I pause in the dark hallway, just outside the light spilling through the bedroom door, imagining Frank Rios as I last saw him, picturing him spread out on the bed like Morales, hands lifted stiffly heavenward, the blood cooling, settling in his extremities. But when I enter, it isn’t a beatific corpse waiting for me.

Rios sits on the edge of the bed, his wrists lashed together with an extension cord, its opposite end secured to the bedpost beneath him, between his legs, forcing him to hunch forward, to tilt his battered head up in order to see. He looks at me through one eye, the lid swollen, his face puffy and scratched, blood dripping from his mouth and nose. It takes a moment for him to recognize me, and then he tugs on the cord violently. He spits to clear his mouth.

“You gotta help me, man,” he whispers.

Robb goes to the mirrored closet, leaning back against the door, his knees buckling under him. As he slides down, he leaves a wet trail on the glass. I kneel beside him, pulling at the T-shirt. A seeping washrag is duct-taped to his side. Underneath, a tiny hole oozes blood.

“Put pressure on this.” I replace the rag, moving his hands to cover it. “I’m calling an ambulance.”

“Wait,” he says, reaching toward my hand. “Make him tell you what he told me.”

“You’ve been shot, Carter. We’ve gotta get you to the hospital.”

“It doesn’t matter. Make him tell you.”

I pull free, walking out into the hallway. There’s no way I’m going to let him bleed to death on the carpet while I chat with Frank Rios. The emergency operator scrambles ambulance and police and then it’s back into the bedroom, where both men look up, both appealing to me. From the bathroom I grab fresh towels, then bend over Robb to try and staunch the flow of blood. Over my shoulder, Rios coughs sloppily and spits some more.

“You don’t get it,” he hisses, addressing Robb, not me, continuing a conversation I must have interrupted with my arrival. “Not you, not that other one – Murray. You talk, but it’s not inside you like it was in her.”

“Shut up,” I say.

Robb shakes his head weakly. “Let him talk.”

“I knew,” Rios says. “I could tell looking at you. Talking. That Murray thinks he’s so smart, quoting all these philosophers he’s never read. But he’s not. You’re not. This” – he shrugs against the cable – “it means nothing.”

I don’t want him to talk. I don’t want to hear his side of the story. Some killers, when they realize it’s over, they want to tell their life story. They have pronouncements to make, as though taking life gives them some heightened insight into living it. I’ve sat through enough of these lectures, even been entertained by a few, but not this time. Not him.

“You murdered Hannah Mayhew,” I say.

“It wasn’t like that.”

“What was it like, then?”

He drops his head, showing me the top of his skull, his matted hair, a target to lash out at, to crush. I feel it in me, that desire to hurt him, to make him suffer, to put him down like a rabid dog. The lives he’s destroyed, the anguish, the senseless brutality – no one would begrudge me doing it, and there are plenty who’d consider it my duty. There are some men not worth bringing in alive, not if you can help it. I have the means, and coursing through me like a high, like a toxin in my system, I have the motive, too.

“I loved her,” he says. He does more than say it. He wails the words, filling them with a repellent self-pity. “I tried to stop them from hurting her.”

“Evey, you mean. You abandoned her. I know what happened to Evey. I saw the aftermath firsthand.”

His head shakes. “I sent them to save her, but they didn’t. You know what they did? He told me. Tony told me. They dumped her, man. They put her in the water like she was just garbage. And they were gonna do that to me, too, if they ever caught me.”

I can hardly stand it. “So you’re the victim here.”

“Everybody’s the victim. I work for the police, man. The good guys. I pass along whatever they need to know. And they supposed to help me. That’s what he says. Tony. They gonna help me with the money I owe. They gonna square everything in time. Only they don’t, so then I gotta do it. Except… Except…”

The emotion in his voice is real enough. I can believe, in his own sick and self-centered way, that he loved Evangeline Dyer, just like Coleman said. But hearing him say so, hearing his words thicken with grief, pollutes her memory. I see her face in Thomson’s photo, on the many pages of his sketchbook, in the picture folded over and tucked in my notebook, Evey and Hannah saying goodbye before the Dyers left for Louisiana. Even though I never knew her, even though I pursued her blindly, just a body tied to a bed, I feel she belongs to me in some way she doesn’t to him, the man she ran away with, the man who left her to her fate.

Something Donna Mayhew said comes back to me. I didn’t know her, but now I feel like I’ve found her. Only I’ll never find Evey, down at the bottom of the Gulf. She’s lost for good, and this is as close as I’ll ever get.

“You left her,” I say.

“I sent help.”

“And what about Hannah? She didn’t deserve to die. She didn’t deserve to have her body dumped, either, but that’s what you did.”

At the mention of her name, his demeanor shifts. He twists his head up, looking at me through the hooded eye. “That girl, she wouldn’t stop calling. She had to talk to Evey, wouldn’t stop until I put her on the phone. But how could I do that? I tried putting her off, but she knew something wasn’t right. She wouldn’t let go of it. And I thought, this girl could get me in a lot of trouble – or maybe I wasn’t thinking. I was afraid.” He spits again. “Afraid of them finding me, afraid of anyone knowing.”

“So, what, you kidnapped her?”

“I agreed to meet her. Told her Evey and me would be at the mall. That’s where we used to meet, before Evey went home to the Big Easy. Hannah, when she showed up, I told her she had to stop calling me. I said Evey went back again, but she could tell it was a lie. And I went, ‘This has gotta end.’ ”

“Then you killed her.”

He shakes his head. “I was just trying to scare her, man. But she got real angry and was like, ‘What you done to her?’ And she says she’s gonna call the police. Under the seat, my cousin Tito, he keeps a loaded gun.” He turns sideways to look at Robb, who hasn’t moved in a while. “He’s got the gun, man. You better watch out.”

“I have the gun,” I say, then hunching over Robb: “You okay? Help’s coming, so just hang on.”

“Is he okay?” Rios says. “What about me? Look what he done to me!”

“He could’ve done worse.”

A sticky laugh escapes his red lips. “No, he couldn’t. Not after what I told him.”

He stops talking, now that I want him to. But there’s no way he can keep it up. Not everybody talks, but everybody wants to, I’m convinced of that. The hard men, the professionals, they know to keep their mouths shut. But it doesn’t come naturally. Like killing, you have to overcome a lot of instinct to stay quiet, whether you’re guilty or not. The effort on its own is sometimes enough to give the game away. So I know he’s going to open up.

“Told him what?”

Under the circumstances, though, he could admit to anything and get away with it. It won’t take much of a lawyer to argue any confession made in this room is coerced. But I don’t need him to confess to anything. All I need him to do is exist; all I need is his body so that justice can be executed upon it.

“Told him what?” I ask again, giving him a nudge.

“Don’t touch me, man.”

I push him again, and he rears back.

“What did you tell him that was so important?”

“Go on,” Robb says.

Rios starts nodding, a nod like a train coming over the horizon, slow at first, hardly perceptible, then it gains momentum, quickening to the point that his head bobs back and forth, his intention arriving. “It was her fault. She saw the gun and the stupid girl reached for it. It went off, and she’s sitting there in the passenger seat, looking surprised, like she never saw that coming.”