“All right, well what do you actually know about this guy?” Hendricks said. “He’s got the backpack and the cap. He sent ACG the photo. So I’ll buy that Suzanne was here. But does Romeo in there have any proof Suzanne was pregnant?”

Gibson showed them the photo. Hendricks seemed unmoved, but Jenn stared at it while her partner kept up his interrogation.

“And does he have any proof it wasn’t his?”

“No,” Gibson said.

“Or that Musgrove wasn’t a suicide?”

“No.”

Jenn cleared her throat. Hendricks shot her a look that Gibson couldn’t interpret.

“But you believe him anyway,” Hendricks said. “That he helped Suzanne out of the goodness of his heart. Helped a girl pregnant by some other guy. And then someone came and took her away and killed his neighbor. You believe that fantasy, but you don’t believe that the guy who hacked ACG, lured us out here, served up Tate for kidnapping his sister—you don’t believe there’s a chance he had something to do with the four quarts of blood I mopped up last night?”

“Come on, Hendricks. Does he strike you like a guy capable of gunning someone down in cold blood?”

“What does someone capable of that look like?”

“It wasn’t him.”

Hendricks’s lip curled. “Well, it’s either you or him. Him I can’t prove, but you I know were there.”

“So were you,” Gibson shot back.

The two men stared flatly at each other, Gibson holding as still as he had ever been. It went on like that for some time. Then, just like that, Hendricks snorted and looked away.

“Does George think I did it?” Gibson asked.

Jenn and Hendricks looked at each other.

“What?”

“Tell him about Meiji?” Hendricks said.

“What the hell is Meiji?”

Jenn sat alone in the kitchen while Hendricks took a power nap in the next room. She was jealous of his ability to compartmentalize. Neither of them had slept more than an hour in the last two days, but she couldn’t keep her eyes closed. There were just too many variables and too few constants. She knew there was only so long she’d be able to keep Hendricks at bay. Despite Gibson’s efforts, Hendricks still liked Billy Casper for Tate’s murder, and she was having trouble coming up with a competing theory that didn’t involve Gibson.

Her phone rang. It was Mike Rilling.

“Mike?”

“Jenn, is that you?”

“Who else am I going to be?”

“I don’t know. Things are kind of crazy, you know?”

Mike didn’t sound good. He had always had a bit of the whiny child in him, but now he was like a middle-school cafeteria in Jenn’s ear.

“It’s going to be fine. Are you at the office? Why are the phones disconnected?”

Mike told her.

“What do you mean Abe Consulting’s gone?”