“She never forgave me for going away to college and leaving her with our mother.” It wasn’t something I would normally have admitted, but Bruxton already knew about my family and my mother’s death.

“What happened after your mother died? I mean, where did your sister live?”

“She wanted to live with me, but she couldn’t stay in the dorm, and I didn’t have the money to get an apartment for us.” Could he hear the guilt in my voice? “The child services people thought she should finish high school in Ithaca, since she only had a year-and-a-half to go.”

“They put her in foster care?” Bruxton asked.

“No, the first home was actually the family of one of her friends. They were really nice people, and it seemed like a perfect arrangement.”

“What went wrong?”

“Claudia fought with them over their rules and everything else. She ended up punching her friend’s mother in the face. They put her in a foster home, one where the couple was used to dealing with problem teens. Claudia hated it, and she ran away.”

“Happens a lot. Where’d they find her?”

“She was arrested three months later for shoplifting, and she had drugs on her, so they got her for that, too. They put her in a juvenile detention center.”

“And things went downhill from there.” There was no question mark. I guessed it was a familiar story for anyone at the NYPD. “Where was she arrested?”

“Manhattan.”

“You were both in New York, and she didn’t try to get in touch?”

“Not even once.” It had been an agonizing time for me, wondering where my sister was. In a way, it had been a relief that she’d been arrested, after I’d stared at the ceiling through many nights, wondering if she were dead.

“So you weren’t kidding about going long stretches without speaking.” Bruxton stared at the traffic. “Would you tell us if you heard from her?”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?” In the back of my mind, I was ticking off the reasons never to trust people in authority. I’d had to lie and play-act throughout high school, always in fear of letting anyone too close to the truth about my family. One girl I’d stupidly confided in when I was fifteen ratted out my drunken mother to the principal. Later, when I’d confronted her, she’d sworn she’d felt sorry for me and just wanted to help. The principal, in turn, had invited me to his office, locked the door, and made it clear what it would take for him not to call in child protection services. Normally I hated it when my erratic mother pulled up stakes and moved Claudia and me to a new town, but that was one place I couldn’t get away from fast enough.