“That wasn’t part of the plan,” she said.

“Well, I’d hope not,” Angie said.

Desiree looked at her and blinked. Then she looked at me, her eyes wide. “He’d already paid the men. When everything went wrong and the car flipped—that wasn’t part of the plan—they panicked and shot him after they killed my mother.”

“Bullshit,” Angie said.

Desiree’s eyes widened even further and she turned her head to a neutral point between the two of us and looked down at the concrete for a moment.

“Desiree,” I said, “there’s enough holes in that story to drive a couple of Humvees through.”

“For instance,” Angie said, “why wouldn’t these guys, once they were arrested and tried, tell the police everything?”

“Because they didn’t know my father hired them,” she said. “One day, someone contacts someone and asks that a woman be killed. Her husband will be with her, this someone says, but he isn’t a target. Just her.”

We thought about that for a minute.

Desiree watched us, then added, “It’s all chains of command. By the time it got down to the actual killers, they had no idea where the order came from.”

“So, again, why shoot your father?”

“I can only tell you what I said before—they panicked. Did you read up on the case?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, if you did, you’d see that the three killers weren’t exactly rocket scientists. They were dumb kids, and they weren’t hired for their brains. They were hired because they could kill someone without losing any sleep over it.”

I looked over at Angie again. It was coming out of left field, and it definitely had an outlandish quality to it, but in a twisted way, it made some sense.

“Why did your father want to kill your mother?”

“She was planning to divorce him. And she wanted half his fortune. He could fight her in court, and she’d drag out all the sordid details of their life together. Her being sold to him, his raping me when I was fourteen, his continuing to assault me over the years, plus a thousand other secrets she knew about him.” She looked at her hands, turned them palm up, then down again. “His other option was to kill her. And he’d exercised that option with people before.”

“And he wants to kill you because you know that,” Angie said.

“Yes,” she said and it came out as a hiss.

“How do you know?” I said.