For all it might be true, it was the wrong thing to say. Tadeo sat brooding silently.

Dora caught my eye and made a little motion indicating that I should keep talking.

“I’m trying to figure out the timing. Let me imagine it two ways-innocent and guilty. If he’s innocent, someone gets control of him early that morning or late the previous night, before his stepfather is murdered-otherwise, Mason might have been able to come up with an alibi. A friend might have met him for breakfast, someone might have seen him go to the store. Anything. If the real killer or killers wanted to frame him, I don’t think they would have wanted to take chances on his whereabouts during the killing.”

“Right,” said Dora, encouraging me.

“He’s supposed to have gone up to the mountains to bury his little sister, and for several hours-during which law enforcement was actively looking for him-driven around. As we’ve said, he was either wearing blood-spattered clothing or nearly naked.”

“He was in a car, so most people would only be able to tell he was shirtless,” Ethan pointed out. “And with a two-hour head start, he could have stayed hidden in the mountains before the crimes in Las Piernas were discovered. Lots of private roads, even empty houses.”

“Okay, let’s say that’s the case. On a cold night in the mountains, he’s still hanging around for a long time. Many hours.”

“Spent the time getting drunk,” Ethan suggested.

“No,” Tadeo said. “The bottle supposedly came from his dad’s office, and it wasn’t empty.”

“If he had been drinking it slowly for more than twelve hours,” I said, “he wouldn’t have been close to dead from the amount of alcohol in his system.”

“He could have waited, drank most of it late in the day,” Ethan said.

“He wasn’t that drunk-it wasn’t the alcohol that almost killed him,” Tadeo said. “I think a lot of it was spilled on him and in the car. That wasn’t what was highest in his bloodstream.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I stopped by the hospital a few days later, talked to some of the ER folks.”

“He mixed it with pills, right?”

“Barbiturates,” Tadeo said. “A load of them. And that’s another funny thing. The barbiturates were mixed into the booze itself. But no one ever found the empty capsules.”

“So if he was opening the capsules and dumping the powder inside them into the booze, you should have seen them on the floor of the car.”

“If the scotch bottle hadn’t come from his dad’s place, I’d say not necessarily. And I suppose he could have buried his sister and then played chemist up in the woods. But that doesn’t seem likely to me. Makes more sense to be hidden in the car, I think.”

“Maybe he wasn’t being sensible,” Ethan argued.

“At his trial,” I said, “the prosecution said up front that he hadn’t arrived at the studio with a plan to kill his stepfather. They said he came there to argue with Richard Fletcher, but it was obvious that he didn’t bring a weapon, and they claimed he didn’t know his sister was there.”

“But it was first-degree murder?” Ethan asked.

“Yes. It’s complicated, but legally you don’t need to have the thought of killing someone in mind for a long time for it to be premeditated. If he had been in a fistfight with Richard and blindly grabbed the trophy and swung it, they might have brought a lesser charge. But Richard Fletcher was at his desk and struck repeatedly from behind, so he wasn’t able to defend himself, and he couldn’t have been threatening Mason.” I paused. “That’s if you believe Mason was there that day in the first place.”

“So the prosecution said he discovered his little sister there, took her, drove around with her for a while, then killed her to keep her from talking?”

“Yes. Then, in remorse, later tried to kill himself with a lethal mixture of booze and pills.”

“I think he was set up,” Tadeo said angrily. “I knew it from the moment I opened that car door, and I’m never going to be able to live with myself if-”

He broke off and looked at his wife, a strange expression on his face.

“It’s true,” she said softly. “You’re a good man, Tadeo. And you won’t be able to live with yourself until you make this right.”

He frowned, then shook his head. “It’s probably not going to make a difference.”

“Who says that you only do the right thing if you’re going to win? Not the Tadeo I know. And if you were where that young man is now, it would make a difference to you.”

She kept talking to him in this vein, and eventually he agreed to talk to Frank. He also told me he would talk to Mark Baker at the Express before he spoke to any other member of the press. “And the brother, Caleb-can you ask him to call me again?” he said.

We told him we would.

As we left, Dora refused our thanks, saying we were the ones who had helped her. I didn’t think that was the case.

WE started the trip back.

“Are you sorry it won’t be your story?” Ethan asked, rearranging his pillows.

I thought about it for a moment and said, “A little, I suppose. Mostly not.”

But he had already fallen asleep, wasting my honesty.

He slept through the brief calls I made to Frank and Mark Baker, and the stop I made at the police department, where Frank met me in the parking garage. Memories of seeing Ethan in an ICU were far too new-neither of us wanted to wake him or leave him alone asleep, so we stood outside the car and spoke softly. I gave Frank a quick summary of what I had learned and told him how to contact Tadeo. He told me Reed had found a little tin container hidden in Sheila’s house. It held several small, individually wrapped teeth.

“He nearly didn’t find them. She put them in a Yahtzee game. He only figured it out because the game was in her bedroom, and after imagining a few wild variations on Yahtzee, he decided she probably wasn’t the type to be playing any of them in bed.”

“Thank you for that image.”

We promised to catch up on other events of the day when we saw each other that evening.

I stopped to refill the Jeep’s nearly empty gas tank, then headed home.

I don’t know when Ethan woke up, but about three miles from the house I heard him say, “Did you know we’re being followed?”

Honesty made me admit I didn’t, but he was right.

CHAPTER 34

Monday, May 1

3:15 P.M.

LAS PIERNAS

SO you don’t know how long you’ve been tailed?”

“I don’t think it’s been for very long. I think I would have noticed someone following me all the way from Redlands. I stopped off at the police department, and again to get gas.”

“You did?”

His disbelief over that gave me a moment to glance again in the mirror.

“Don’t let him see you checking the mirror,” he said, making me want to tell him that I wasn’t born yesterday, but why emphasize the obvious? And it’s hard to sound wise if you’re the one who didn’t notice the tail.

“He’s staying far enough back that I haven’t been able to get a good look at his plates-or at him,” he added. “He’s wearing a cap and shades. Driving a dark blue SUV. Not one of the giant ones, but high enough off the ground to see you from a few cars back.”

“I did figure out which car it is,” I said. He didn’t laugh, which made me think he was more worried than he was letting on.

I made a turn, traveling away from the house. “Don’t sit up,” I said to Ethan. “He may not know you’re in the car, and that might be helpful.”

“No problem. But the seat belt might be giving me away.”

I made another turn and glanced at Ethan. His face was pale and drawn. “Are you in pain? Don’t lie to me.”

“Let’s call it discomfort. I can handle it.”

The blue SUV appeared in traffic a few cars back. I thought over my options.

If I turned on to a more deserted street, I would either make him shy away or become more aggressive. If he was only trying to figure out where I lived, he might hang back a bit, but if he intended harm, it would be a bad choice. This was no time to give him the benefit of the doubt.