worry about Adrian’s future than her own. Large as he stood in the halls of memory, his suffering would remain his alone, at least until she faced her own conviction. Yet, that risk was out there, too, and it could happen now: cars in the mist, cops with weapons drawn. What would she say if Hamilton and Marsh suddenly appeared? What would she do?
“You should run.”
Elizabeth turned and found Channing awake. “What did you say?”
The girl pushed up in the bed, her eyes catching light from the window, the rest of her dim and shapeless in the gloom. “If we’re not going to tell the truth about what I did, then you should leave. Maybe, we should leave together.”
“Where would we go?”
“The desert,” Channing said. “Some place we could see forever.”
Elizabeth sat on the bed. The girl’s eyes looked so kaleidoscopic that anything seemed possible. Escape. The desert. Even a future. “Did you know what I was thinking just now?”
“How would I know that?”
Elizabeth waited half a beat, thinking the girl had known. “Go back to sleep, Channing.”
“Okay.”
“We’ll talk later.”
Elizabeth closed the bedroom door, then took the hottest shower she could stand. Afterward, she tended the wounds on her wrists, then put on jeans and boots and a shirt with tight cuffs. She was in the living room when Beckett showed up at the front door.
“Two things,” he said. “First, I was out of line last night. Way out of line. I’m sorry.”
“Just like that?”
“What can I say? You’re my partner. You matter.”
“What’s the second thing?”
“Second thing is I still want you to see the warden. He gets in early. He’s expecting you.”
“Adrian has court.”
“First appearances aren’t until ten. You have time.”
Elizabeth leaned into the door, thinking she was tired and wanted coffee and that it was too early for her to be standing in the door and talking to Charlie Beckett. “Why do you want me to see him? The real reason.”
“Same as before. I want you to recognize Adrian Wall for what he is.”
“Which is what?”
“Broken and violent and beyond redemption.”
Beckett put a big period at the end of the sentence, and Elizabeth thought hard about what he wanted. The prison mattered in the county. It meant jobs, stability. The warden had a lot of power. “He’ll show me something I don’t already know?”
“He’ll show you the truth, and that’s all I’m asking. For you to open your eyes and understand.”
“Adrian’s not a killer.”
“Just go. Please.”
“Okay, fine. I’ll see the warden.”
Elizabeth leaned on the door, but Beckett caught it before it closed. “Did you know she’s a shooter?”
Elizabeth froze.
“I looked it up last night. Channing is a competitive marksman. Did you know that?” Elizabeth looked away, but Beckett saw the truth. “It’s not in your report.”
“Because nobody needs to know.”
“Doesn’t need to know what? That she could strip your Glock in the dark, then put it back together and shoot the dick off a gnat? I dug up her scores. She can outshoot ninety-nine cops out of a hundred.”
“So can I.”
“She burned down her yard, yesterday. Did you know that, too? The fire marshal says the house could have gone up with it. The neighbor’s house, too. People could have died.”
“Why do you push, Charlie?”
“Because you’re my friend,” Beckett said. “Because Hamilton and Marsh are coming for you, and because we need an alternate story.”
“There is no alternate.”
“There’s the girl.”
“The girl?” Liz leaned on the door until the center of a single eye was all that showed. “As far as you’re concerned, there is no girl.”
* * *
Beckett disagreed. The bullet placement was perfect. Knees. Elbows. Groins. Could the girl have done it? Taken the Monroe brothers out in near dark? Tortured them, first? She was eighteen, weighed all of ninety pounds. Beyond that, he didn’t know her at all, so he couldn’t say.
But, he did know Liz.
She treated Gideon like a son, the girl like a sister, and Adrian like some kind of fallen saint. She was a sucker for lost causes, and now there were these new questions.
Could Channing have pulled the trigger?
Whose blood was on the wire?
The questions followed him into the precinct and upstairs. He checked the murder board on Ramona Morgan, but they didn’t have much. Burn marks from a stun gun were obvious, but they had no fingerprints, fibers, or DNA. No sexual assault occurred. Death was by strangulation, which apparently happened on or near the altar, and took a long time. There was no sign the body had been moved, but