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job. Spouses witnessed occasional horrors beneath their roofs. They allowed the secrets to grow and taint them, until they were just as guilty. Sometimes it went on for months or years, until they took a stand. Wives got out the meat cleaver. Older siblings performed ritual patricide. Husbands dropped a call to CPS and drove around the block waiting for their family crimes to be solved by other men.
    “He wants to explain why he called in the tip,” Flynn said.
    “You sound sure of it.”
    “I am. Shepard was a regular mook caught up in something beyond himself. But the wife? She’s the one who ran that show.”
    “You don’t have to go.”
    “Of course I do, and you want me to anyway.”
    “I want to know everything about that guy. If it has to do with Kelly and Nuddin, I want to know about it.” She tugged at a nylon curl and the wig shifted forward. “The newspapers are pretty much split down the middle about you.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Half are making you look like a hero. The rest are saying she was only trying to save her kid and died for it. They’re trying to juice the situation up as much as they can.”
    Flynn thought about a retarded man in a cage, a crazed woman with a gun, a car chase through the slick back roads, a flip onto the ice, the yawning mouth of an icy hell sucking down a Cadillac SUV, and wondered why the hell anybody out there needed more fuckin’ juice.
    “All someone has to do is look at the scars on Nuddin’s body.”
    “You make it sound like reporters care about facts and evidence and little stuff like that.”
    “I live in hope.”
    “You need to forget that now,” Sierra told him.
    She was right. The media could massacre him. The cops might scapegoat him. A dead woman’s word held a lot more weight than his own did. She’d been rich and pretty. She’d had a beautiful home, a loving husband, an intelligent and sweet daughter. He was an outsider who trucked in during a storm and blew the American dream off its foundation. Shepard would have high-power lawyers. They could play all kinds of cards. Say that Nuddin was being cared for personally, by family, instead of being sent off to a filthy
asylum
run by uncaring, corrupt attendants and fat, cruel nurses. Before it was over, Flynn could be looking at jail time for manslaughter.
    “Do a background check on Christina Shepard,” he said. “She had a thing about her name. She forced me to say it.”
    “We’ll run the usual and I’ll go deeper if I have to.”
    “You will. She mentioned her father, acted afraid of him. She said he’d become too sick to care for Nuddin. Shepard called him a crazy son of a bitch. I’d guess the father was the one who tortured Nuddin.”
    “Okay, I’ll look into it. This is going to be the big ugly story for a while. A crowd of reporters has been waiting for you to wake up so they can tear you to pieces.”
    “It’s nice to be loved.”
    “You’ll contend with it. Just stay the course. Don’t dodge. You know you were right in what you did, don’t let them deflect you.”
    Flynn thought about Sierra’s household. The layout of the place. Big yard, short hedges. You could see the kids playing in back from the street. He wondered how safe it was. “I’m going to drop by now and again.”
    “You can’t for the time being. If the cops see you near Kelly, you’ll stir them up even more.”
    “I can handle that.”
    “But she can’t. Don’t come by until I say it’s all right, you hear me?” She waited for him to answer. When he said nothing, she kicked the bed frame hard enough to make his catheter rattle. “You hear?”
    “Jesus Christ, yeah, I hear.”
    “Good.”
    An oppressive weariness dropped over him. It was the timed pain meds feeding into his system through the IVs, except he wasn’t in any pain. “What about the dog?” he asked.
    “The bulldog? Kelly keeps crying about it. They found it in your car when they got the Charger up off the bottom. You’re