And that’s when it hit me. Like a building had fallen on me. The oxygen in my chest swirled into a vortex created by a single instant of horrifying clarity.

“What’s the best type of lie in the world?” I asked Angie.

“The type that’s mostly true.”

I nodded. “Why does Trevor want Desiree dead so badly?”

“You tell me.”

“Because he didn’t set up that murder attempt on the Tobin Bridge.”

“She did,” Angie said in a near whisper.

“Desiree killed her mother,” I said.

“And tried to kill her father.”

“No wonder he’s pissed at her,” the woman beside Angie said.

“No wonder,” I repeated.

34

It was all there to see in black-and-white for anyone who had the right information and the right perspective. With headlines such as THREE MEN CHARGED IN BRUTAL SLAYING OF MARBLEHEAD SOCIALITE, or ALLEGED THRILL-KILL TRIO ARRAIGNED FOR CARJACK KILL, the stories quickly fell off the front page when the three killers—Harold Madsen of Lynn, Colum Devereaux of South Boston, and Joseph Brodine of Revere—entered guilty pleas the day after the grand jury’s decision to indict.

Angie and I went straight from the airport to the Boston Public Library in Copley Square. We sat in the periodical room and scrolled through microfilm of the Trib and the News until we found the stories, then read each one until we found what we were looking for.

It didn’t take long. In fact, it took less than half an hour.

The day before the grand jury met, Harold Madsen’s attorney had contacted the District Attorney’s Office with a proposed deal for his client. Madsen would enter a plea of guilty to first-degree manslaughter for a sentence of fourteen to twenty years. In exchange, he would finger the man who had hired him and his friends to kill Trevor and Inez Stone.

It had all the makings of a bombshell, because up to this point, no mention had ever been made of the murder resulting from anything but a botched car theft.

CARJACK KILLER CLAIMS: IT WAS A HIT, the News screamed.

But when the man Madsen claimed had hired them turned out to have died two days after Madsen’s arrest, the DA laughed them out of his office.

“Anthony Lisardo?” Assistant District Attorney Keith Simon said to a Trib reporter. “Are you kidding me? He was a high school buddy of two of the defendants who died of a drug overdose. It’s a pathetic ploy by the defense to give this sordid crime a grandeur it never had. Anthony Lisardo had absolutely no connection to this case.”

No one on the defense team could prove he did, either. If Madsen, Devereaux, and Brodine had been contacted by Lisardo, that fact died with him. And since their story hinged on contact with Lisardo and no one else, they took the fall for Inez Stone’s murder all by themselves.