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She paused, then shook her head. “No. I don’t remember. I don’t think so.”

“It’s not really a lie,” I said. “It’s possible she really didn’t remember at that moment.”

“That’s not what she said when she came to see you,” Dad said. “I’d actually understand that. This? I don’t get it.”

“By the time she’s interviewed here,” I said, “they already had the DNA back. Sidney was already the prime suspect.”

“Did she know that?” Dad asked.

He pored through Holland’s report. He seemed frustrated, turning the pages with near violence. Then he stopped.

I focused on the crime scene photos. I’d seen murder scenes before. I’d had a stint interning with the prosecutor’s office down in Waynetown, Ohio, a few years ago. Then one of the first cases I dealt with when coming to work for my dad last year involved another decades-old murder that took place right here in Helene. That one involved a child.

But these photos ... they were different.

This was cold. Calculated. One by one, Derrek Sidney had entered these women’s rooms and choked the life out of them. Even without reading the full report, I could tell he took his time.

Emily Reynolds was posed. He strangled her with the power cord to her own smartphone. It cut through and embedded in her flesh. Sidney had propped her up in the bed, placing one of her arms around a teddy bear she must have carried with her. In her other hand, he’d curled her fingers around her phone, making her hold it in her lap. The most ghoulish thing of all, he’d taken clear packing tape and forced her mouth into a hideous smile.

The police had hoped to extract fingerprints and more DNA from the tape. But Sidney had worn gloves, apparently.

Maisy Adams was found lying face down. The autopsy indicated he’d killed her on the ground like that, his foot pressed into her back as he pulled her head toward him with the belt, breaking one of her cervical vertebrae.

Annabelle had been a more hurried job. He’d wrapped a pillowcase around her neck. Then he cast it aside and used his hands. She was still lying in bed, her vacant eyes staring toward the hallway. Had she been looking at Geneva? Praying for help?

I looked at my copy of Holland’s narrative. My father, by coincidence, came to the same passage as I did at almost the same time.

“This isn’t the way Geneva remembered it,” I said.

“The crime scene unit concluded Annabelle was killed first,” Dad said.

“She said she was last. She said she heard something going on above her where Maisy and Sarah were sleeping.”

“She said she heard someone using the back stairs coming up from the basement,” he said. Emily Reynolds was down there.

“It says here they concluded Sarah was probably the last to die,” Dad said. “Not one of the first.”

Was it a lie or just a faulty memory in the fog of trauma? Did it matter?

I scoured through the photos. They’d taken pictures of Geneva when she was still unconscious. I found her medical report in another subfolder.

“Superficial wounds,” I read. “She had abrasions around her neck. It came from the bikini top he wrapped around her.”

“No damage to her trachea,” Dad read over my shoulder.

Could she have inflicted her own wounds? This was crazy.

“Why would she come to me?” I asked. I’d been asking myself that every waking minute for the last two days now.

I flipped to the last page of Holland’s report. My father did the same.

“Mercy!” he said, his voice filled with alarm.

“No.” I shook my head. “It doesn’t have to mean anything. You’re a defense lawyer. You know that. If she were your client, you wouldn’t have even allowed this to happen.”

“Mercy,” he said, more stern this time.

My eyes went in and out of focus. I thought maybe I was reading it wrong. But I wasn’t.