The center elevator arrived. The cage door opened. We stepped on. I reached into my bag, and her face froze in a mask of horror when she saw what I brought out.

Everything stopped. Darkness descended.

Chapter 20

Four hours passed before the door to Interview A swung in again, and instantly I could see that something had changed since I last saw the detectives. Riley now wore a stubble of beard that was shockingly white against the gray pallor of his skin. Cruz’s Vandyke was neatly trimmed again; he must have kept a razor in his desk. But it was their expressions that had changed the most.

“What?” I said. “What happened?” They might have struck out on their search of Lucy’s house. But they still had the note; that should have been enough.

Cruz didn’t answer or even look at me. He sat down and turned on the recording equipment, and he droned out all the preliminaries again: date and time, persons in the room, consents and waivers duly executed.

Riley ignored my question, too. “Hold up,” he said to Cruz. “You just said Shay Lambert’s in the room.”

“Oh, you’re right,” Cruz agreed. “Let me correct that for the record. I should’ve said Sharona Chance.” He looked at me then, finally. “Isn’t that right?” he said, and he opened a folder and shot a paper across the table like a hockey puck.

I didn’t need to look at it. I knew what it was. As soon as he said Sharona Chance, I knew they’d gotten their hands on my birth certificate. The name was Barb’s little dig against the man who’d knocked her up. “My Sharona” was their song, and Fat Chance was the name she gave him after he took off and she found out he wasn’t really Paul Getty. “It was a stupid name,” I said. “I never used it.”

You can call yourself whatever you want, Mrs. Casco told me, so starting in eighth grade, I signed all my tests and homework papers as Shay Chance. The school eventually conformed my transcripts, and by the time I reached law school, I made it legal. Later I switched out Chance for Lambert and made that legal, too. A birth certificate wasn’t a public record in the state of New York. No one was ever supposed to see it.

“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” Riley said. “About the kind of person who’d kill off her own mother?”

“We were never close,” I said in a low voice. “We didn’t have any kind of relationship.”

“Yeah, so we gathered,” Cruz said. “That call you made to her on Christmas Day was the first time she’d heard from you in years.”

They’d opened my phone. They’d talked to Barb.

“She told us a lot more than that,” he said. “Things that make us wonder if you told us anything that’s true.”

“I have—”

“Poor me, I’m an only child,” he said in a falsetto.

She’d told them about Roger and Tommy.