"What happened?" Noah asked.
Carter touched the edge of the butterfly strips with two fingers, gently, the way you test whether something still hurts. It did. "What do you think?"
"Yard?"
"Chow line. Three of them. One held, two hit. Guards took ninety seconds to respond. That's a long time when someone's working on your face." He dropped his hand. "Someone wants me dead before my time." His good eye fixed on Noah. "Wouldn't be your family, would it?"
Noah scoffed. "You're reaching."
"Am I? Roberts had a lot to say about your family."
"And he will. I put him in this place. He's pissed that he couldn't continue his little corruption game."
"Maybe he's pissed that he's punished for corruption when there are others on the outside still corrupt." Carter studied Noah like he didn’t trust him. "What do you want?"
Noah reached into the folder he'd brought and slid a photograph across the table. Derek Hollis. Taken from his Lyft driver profile. Mid-thirties, dark hair, tattoo sleeve visible on his left forearm.
“Do you know him?”
Carter looked at it. Picked it up with his cuffed hands and held it closer to his good eye. Studied it for a few seconds, then set it back down.
"Depends. What do I get out of it if I say I do?"
"You don't get anything."
Carter smiled. It pulled at the cut on his cheek and he winced but the smile stayed. "Can't judge a man for trying." He sighed and pushed the photo back. "Never seen him before. Who is he?"
"Someone we're looking at."
"For Kara?"
"For other things."
"Other things." Carter repeated it like he was turning it over, checking the weight of it. He leaned back, as far as the chains allowed, and crossed his arms on the table.
"Were you working with anyone on the outside?" Noah asked.
Carter laughed. It was a short, hard sound that drew a glance from the correctional officer stationed by the door. "Oh, I get it. You think because a dead girl shows up wearing Kara Ellison's jacket with her ID in the pocket, that I must have been operating with someone else."
"Were you?"
"No."
"How did you know about the jacket?"
Carter tilted his head toward the wall behind him. "We have a thing called a TV in here. It's not like the media hasn't had something to say about all those bodies they found recently. The Brooke Danvers girl. The disappearance of Fiona Spence." He paused. "You can imagine what I was thinking when I heard that. I said it four years ago in court. I was not guilty. They refused to believe it." He straightened in his chair. "Maybe now they'll believe me."
"I believe you."
The room kept going around them. The murmur of other conversations, a child's laugh, the scrape of a chair being pushed back. But at their table the air changed. Carter's expression shifted from the guarded hostility he'd worn since walking in to something rawer.
"What?" Carter said.
"I believe you didn't kill Kara Ellison."
Carter stared at him. His good eye searched Noah's face for the lie, the angle, the trick. He'd been inside long enough to know that nobody said anything in a visiting room without wanting something in return. His jaw worked like he was chewing on a response that kept changing shape before he could spit it out.
"The trouble is we don't have enough evidence yet to pin this on someone else," Noah said.
