There was a lot of time to think on that drive home. And as I reached the city of Canborough and took the bypass, I felt a twinge of guilt. I probably should have driven into the downtown, parked outside police headquarters, and gone in to see Michael Cherry. I had some vague recollection of a promise I’d made to him two days earlier, that if I happened upon any information that would help him with the Kickstart massacre investigation, I’d pass it along.

It was fair to say I had a few new details he might want to have. I’d have a source for life in the Canborough Police Department, helping him crack a triple murder.

Moral dilemma time.

Maybe, for most people, this would be a no-brainer. Trixie had admitted to me that she’d shot and killed three men. Three men who’d raped her before, and were about to do it again. If her claim of self-defense was legit, she could tell it to a judge and jury. He might well agree. So might the jury.

But I could see the prosecutor—and in my mind’s eye he looked a lot like Sam Waterston—approaching the witness box. He was saying, “So tell us, Ms…. whatever your name is at the moment. Is it Chicoine? Is it Snelling? So these men, they allegedly attacked you, allegedly sexually assaulted you, on this earlier occasion, you claim, and, let me just check my notes here, and then you went back to work with them? Just a couple of days later? And then, when they allegedly did this again, that’s when you decided to kill them? I’m just having a little trouble with this. Isn’t it more likely that the reason you killed them was because you were ripping them off for half a million dollars? And that this first incident, that this never even happened? That it’s just a very good story to justify what you did? I mean, do we have anything but your word?”

I composed Sam’s entire summation in my head as I drove.

It seemed unlikely that Gary Merker, the only one left alive who’d participated in the rape, would be called to support her testimony.

There was a good chance, I thought, that the evidence would exonerate Trixie in the death of Martin Benson. But if the cops ever knew what she’d told me about that night at the Kickstart, well, I didn’t like her chances of beating that one. Trixie was classic “blame the victim” material, by virtue of the choices she’d made, her line of work, her use of multiple aliases.

They’d tear her apart.