“They’re half brothers,” I said. “They’re a lot older than I am. I barely knew them.”

“Or maybe you deliberately withheld their names because Roger’s doing time in a federal penitentiary.”

“No. I didn’t know that. We haven’t been in touch for years.”

“You’ll never guess what he was convicted of.”

During the few years when I knew him, he was arrested for public drunkenness, retail theft, auto theft, and assault. “I have no idea,” I said.

“Illegal firearms sales,” Cruz said. “And you’ll never guess what kind.”

I stared at him.

“Ghost guns. Homemade. From DIY kits he bought online.”

“No. I didn’t even know what they were until you—”

“From the same manufacturer as the gun that killed Lucy Carter-Jones.”

I shook my head. “I haven’t seen or heard from him in almost twenty years. I don’t know anything about any ghost guns.”

“You brought the gun onto that elevator,” Cruz said.

“No—”

“You’d just been fired,” Riley said.

My head swiveled his way. “No—”

Cruz: “Your marriage was over.”

Riley: “And there you are, trapped with the woman who fired you.”

Cruz: “When the lights go out.”

Riley: “It wasn’t Carter-Jones who snapped.”

Cruz: “It was you!”

I was spinning between the two of them, shaking my head wildly at each accusation. “No. No, it was Lucy—”

Cruz pushed back from the table. “Stand up.”

“What?”

He came around behind me.

“No, honestly, you’re making a terrible mistake!”

He grabbed me and pulled me to my feet and jerked my arms behind me. “Sharona Chance Lambert, you are under arrest for the murder of Lucy Carter-Jones.”

I felt the cold snap of handcuffs around my wrists.

Interval

Chapter 21

In Old Norse mythology, Valhalla was where slain Viking warriors went for their heavenly reward. In Westchester County, it was where pretrial detainees went when they couldn’t post bail.

That was where I went, in a prison transport van. It had a latticework of steel bars behind the driver’s seat and the acrid odor of urine everywhere. It might have been an animal control van except for the metal posts in the floor that my leg irons were shackled to. The cold seeped up from the steel floor and spread frigid fingers up my torso and down each coatless arm. Through the windshield I could see the slant of snow falling through the beams of the headlights.

Valhalla was for warriors, and that was what I had to become. Roger and Tommy had been in and out of jail throughout my childhood, and they liked to scare me with tales of kidney punches and toothbrushes sharpened into shivs. They delighted in teaching me about sodomy and wolf packs. So from the moment I realized I was actually going to jail, I started to prepare my game face. It was just like Mrs. Casco taught me: put on the face you want the world to see. I wanted to be seen as a warrior, and I practiced it on the drive to Valhalla, galvanizing my eyes into a hot stare, clenching my jaw into a snarling grimace, staring at my fellow transport prisoners with a look that said, Go ahead, I dare you.