Fourth pin: Someone killed Charles, cut off his hand, and took his drawings.
Fifth pin: Someone put the hand in my rubbish bin.
Sixth pin: Someone altered the drawings and sent them to me.
Seventh pin: Someone sent me threatening collage letters.
Eighth pin: Someone talked Constance into telling the police.
Ninth pin: When that didn’t work, someone medicated Constance to make her statement more believable.
Tenth pin: Someone killed Constance before she could make her more-believable statement.
I spent minutes walking through the pins in my mind, trying to make sense of them. But there were too many unknowns. Too many someones, and not all of them could be the same person. Would the person who killed the artist put his hand in my rubbish? Wouldn’t it be better for the killer if no one ever found any of him? Why had the artist been killed? Why use it to implicate me? What was the point of it? I could buy that the person who called in tips about me and brought Constance in to make a statement would make her take medicine to clarify her thoughts. But why would this person then kill her?
No. It was like two equations in one.
I sat up straighter.
I needed to group the sets.
Someone had put the hand in my rubbish, sent me threats, and found Constance to give a statement.
Someone else had killed Charles, altered his drawings, and killed Constance to keep her from giving her statement.
There were two. It was the answer to everything. There had been two people all along. The problem wasn’t solving for X. It was solving for X and Y, two forces working opposed to each other. X was trying to blame me for my father’s crimes. Y was trying to stop X. And Y was killing people in the process.
Which meant X was in trouble.
I stood up and walked over to the mirror. “Hey! I need Mallory. ?Tell him I’m ready to talk.” No response, so I knocked on the glass and got louder. “Go get Mallory! I need to talk to him. It’s important!”
Nothing.
I paced the room, sat for a while, then got up to tap on the glass again, but still there was no reply. I was starting to wonder if I had a babysitter after all. I tried counting down the minutes, to track time, tried to use all these wasted minutes and hours to think of what to do next, but there were almost too many contingencies and not all that much that was in my control.
Were I to be released, my first priority had to be getting Alice to take my brothers out of town. And then I needed to find X and . . . do what? Protect whomever it was from the threat of the equally mysterious Y? Would I really protect someone from a killer who was trying to protect me?
If I didn’t get out of this bloody station, I still had to find a way to convince Alice to leave me here and get my brothers out of town. And if Mallory wouldn’t listen or see reason? If I ended up being incarcerated for good?
I sighed and felt the drag of that hopeless thought on my mind. But it wasn’t only hopelessness that dragged me down. It had been days since I’d had a proper sleep in an actual bed. As much as I tried to keep my focus, my eyelids kept drifting shut, and closing them felt so good.
? ? ?
I didn’t know how long they let me sleep, or what time it was when Mallory next came in the room, but he was breaking the rules—I knew that for sure.
“Where were you between the hours of four and six yesterday morning?” he asked. He had slammed down his files as my wake-up call, which was bad enough. But he’d almost immediately shoved a microphone in my face and compressed some buttons on an ancient-looking machine I assumed would record our conversation.
I barely lifted my head in acknowledgment of his question, and, when I didn’t answer him right away, he leaned toward the mic and said, “Suspect refuses to answer the question.”
I grunted and Mallory asked, “What did you say to the victim to lure her from the park?”
I met his gaze and sat quietly.
“Suspect refuses to answer the question.”
I again said nothing.
“Where is the weapon you used?”
Nothing.
“Suspect refuses to answer the question.” He flipped open his file folder security blanket then, and I decided to take the opportunity to ask a question of my own.
I leaned as close as I could toward the microphone and asked, “Where are my attorney and guardian?”
Mallory flipped a page from his file and opened his mouth to say something else, but I cut him off.
“Inspector refuses to answer the question.”
He slammed down the page in his hand and said, “Interview ended at seven thirty-nine,” then compressed another button to stop the recording. He sat back in his chair and stared at me. “I’ve done my due diligence.”
“A.m.?” I asked.
Mallory looked confused.
“Is it morning?”
He didn’t say, of course, but I guessed it must have been morning already, because Mallory was wearing a different-colored shirt from yesterday’s blue.
I asked, “Who brought Constance Ross to the station to give her statement?”