“Why?” the nun asked suspiciously.

Alex held out the sack filled with the samples of prescription-strength antibacterial cream the nurses at the Atlanta ER had given her. “Her little girl has impetigo and this will fix it. There are also a few other supplies in there.”

The nun’s face softened. “Thank you.” She started to close the door again.

“Wait. I have one more question. Do you know this song?” She hummed the six bars Hope had been fixated upon the day before.

The nun frowned. “No, but I don’t get out much lately. Hold on. I’ll be back.” She shut the door and Alex and Hatton waited for a long time.

Hatton checked his watch. “We need to go. Vartanian will be here soon.”

“Just another minute. Please.” A minute came and went and Alex sighed. “I guess she’s not coming back. Let’s go.” They were almost out to the street when the door opened and the nun stuck her head out, a scowl on her face.

“I said I’d be back.”

“We waited. We thought you weren’t coming,” Alex said.

“I’m eighty-six years old,” the nun snapped. “Turtles move faster’n me. Here. Talk to this one.” She opened the door wider, revealing another nun who was only slightly younger and who looked very worried. “Tell them, Mary Catherine.”

Mary Catherine glanced up the street, then whispered. “Check Woodruff Park.”

Alex looked up at Hatton. “What’s that?”

“It’s one of the areas where musicians gather,” he said. “Anybody we should talk to in particular, Sister?”

Mary Catherine pursed her lips and the first old nun gave her a nudge. “Tell her.”

“You’ve heard the song before?” Alex asked, and Mary Catherine nodded.

“Bailey was humming it on the last Sunday she was here, while she was making the pancakes. She looked so sad. The song sounded sad. When I asked her what the song was, she got this scared look and said it was just a song she’d heard on the radio. But Hope said no, that it wasn’t the radio and didn’t her mama remember it was her Pa-paw and he was playing the song on his flute.”

Alex stiffened. Hope’s magic wand.

“What did Bailey do then?” Hatton asked, and she knew he thought the same thing.

“She got real flustered and sent Hope off to help set the tables, saying Hope thought every man with a beard was her Pa-paw. She said it just some poor drunk on the street corner playin’ a flute, that was all.”

Alex frowned. “But Sister Anne said she didn’t think Bailey had found her father.”

The first nun nudged Mary Catherine again. “Go ahead.”

Mary Catherine sighed. “Anne wasn’t in the kitchen at the time. I told her about it Monday night after you left. That’s when she decided to go lookin’ for him yesterday.”

Alex’s shoulders sagged. “She should have called me. I would have gone looking for him myself. Why did she go alone?”

The first nun sniffed. “Anne’s been ministering on these streets for years. She ain’t afraid to walk around herself.” Then she sighed. “I guess she shoulda been. At any rate, she didn’t want to get your hopes up. She said she’d check it out, then tell you when you came back last night. But you didn’t come back and neither did she.” The old nun shook herself back to brusque. “Thanks for the medicine. I’ll make sure it goes to good use.” She shut the door in Alex’s face.

Alex looked up and down the street. “Which way to Woodruff Park?”

But Hatton took her arm. “You don’t have time to look. I’ll find the flute player, and even if he’s not Crighton, I’ll bring him in. Now come on. You have a date.”

Atlanta, Wednesday, January 31, 3:30 p.m.

Daniel had parked his car in the prison lot, but he still sat behind the wheel. He’d told her about the interview with Gretchen French, about the assault and the empty whiskey bottle. He’d told her his plan to startle Fulmore with her face, that neither Fulmore nor his lawyer knew she was coming. All that conversation had eaten up about twenty minutes. The rest of the drive, he’d been withdrawn, deep in thought. She’d let him brood, hoping he’d eventually say something, but he’d said nothing at all.

Finally she broke the silence. “I thought we were going inside the prison.”

He nodded. “We are, but we need to talk first.”

Dread had her stomach clenching. “About?”

Daniel closed his eyes. “I don’t know how to ask you this.”

“Just ask, Daniel,” she said, her voice trembling.

“Is the picture I found of Alicia… or of you?”

Alex shrank away. “No. It’s not me. How… why would you even ask me that?”

“Because you have nightmares and hear screams and there are things you can’t remember. I assumed that Alicia was raped the same night she was killed, but the MO is too different. I wondered if they’d happened at different times, by different perps. And then I started to wonder…” He opened his eyes, and they were filled with pain and guilt. “What if the victims were different, too? What if Simon and the others hurt you?”

Alex pressed her fingers to her lips and for a moment simply focused on breathing.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “So sorry.”

Alex dropped her hands to her lap and made herself think. Could it be? No. She’d remember something like that. Maybe not. Meredith had said so in response to her exact same declaration earlier in the day.

“You’re the second person today to ask if I’ve been molested. I don’t know how to answer you except to say I don’t remember it happening, but I don’t remember the night she died, either. I started feeling sick on the way home from school and went right to bed. The next thing I remember was my mother shaking me awake the next morning, demanding to know where Alicia was. But I wasn’t bleeding and I don’t remember any whiskey bottle. I would think details like that would be harder to forget.”

For a moment the two of them were silent. Then Alex lifted her chin. “You never showed me the picture of Alicia,” she said.

He looked horrified. “You want to see it?”

Quickly she shook her head. “No. But there is one feature we had that was different.” She lifted the left leg of her slacks. “Can you see it through the hose?”

Daniel leaned over the gearshift. “The sheep tattoo. You said Bailey had one. No, you said you all had one, on Monday morning when you were viewing Janet’s body.”

“It’s actually a lamb. We thought it was cuter than a sheep. My mother called us her little lambs. Bailey, Alicia, and Alex. Baa. On our sixteenth birthday, Alicia got the idea to get the tattoos. Looking back, I think she was a little high. But Bailey was going, too, and it was our birthday, Alicia’s and mine, and I didn’t want to be alone.”

“A tattoo parlor gave sixteen-year-olds tattoos?”

“No, Bailey knew a guy. She told him we were seventeen. I tried to chicken out at the last minute, but Alicia triple-dog-dared me.”

One side of his mouth lifted. “The dreaded triple-dog-dare.”

“I never did anything exciting or fun. That was always Alicia. So I went along. In the picture of Alicia that you have, can you see her tattoo?”

“I didn’t look at her ankle.”

“Then look, at her right leg.”

He lifted his brows. “You didn’t get the same leg?”

Alex’s mouth quirked in a tiny smirk. “No. Bailey went first, then Alicia, which was the usual way of it. They were admiring their tattoos when the guy started mine. I purposely gave him my left foot. I was tired of getting in trouble for Alicia’s wildness.”

“You wanted people to be able to differentiate. What did Alicia say?”

“By the time she noticed me, he was already halfway done and it was too late. But oh, was she mad. And my mom, she was livid. She punished all three of us and for the first time in a long time Alicia had to take responsibility for her own actions instead of blaming me. I finally felt like I’d gotten the upper hand for once.” But then, Alicia had been murdered and all their lives had gone to hell. Her little smirk faded. “Look at the picture again, Daniel, and tell me what you see.”