“Not if you want me to represent Jacob. How did he get here?”

“I drove him.” She takes a long, shaky breath. “When I was watching the news today, and they were reporting from the crime scene, I saw a quilt that belongs to Jacob.”

“Is it possible that other people have it, too? Like, anyone who happened to shop at Kohl’s last season?”

“No. It’s handmade. It was upstairs in his closet, or so I thought. And then I heard the reporter say that they’d arrested Jess’s boyfriend for the murder.”

“Was Jacob her boyfriend?”

“No. That’s someone named Mark. I don’t know him, but I couldn’t stand the thought of him going to jail for something he didn’t do. I called the detective in charge of the case, and he said if I brought Jacob down here, he’d talk to him and take care of everything.” She buries her face in her hands. “I didn’t realize that meant he’d ambush Jacob. Or tell me I couldn’t sit in on the interview.”

“If he’s eighteen, that’s true,” I point out. “Did Jacob agree to talk to him?”

“He practically raced into the police station, once he was told he could help analyze a crime scene.”

“Why?”

“It would be like you getting a high-profile celebrity murder case after years of practicing property law.”

Oh. Well, that I could understand. “Did the police tell you Jacob was under arrest?”

“No.”

“So you just brought him down here voluntarily?”

She crumples in front of me. “I thought they were going to talk to him. I didn’t know he would be considered a suspect right away.” Emma Hunt is crying now, and I know less about what to do with a crying woman than I would with a greased piglet on a New York City subway. “I was just trying to do the right thing,” she sobs.

When I was a farrier, I worked with a mare that had a fracture in the pedal bone. Weeks of rest hadn’t helped her; the owners were talking about putting her down. I convinced them to let me hot-fit a straight bar shoe to the hoof, and I wrapped it instead of nailing it. At first, the mare didn’t want to walk, and who could blame her? It took a week of coaxing to get her to take a step from her stall, and then I worked with her for thirty minutes a day, until a year later, I led her out to a field and watched her fly across the open space, fast as a rumor.

Sometimes, you need someone else to help you take the first step.

I put my hand on her shoulder; she jumps at the contact and stares up at me with those crazy molten eyes of hers. “Let’s see what we can do,” I say, and I hope like hell she cannot tell that my knees are shaking.

At the dispatch desk, I clear my throat. “I’m looking for an officer…”

“Which one?” the bored sergeant asks.

My face floods with heat. “The one who’s doing the interview with Jacob Hunt,” I say. Why hadn’t I thought to ask her the guy’s name?

“You mean Detective Matson?”

“Yes. I’d like you to interrupt that interview he’s doing.”

The sergeant shrugs. “I’m not interrupting anything. You can wait. I’ll let him know you’re here when he’s done.”

Emma isn’t listening. She’s edged away from me, toward a door that leads down the hallway of the police department. It’s on a locked mechanism controlled by dispatch. “He’s down there,” she murmurs.

“Well, I think right now the best course of action is to play by their rules until-”

Suddenly the door buzzes and opens. A secretary wanders into the waiting area carrying a FedEx box for pickup.

“Now,” Emma says. She grabs my wrist and pulls me through the windfall of that open doorway, and in tandem, we start to run.

I am here as living proof to tell you that dreams really do come true.

1. I am sitting with Detective Matson, shooting the shit.

2. He’s sharing details of an open investigation with me.

3. Not once has he yawned or checked his watch or in any way indicated that he is not enjoying speaking to me at length about crime scene investigation.

4. He wants to talk to me about the crime scene surrounding Jess’s disappearance-a crime scene that I orchestrated.

Seriously, it doesn’t get much better than this.

Or so I think until he begins firing questions at me that feel like bullets. And his mouth is smiling halfway, and I cannot remember if that means he’s happy or not. And the conversation moves from the practical-the weight of the human brain, the nature of postmortem toxicity tests-to the personal.

The fascination of creating a liver slide to look at microscopically loses some of its entertainment value when Detective Matson forces me to remember that the liver in question belonged to someone I actually knew, someone I laughed with and looked forward to seeing, which is far from how I feel about most social interactions. As theoretical as I would like death to be, it turns out there is a significant difference when it’s corn syrup and food coloring instead of the real McCoy. Although I can logically understand that Jess is gone, which therefore means there’s no point wishing she weren’t since she’s not able to reverse the situation, it doesn’t account for the fact that I feel like a helium balloon is caught inside me, and that it keeps inflating, and that it might actually tear me apart.

Just when I think things cannot get any worse, Detective Matson accuses me of being the one to hurt Jess.

You’re the one who grabbed Jess by the arms, aren’t you?

I wasn’t. And I tell him so.

What about choking her? You’re not going to lie to me about doing that, are you?

I know the answer, of course, but it’s bogged down in the syntax. It’s like when someone asks you at dinner, You don’t want that last piece of steak, do you? when of course you do. If you say yes, are you saying that you want the last piece of steak? Or that you don’t want it?

So what made you choke her?

Was it a fight? Did she say something you didn’t like?

If Jess were here, she’d tell me to take a deep breath. Tell the person you need him to speak more slowly, she’d say. Tell him you don’t understand.

Except Jess isn’t here.

“Nothing made me choke Jess,” I finally manage to say, which is the absolute truth. But my face is red, and my breath feels like sawdust spilling out of me.

Once, when we were little and Theo called me a mental midget, I threw a couch pillow at him and, instead, it knocked over a lamp my mother had gotten from her grandmother. How did this happen? my mother asked, when she retained the power of speech again.

A pillow knocked it off the table.

It was unequivocally the truth, but my mother’s hand came down and swatted me. I don’t remember it hurting. I remember being so embarrassed that I thought my skin might melt off. And even though she apologized later, there was always a disconnect for me: telling the truth was supposed to set you free, wasn’t it? So how come it got me in trouble when I told a new mother that her baby looked like a monkey? Or when I read another kid’s paper in class during a peer edit and said it was abysmal? Or when I told my mother that I felt like an alien who’d been sent down to analyze families, since I never really seemed to be a part of ours?

Or now?

Did you choke her until she stopped breathing? Did you hit her in the face?

I think of Lucy and Ethel at that candy factory. Of one time when I went into the ocean and could not get out of the oncoming waves before the previous one drove me to my knees. On CrimeBusters, at the end, the CSIs interrogate the suspects and the suspects always crack in the face of cold, hard evidence.

None of this is happening the way I planned it to.

Or maybe it’s just that my plan is working a little too well.