As he regarded me, I sensed he weighed his words carefully. “Attending a woman’s autopsy is pretty damn intimate.”

My threaded arms tightened. I had no words to rebut his statement. I’d known my sister since before we were born. We could finish each other’s sentences, looked so much alike we could fool our friends and parents, and were privy to dark family secrets. But I’d not been there at that terrible end. None of the details that had defined Clare—the smart one, the sensitive one, and the nice one—mattered now. All anyone cared about was gathering details of her death: Had she known her killer? Was she sexually assaulted? Was she really strangled? I’d seen all these thoughts reflected back in the stares following me since Clare had died.

But I knew nothing about the crime scene or the real, intimate details of her death. Richards did, and in death he was closer to my twin than I was.

“I’ve had a week to ask around about you,” he said.

“Why would you ask about me? What do I have to do with any of this?”

“You were the instigator,” he said with certainty. “If you and Clare got into trouble, you always started it.”

That was true. “We didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Depends on who you talk to.”

I was a minor, only sixteen, but he stared at me as if I were twice that age. There was no pity, no empathy, just a keen and unsettling interest.

“You were arrested twice for drunk driving last year. Not only too young to drive but loaded. Then you were caught shoplifting. Daddy fixed both issues, and then you and Clare were caught speeding. Oddly, Clare was behind the wheel. She didn’t pass the Breathalyzer test, whereas you, in the passenger seat, did. My guess is you two swapped driver’s licenses.”

We had. It would have been my third offense, and another DWI would have meant fifty hours of community service. The judge had already stated he’d see to it that every college I applied to would know about my drunk-driving record. Clare hadn’t wanted to trade, but she was always looking out for me.

“You don’t know that,” I said.

“You’re right, I can’t prove it. But I really don’t care about that now. I’m wondering if you didn’t swap places the night Clare died. Maybe whoever killed her thought it was you.”

“How can you say that?” Anguish wrapped each word.

Richards was unmoved. “We found the clothes Clare had been wearing. They were in a pile a half mile down the road in the bushes. Like someone balled them up and tossed them out a car window before or after they dumped her body.”

Picturing my sister being treated as yesterday’s garbage hurt.