“He talked about it that night?”

“What I’ve just told you I learned later, when I talked to him about the handprint on the window. I know he talked about it with my mother that night-she came downstairs and asked what had happened, and I told her I had cut my hand. He was only worried about me then, but she asked him what he was doing there-it wasn’t asked in an angry way. And he said, ”We have to get him to a hospital.“ She asked again why he was there, and he said, ”Because I need my family.“

“I have to admit that I wasn’t really paying much attention after that, because my hand was bleeding and I was focused on that. I just remember that we got into his car, and my mother drove, and he held on to me in the backseat, as if I were a much younger child, but I remember liking it, feeling safe and-” He paused, then said, “I had a towel wrapped around my hand, but I still bled all over him. I remember watching the stain soak from the towel onto his shirt and telling him I was ruining it. He said not to worry about it, the shirt wasn’t important, I was the one who mattered most to him. I remember him trying to soothe me, to keep my mind off my hand. I think he must have told my mother something about Gwendolyn’s murder while they first took a look at my hand in the emergency room, because Mom was the one who got rid of the car.”

“She what?” I asked, shocked.

He turned red. “Whatever my father is guilty of, my mother engaged in a criminal act that night. When we first got to the emergency room, it was really busy, so they just cleaned my cuts and then put some kind of a temporary bandage on my hand, just to stop the bleeding until the hand surgeon could come in. My dad stayed with me while they were doing that, and Mom went out to the car. She wiped off the steering wheel and the door handle, then took the car to a bar not far from the hospital and left it parked in the parking lot. She said she thought of setting it on fire, but decided that would attract too much attention, and might result in damaging someone else’s property. So she just left it there and walked back and waited for us in the waiting room.”

Apparently Rachel was just as stunned as I was, because she just sat there staring at him.

“She was really very cool-headed about it. I had seen that side of her before-the protectiveness, I mean. Mom was shy and timid, except in one circumstance: when anything threatened someone she loved. Then she turned into this fierce Irish warrior woman.”

I smiled. “My mother wasn’t as shy as Briana, but she was just as protective of her family. God help anyone who so much as said a word against any of us.”

“So the car wasn’t really stolen?” Rachel said.

“Well, yes, it was, but from that lot-not the hospital, I mean. She said she thought it might get stolen, because it was a tough neighborhood. The car was a new T-Bird, and she left the windows down and the doors unlocked. The more my father and I thought about it, the more we realized how dangerous it had been for her to be walking around in that area by herself at two-thirty in the morning. God knows who might have come out of that bar. My mother always said a lot of prayers for that car thief-that he’d keep the car and never steal another. She was grateful to him for putting a little truth in her lies to the police.”

“Your dad didn’t know what she planned?” I asked.

“No. Neither of us did. We were both amazed when she told us.”

“But what if the police had found the car?”

“Well, I suppose she thought that it might help my father’s lawyer raise some questions about where the blood came from-if the police had found any traces of blood on it. But mainly she wanted the police in Las Piernas to be able to attest to the fact that my dad was there that night.”

“How long were you at the hospital?” I asked.

“Oh, a long time. I had to have surgery, because I had severed a bunch of tendons. I wasn’t ready to go home until about ten or eleven o’clock the next morning; then we couldn’t find the car. So by the time we talked to the hospital security people and did the police report-they just took the report by phone-and hired a taxi to come home, it was early afternoon on Saturday. We were all exhausted.

“My parents put me to bed, then they stayed up talking for a while. I was really excited, because I thought they were getting back together. Then when I woke up, late on Saturday, my mother told me that Gwendolyn had been murdered, and that my father didn’t kill her, but he would be blamed. She said that if anyone ever asked me, my father had been home with us all evening. I guess I knew right at that moment that we would only have a little time together. There wasn’t any way that things were ever going to be okay again. Maybe I should have told the truth to the police, but I loved my father-I had figured that out that night, when I got hurt, that even if I was angry with him about some things, I loved him. If he were alive right now,” he said, his voice breaking, “I would lie for him again.”

Neither one of us said anything. I could tell that his story didn’t sit well with Rachel, but she didn’t criticize him. I sat trying to imagine what it would have been like to be an eleven-year-old boy in that situation.

“Rachel,” I asked, “wouldn’t his hand print have remained in the blood on the sheet?”

“It probably was there,” she said, “and might still be on the sheet if they’ve kept it. But as I said, the scene was disturbed. The housekeeper and several other people-including Richmond-were leaning on or kneeling on the bed to look at the victim. It may have gone unrecognized after that.”

Travis drew a deep breath and said, “So, back to distraction. What have you got to show us, Rachel?”

Rachel pulled out one of the copies of the crime scene photos. It was a sharp image in black and white-too sharp.

“That’s an actual print, not a photocopy,” I said.

She smiled. “Switched them on old Richmond. I’ll give these back to him when we’re done with them.”

“Rachel-”

“Hell, he’s had over a dozen years to look at these things. If he hasn’t memorized them by now, he’s a bigger jerk than I think he is.”

Travis was half looking at it, half looking away.

As crime scene photos go, it wasn’t one of the more gory ones I’ve seen. It was a shot taken inside Gwendolyn DeMont’s bedroom, from across the room, looking toward the bed. The body was not uncovered; there was form under a single, bloodstained sheet. A pillow lay across the face.

Rachel looked at it dispassionately. “There’s a lamp here where your dad said he reached for one.”

She handed the photo toward him, and when he shrank back from it, she gave it to me. She moved on to the next photo, which was taken directly over the bed. It was easy to see why Arthur knew his wife was dead. The one part of her that could be seen between pillow and sheet was her throat, which lay slashed open like a strange dark mouth.

“That was probably one of the last blows,” Rachel said. “Not much bleeding for that type of cut, no arterial spray. I think she was already dead when the killer got around to this slice. The ones over her chest and stomach bled more.”

I made myself ask, “What about spatter patterns?”

“That’s some of the best evidence-Richmond and the housekeeper didn’t touch the walls and ceiling.” She thumbed through the photos and handed me several.

“Even though there isn’t blood all over the place, you can tell that her killer really went at it,” she said. “There’s a pattern to the spray-it’s called cast-off blood, because it was projected or cast from an object, not the site of the wound; it came from the weapon, not directly from the victim, like this arterial spurting, here and here.” She pointed to large spots with long drips running down from them.

“Look at this, then,” she said, showing me other, finer drops. “A bloodstain specialist could give you a good estimate of how far, how fast, and at what angle this blood traveled from the knife, and would have been able to count the blows delivered.