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angry.
    Roarke kept his tone neutral, suppressing an urge to haul Trent up by his collar and slam him against the wall. “A five-year-old? Snooping?”
    Trent assumed a look of righteous martyrdom. “The kid… you don’t know what we had to deal with. Her waking up at night screaming. Seeing things.”
    Hallucinations . That had been in the psychiatric reports, too.
    “Seeing things like…”
    “Monsters, she said. Always crying about It .”
    There was an odd inflection he gave the word, an inflection Roarke had heard before. From Cara. He frowned, repeated it. “Always crying about monsters?”
    “It,” Trent said again. “She was always talking about It .” He seemed agitated for the first time. “Spooked the kids. Creeped me out, too.”
    Roarke sat back and looked at him.
    “No one could go near her sometimes. She’d just start screaming. In the end she needed more help than we could give her,” Trent said piously.
    Yeah, I believe that . Roarke gave himself a minute to breathe, and studied the man in front of him. What went on ? What are you hiding ?
    “You’re in for assault,” he said aloud.
    Trent’s face turned sullen. “Self-defense,” he said.
    Sure, pal. Prostitutes are in the habit of attacking johns for no reason . “Not the first conviction, either,” he said. “The rest of them self-defense, too?”
    The convict moved explosively, a threatening gesture. “You got a point?”
    “Just trying to see what she saw in you.”
    Trent looked truculent. “I was a good husband to Joanie.”
    The fact was, Roarke hadn’t meant Joan Trent. He’d been thinking of Cara. Just trying to see what she saw in you. At five years old .
    “Until Cara came along,” Roarke said.
    “The kid was damaged. Maybe always was, maybe got that way because of what happened. Either way, not a kid you wanted living in your house.”
    “So you split and left Joan with her and two other kids,” Roarke said evenly.
    Trent’s eyes narrowed at Roarke speculatively. “Is this what the Feebs do these days? You’re here to rag my ass about what a bad father I was to the poor little orphan? Telling you, I wasn’t the one messed that kid up.”
    Roarke realized Trent was right in at least that one respect. And he’d strayed far from the topic. He refocused. “Did the Lindstroms have any vacation homes, favorite vacation spots, condos that you know of?” He knew that early imprints went deep, and if Cara had a safe house, as Singh had speculated, she may have unconsciously gravitated toward and established herself in a place that had warm memories from her earliest childhood.
    Trent rolled his eyes. “I’m ’sposed to remember from what, twenty-five years ago? We didn’t socialize much with Joan’s family.”
    Maybe because her brother could see what a creep you are , Roarke thought wearily.
    “And you never took the children anywhere, no family vacations?”
    He barked a laugh. “It was enough of a time just getting the kid to sleep at night.”
    “Did you go to the funerals?” Roarke asked out of nowhere.
    Trent looked startled. “Go to the… of course we did. What the hell?”
    It was the most natural response Roarke had gotten from him yet, so he tried for more. “Killers often attend the funerals of their victims. I wondered if you might have noticed anyone out of place, anyone unusual.”
    Trent frowned, and his eyes clouded, as if he were seriously thinking about it. But he shook his head. “I was there when Joanie I.D.’d the bodies. Person who does that kind of thing… I don’t think you can walk around hiding that.”
    “That’s interesting,” Roarke said. He meant it. He sat back in his chair and studied Trent. Trent stared back.
    “You seriously opening all that up again?” He shook his head. “Brother, good luck. No one ever had a clue.”
    Roarke had the feeling that Trent would sit talking to him all day if this were the topic. And what was surprising about that? A violent