“Women and men are different,” I said. “Most of them anyway. Particularly when it comes to their reactions to the opposite sex.” I took her hand in mine. “Desiree passes a hundred guys in the street, at least half of them will think about her for days. And when she passes, they won’t just go, ‘Nice face, nice ass, pretty smile,’ whatever. They’ll ache. They’ll want to possess her on the spot, melt into her, inhale her.”

“Inhale her?” she said.

“Yes. Men have a completely different reaction to beautiful women than women do to beautiful men.”

“So Desiree again is…?” She ran the backs of her fingers up the inside of my arm.

“The flame, and we’re the moths.”

“You ain’t half bad,” the woman said, leaning forward and looking past Angie at me. “If my Leroy could talk that sort of sweet bullshit you talk, he’d have gotten away with a lot more than he did these last twenty years.”

Poor Leroy, I thought.

Somewhere over Pennsylvania, Angie said, “Jesus.”

My head came off her shoulder. “What?”

“The possibilities,” she said.

“What possibilities?”

“Don’t you see? If we invert everything we thought, if we look at things from the perspective of Desiree being not just a little screwed up or slightly corrupt, but a black widow, a machine of relentless self-interest—then, my God.”

I sat forward. “Run with it,” I said.

She nodded. “Okay. We know she put Price up to the robbery. Right? Right. And then she gets Jay thinking about getting that money back from Price. She plays the opposite. You know, ‘Oh, Jay, can’t we be happy without the money?’ but of course, inside, she’s thinking, ‘Take the bait, take the bait, you fool.’ And Jay does. But he can’t find the money. And then she realizes where it is. And she goes there, but she doesn’t get caught like she said. She gets the money. But now she’s got a problem.”

“Jay.”

“Exactly. She knows he’ll never stop trying to find her if she disappears. And he’s good at his job. And she has to get Price out of the way, too. She can’t just disappear. She has to get dead. So…”

“She killed Illiana Rios,” I said.

We looked at each other, my eyes as wide as hers, I’m sure.

“Shot her point-blank in the face with a shotgun,” Angie said.

“Could she have?” I said.

“Why not?”

I sat there thinking about it, letting it sink in. Why not, indeed?

“If we accept this premise,” I said, “then we’re accepting that she’s—”

“Totally without conscience or morality or empathy or anything which makes us humane.” She nodded.

“And if she is,” I said, “then she didn’t just become that way overnight. She’s been that way for a long time.”

“Like father, like daughter,” Angie said.