“Kind of,” I said with a wry smile. “I’m guessing she didn’t survive.”

“Dead before we arrived, I’m afraid,” she said. “Her mother fell asleep smoking on the sofa. You’d really think people would know better.”

“No smoke detector?”

She shook her head. “In old rentals like this, nobody checks until something happens. A fifty-dollar investment could have saved two lives.”

“Any chance I can see the bodies?” I asked. “If she’s definitely my witness, I need to move fast in another direction.”

“I hear you,” she said, and waved for me to follow. “And I hate to see a killer walk free. Especially a multiple murderer.”

Mmm, yeah, sorry, but actually, if we win this one, we do set a multiple murderer free. It’s a package deal—getting my father out of jail means freeing my mother, too.

As we walked, Gabriel fell in beside me. When the trooper glanced at him, I said simply, “My colleague.”

“Organized crime?” she said.

I choked on a laugh, and she quickly added, “I mean the case. I can imagine you’d need security for something like that.”

It wasn’t the first time Gabriel had been mistaken for my bodyguard. When we met, I’d pegged him as hired muscle myself. Even the expensive cut of his suit had only made me amend that to “hired muscle for someone with a lot of money.” He was at least six-four and built like a linebacker. It was more than his size, though. He just had a look that made people get out of the way.

The trooper said something to one of the paramedics, who nodded and opened the smaller body bag. It was Imogen’s mother. Death seemed to have been from smoke inhalation, with signs of suffocation and minimal burning, mostly to her clothing. Which meant there was no chance we were looking at the badly burned remains of a stranger. And the corpse in the other body bag? Imogen herself, mistress of Marty Tyson, one of my mother’s victims. Imogen was the only person who could have testified that Tyson had actually killed the first couple my parents were supposed to have murdered. That was the reasonable doubt we’d needed to overturn the conviction.

And now we’d lost it.

—

Twenty-two years ago, my mother killed four people so that I could walk again. She’d made a deal with the Wild Hunt—the Cŵn Annwn—to take the lives of four killers. In return, her two-year-old daughter’s severe spina bifida would disappear. And it had. I don’t even remember having it.