MacLeish didn’t answer, but he did reach under the table and pull out a recorder. “You’re in the nick of time,” he said. “The St. Leo turns over the security tapes tomorrow. I wouldn’t be able to do anything for you, then.” He punched the recorder on, and nodded at me in encouragement.

I leaned down and grabbed my purse and pulled out the photographs, along with the phone records.

“What you said, about being under the Lady’s thumb. You’re right. I don’t want to live that way anymore.” I nodded at the photographs, telling myself I was doing the right thing. Even if I gave the Lady the money, Lou and I were too much at her mercy now. Knowledge is power, and she had too much of both. “This should be proof enough about the type of operation she’s running. I have a name, too.”

MacLeish stared at the photographs and, with one finger, spread them out across the table, a patchwork Kama Sutra. He mouthed the names of the men in the photographs as he looked at them. “Jesus,” he breathed softly, and then his eyes flicked up, away from the photographs, directly into the one-way glass. He kept them there for one long moment, and then he looked back at me, eyes full again of that hangdog sadness. He reached across the table and softly punched the recorder off.

That’s when I realized I’d made a mistake.

From outside the interrogation room, there came a swift two-knock. MacLeish crossed to the door and opened it. I expected his partner to walk through the door, but it seemed I couldn’t get anything right.

A man entered, dressed in black jeans and a white button-down shirt. Sleeves rolled up. Nice-quality shoes, black leather shined to mirrorlike proportions. The shoes always give the game away.

“Jo. My boss, the chief of detectives, Graham Lafferty,” MacLeish said. It was the most formal sentence I’d ever heard him pronounce. Graham. A little sound came out of me but I managed a nod.

Chief of Detectives Graham Lafferty stood a little over six feet tall, with a face a mother might’ve struggled to love. He stood and moved with the most perfect posture I’d ever seen, like he might be photographed at any time.

Mr. Alibi, I presume, I thought but didn’t say. It would only matter if I made it out of the room uncuffed. And I hated to admit it but it was another of Lou’s smart moves, an extra insurance policy. But if I was here, that meant he hadn’t cracked her—or that Lafferty didn’t know she was part of the Lady’s operations.

He turned his head to MacLeish and said, “A moment alone with the young lady?”