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Three or four months, I guess.”
    â€œBut you spoke with him a few days ago.”
    â€œHe called, talked about meeting for a drink, catching up. I was busy, I put him off, told him we’d make it next week. Jesus.” Ash pressed his fingers to his eyes.
    â€œI know this is hard. You said you hadn’t met the woman he’d been living with for the past three months, almost four months now.”
    â€œNo. He mentioned her when he called. Bragging some—hot model. I didn’t pay much attention. Oliver brags, it’s his default.”
    â€œHe didn’t mention any trouble between him and the hot model?”
    â€œJust the opposite. She was great, they were great, everything was great.” He looked down at his hands, noticed a smudge of cerulean blue on the side of his thumb.
    He’d been painting when they’d come to his loft. He’d been annoyed by the interruption—then the world changed.
    It all changed with a few words.
    â€œMr. Archer?”
    â€œYeah. Yeah. Everything was fucking great. That’s how Oliver works. Everything’s great unless it’s . . .”
    â€œUnless?”
    Ash dragged his hands through his mop of black hair. “Look, he’s family, and now he’s dead, and I’m trying to get my head around that. I’m not going to punch at him.”
    â€œIt’s not punching at him, Mr. Archer. The better picture I have of him, the better I can resolve what happened.”
    Maybe that was true, maybe it was. Who was he to judge?
    â€œOkay, Oliver ran hot. Hot deals, hot women, hot clubs. He liked to party.”
    â€œLive large.”
    â€œYeah, you could say. He liked to consider himself a player, but God, he wasn’t. Always the high-stakes table for Oliver, and if he won—gambling, a business deal, a woman—he’d lose it and more in the next round. So everything was great, until it wasn’t and he needed somebody to pull him out. He’s charming and clever and . . . was.”
    The single word slashed through him. Oliver would never be charming and clever again.
    â€œHe’s his mother’s youngest, her only son, and basically? He was overindulged.”
    â€œYou said he wasn’t violent.”
    â€œNo.” Ash pulled himself back from the grief—that was for later—but he let the quick flash of temper come through. “I didn’t say Oliver wasn’t violent, I said he was the opposite of violent.” It stuck in his gut like a knife, the accusation that his brother had killed. “He’d talk himself out of a bad situation, or run from it. If he couldn’t talk himself out of it—and that was rare—or run from it, he’d hide from it.”
    â€œYet we have a witness claiming he struck his girlfriend multiple times before shoving her out a fourteenth-story window.”
    â€œThe witness is wrong,” Ash said flatly. “Oliver’s more full of bullshit and delusions of grandeur than anyone I know, but he’d never hit a woman. And he sure as hell wouldn’t kill one. Over and above? He’d never kill himself.”
    â€œThere was a lot of alcohol and drugs in the apartment. Oxy, coke, marijuana, Vicodin.”
    As she spoke, cop-cool, Ash imagined her as a Valkyrie—dispassionate in her power. He’d paint her astride a horse, her wings folded, overlooking a battlefield, face carved like stone as she decided who lived, who died.
    â€œWe’re still waiting on the tox screens, but there were pills and a half-empty bottle of Maker’s Mark, a glass still holding a finger of it, on the table beside your brother’s body.”
    Drugs, alcohol, murder, suicide. The family, he thought, would suffer. He had to pull this knife out of his gut, had to make them see they were wrong.
    â€œDrugs, bourbon, no argument. Oliver was no Boy Scout, but the rest? I don’t believe it. The witness is