Kateri watches Shannon press his lips together, flat, white.

“Did you fight about the house?” Hurt asks.

“Something had to be done,” Shannon says. “She wasn’t going to do anything about it. We were going to be homeless.”

“Did you fight about your sister?” Hurt asks.

Shannon clamps his jaw tighter.

“You were tired of being implicated in her hiding,” Hurt says. “You disagreed with the way your mother had chosen to keep her captive all this time.”

Shannon looks at Hurt, then looks Kateri in the eye.

“So you confronted her,” Hurt says, projecting. Kateri has seen other investigators use this, and she’s used it herself. Tell the story the way it might have happened and wait for the suspect to disagree, to begin to tell it right, or to crumple with guilt, or flare with anger at being caught. “It got physical,” Hurt says. “You’re still badly bruised,” he says, and Shannon’s hands go to his throat. “And in reaction, in rage, pent up from years of lying, you struck her.”

Shannon moves his shoulder a little, shifts against the wall. “Maybe you didn’t mean to do that much damage,” Hurt says. “But faced with what you had done, you tried to hide it, you destroyed the evidence, and you hid your sister in the safest spot you could find: the closet.”

Shannon’s nostrils flare, and he draws his lips in so tight they are nearly invisible.

“When you found out your sister was at Mercy, you staked out her guard, attacked him in the parking lot, signed your sister out, and fled.”

“Fled,” Shannon repeats.

“Did you sign her out?” Kateri asks. “Or did you send someone up? Tag team, so to speak,” she says.

“While you ambushed Craig O’Neil in the parking lot,” Hurt says. He shrugs, cool. “Maybe you didn’t mean to kill him. But he died, bound and drowning in the trunk of his own car.”

She watches Shannon swallow.

“We’re in the process of searching Bear Miller’s house,” Kateri says.

Shannon huffs.

“Your prints are on the murder weapon,” Hurt says.

Shannon’s mouth falls open, and his eyes spring with tears. “I didn’t do it,” he says. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Where’s the girl?” Hurt asks.

“I don’t know,” Shannon says.

“Triple homicide is a steep offense,” Hurt says.

Kateri watches two tears brim and fall from his eyes. “I would never hurt her,” he says.

“I’m sure you didn’t mean for it to go this far,” Hurt says.

Kateri leans forward on the desk. “Who’s the angel?” she asks.

Shannon closes his eyes for a long moment before he looks at her. His eyes have gone dark and searching with fear. “I don’t know,” he says, but he knows what she’s talking about. This is not a new phrase to him. She folds her hands and lets him sit with it, and she notices that he starts to shake, first in his hands, which he clamps together, and then in his arms and across his torso. She has knocked something loose in him.