cajole him into a car. Sweeney followed me, pulling off her latex gloves.

“Amanda will be your only contact from our end for a couple of days,” I said, gesturing back inside to where my partner was raiding the bar for cigars. “If you decide to let her interview victims, don’t leave her alone with them for too long. She’s about as subtle as a kick in the face. I wouldn’t leave, but I’ve got to head down to Sydney for a couple of days. It’s my daughter’s birthday. I can’t cancel.”

Sweeney nodded gravely. Whenever I mention anything to do with my daughter, people do that, nod gravely, like she’s dead. There were press vans turning up outside the bar now, officers directing them away from the parking lot, where they were trying to photograph tire tracks. I prepared to do the old duck-and-run to my car before they cornered me for an interview I couldn’t give.

“I’ve been listening to the podcast,” Sweeney said suddenly.

I stopped. Exhaustion swept over me.

Toward the end of my first case with Amanda, a group who believed in my innocence had formed. It had started with a journalist named Fabiana Grisham, who’d come to Crimson Lake to pursue me for her newspaper. She’d expected me to be the sniveling, bent-backed, hand-wringing child predator of her nightmares, but she’d been struck by how normal I was, as most people are. She’d started asking me questions about my alleged crime, and I’d had answers for all of them. After a while I turned her around.

Fabiana had gone back to Sydney and started an organization called Innocent Ted, which had a website, a podcast that chronicled the crime and speculated over the evidence, and a few videos on YouTube. As the group grew, the media took interest in it and they insinuated that Fabiana and I had been romantically involved.

She’d been punished for it pretty badly in the court of public opinion. People were calling her a pedophile sympathizer, a traitor, a conspirator. The more sympathetic of Fabiana’s detractors mused that she probably had hybristophilia, a fixation on sexual partners who have committed violent acts like murder or rape. She’d had a few bricks through her front windows, like me. But much of the backlash went to her social media profiles, where people threatened and stalked her, sent her obscene photographs, hacked into her personal accounts and published her correspondence.

I did not need to drag someone else into that kind of mess.

“Have you listened to it?” Sweeney asked.

“No.”