“No?” Cruz gave an enigmatic smile.

I squinted at him. “No. How would I know?”

“Because you broke it. You and your mad techie skills.”

“My—what? I’m not a techie.”

“You wrote a software program for your old law firm that’s so good they’re still using it today.”

I froze at the echo of my own words. If I hadn’t been certain before, I was now. Ingram Barrett was the only person I’d ever told about that. He was the only one who could have packaged this whole story for the detectives. I had to give him credit. In only a few hours he’d come up with a totally plausible scenario. So plausible that parts of it were even true. Here was the risk with fabrications. I’d been tripped up in a tangled web of my own weaving. I stopped to think how best to play this. “That’s not true,” I said finally.

“You’re saying your boss lied?”

“No,” I admitted with a sigh. “I did. In my interview. I made it up to get the job.”

“The same way you lied about clerking for Judge Arnold.”

And here was the risk in confessing to one fabrication. Everything else fell into doubt, too. “No, I didn’t lie about that—”

“The same way you lied about those missing five years.”

He caught me off-guard again. “What?”

“You told us you took five years off, remember? Rather than admit you’re a criminal defense lawyer.”

“I’m not—”

Cruz snatched the packet of résumés from my hand and jabbed a finger at a line farther down the page: 2009–2014. Staff Attorney, The Innocence Project. “You worked there for five years.” He was seething. “Overturning convictions. Learning all the tricks to outfox the cops and the prosecutors. Exactly what you’ve been doing here.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. Here was the real reason he’d turned so hostile. It wasn’t the video surveillance. It wasn’t the clerkship or the software hacking. It was the Innocence Project on my résumé. He was the kind of cop who saw criminal defense lawyers as his mortal enemies, so that was what I was now. I wasn’t sure how to deflect this charge. Admitting to another lie would be disastrous. But finally it came to me. I opened my eyes.

“Let me see if I understand your theory, Detective.” I leaned forward, my elbows on the table and my hands clasped together again. “You think Lucy fired me at eight thirty last night, and I spent the next half hour planning to kill her, including how to hack the elevator system. Carefully premeditated, right? That’s your theory?”

Cruz set his jaw and folded his arms over his chest.

“And what exactly would that have accomplished? I’d still be fired, right? Unless you think I hacked into her files and unfired myself? But what good would that do if Barrett’s the one who ordered me to be fired? I guess I’d have to kill him, too, huh?”

“You were desperate. You weren’t thinking straight.”