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Frank Torres insisted they speak on the back porch, which struck Ella as a peculiar choice, but grief made people do peculiar things. The widower of less than ten hours stood at his glass railing overlooking waters so pristine they belonged on a postcard. Too beautiful a backdrop for such an ugly conversation.

‘You don't mind if I smoke, do you?’ he asked.

‘Go ahead,’ Ripley said.

'Sure.' The man's wife had been murdered last night. He could've lit up a Cuban cigar rolled on the thighs of virgins, and Ella wouldn't have objected.

Frank pulled out a pack of Marlboros. The wind blew out the first flame on his lighter, but he caught it with the second. He took a drag and exhaled through his nose. 'You probably think it's weird talking out here. But this was Becca's favorite spot. Seems only fitting.'

The Torres house was exactly where Ella expected a small-town politician to live. One rung below magnificent; around four-thousand square feet of architectural digest perfection perched on prime lakefront acreage. Floor-to-ceiling windows that erased the boundary between inside and out. The kind of house that made you wonder where exactly you'd gone wrong in life.

Frank Torres, however, looked like a man recently dragged through hell. His skin had a grayish tint beneath his tan. Dark half-moons cupped his bloodshot eyes. His silver-flecked hair, which had been carefully styled in all the campaign photos alongside his wife, stuck up in uneven tufts. He wore a bathrobe over jeans and a wrinkled dress shirt, as if he'd started to get dressed for the day and forgotten halfway through.

‘I quit three years ago,’ Frank said, staring at the cigarette between his fingers as if it had materialized there without his knowledge. ‘Rebecca hated the smell.’

Ella began, ‘Mr. Torres-,’

‘Frank.’

‘Frank. I know you've been through the wringer since last night, but we need to ask you some difficult questions.’

He nodded and took another drag. ‘You want to know if I killed my wife.’

The bluntness startled her. Most spouses bristled at the implicit suspicion. Frank Torres blurted it out.

‘That's not exactly-‘

‘It’s fine, I know husbands are the biggest offenders. I was a cop once.’

‘You were?’

‘A long time ago, in Columbus. I took medical retirement.’

‘So you’ll know what we’re dealing with.’

'Barely. I'll save you the time. I didn't kill Becca. I was out with my buddy until about nine. I texted Becca just before midnight asking if she was coming home, but she never replied.' Frank fished his cell out of his robe and passed it to Ella. 'I text her from this phone. Get your tech guys to check it. It'll show that it was connected to the Wi-Fi here all night.'

Ella pocketed the cell. Such an alibi wouldn't prove Frank's innocence, but she was welcome of it all the same. Still, her gut told her that Frank had nothing to do with this. If he did, he'd be playing up his grief. Ella guessed it was a cop thing: acceptance in the face of death, even when it was your own wife on the slab. Either that, or he hadn't fully processed it yet.

‘Appreciated. I don’t think you had anything to do with Rebecca’s death, but you might be able to point us towards someone who did. What can you tell us about her?’

Frank lit a second cigarette with the ember of the first one, then flicked the used one into the lake. ‘Where do I start?’

‘What was she like?’

'Always told she wasn't good enough as a kid, so spent adulthood making up for it.'

‘She’s the…’ Ella wondered how best to word it. ‘Ambitious type?’

‘Ambitious? Not really. Becca just knew an opportunity when she saw it.’ Frank admired the cigarette between his fingers. ‘I’ve missed these things.’

‘Forgive me for speaking out of turn,’ Ripley jumped in, ‘but you don’t seem all that upset by your wife’s death.’

Frank made a noncommittal sound. ‘Yeah, I thought you might say that.’

‘So, care to explain? You can see why we might find that suspicious.’

'Yup. Truth is, I lost Rebecca years ago. Used to be a time we'd jet off to Europe on a whim, go wild swimming in the lake, eat grilled cheese at two in the morning. The day she got a job in politics, that all stopped. That Becca, the one who'd wake me up at midnight to dance in the kitchen, she disappeared. Replaced by this... machine. Sometimes I didn't even recognize her. Like we were two strangers.'

Ella asked, ‘And Rebecca became colder?’

‘Her priorities changed. I came second. She became obsessed with….’ Frank gestured to the house, the lake, the oak chair set on the porch. Ella followed his gaze, but didn’t follow his train of thought.

‘Obsessed with what? Material gain?’

‘Small town politicians don’t exactly rake it in and, well, you know how much a police pension is?’

Ripley said, ‘Yup. Not enough to live here.’

Ella watched Frank Torres dance around the truth like a man trying to confess without committing the sin of speaking ill of the dead. Years in this job had taught her that people rarely handed you the truth in neat packages. It came in fragments and implications and negative spaces. Frank Torres was trying to tell them something about his wife without actually saying it.

‘You're suggesting Rebecca found... alternative income sources,’ Ella said carefully.

‘Something like that.’

‘ Something like that? Or exactly that?’

‘I don’t know. She didn’t tell me the details. Not that I ever asked. All I know is that yearly Range Rovers don’t pay for themselves.’

‘You're telling us Rebecca Torres was corrupt,’ Ripley said bluntly.

Frank flinched slightly, maybe not at the accusation but at the baldness of it. ‘I know what you’re thinking. Why didn’t I call her out on it? Why’d an ex-cop let it happen? Well, you already know the answer.’

Ella did know. The man was living in a lakefront mansion. Don't ask, don't tell. A convenient arrangement that even Ghandi might have been tempted by. The law might find Frank complicit in his silence, but Ella's priorities were elsewhere. She found herself oddly appreciating his honesty. Most spouses in his position clung to sanitized versions of their dead partners – posthumous canonizations that erased all flaws. Frank Torres seemed determined to acknowledge his wife's reality, however unflattering.

'Thanks for telling us the truth, Frank, but we're here to find a killer, not a corrupt politician. Do you think Rebecca's backhanders had anything to do with her death?'

Frank found an ashtray on the table and transposed it to the balcony. The minor act ramped up Ella's anxiety because a strong wind could knock it right into the lake. She figured Frank would be mindful of things of value now his sugar mama was gone.

‘I’m not a betting man, but if I was…’

Ella tucked Frank's implications away, rearranging the puzzle pieces of Rebecca Torres in her mind. A corrupt politician getting rich off her position. Hardly a unique story, but it expanded their list of potential enemies exponentially.

‘Who? Any names come to mind?’

Frank leaned against the railing and flicked ash into the tray. ‘No specific names. Rebecca didn't exactly bring home an enemies list for me to review.’

'But she must have mentioned someone,' Ripley said. 'People who opposed her projects questioned her decisions.'

Frank dragged his free hand through his already disheveled hair.

‘I don't have specific names for you,’ he said after a moment. ‘Rebecca kept me walled off from the details. Plausible deniability or whatever.’

‘But?’ Ella prompted, sensing hesitation.

‘But she did mention upsetting some people recently. Said she'd 'stepped on toes that weren't used to being stepped on.' Her words, not mine.’

Finally. Ella felt like she might have hit something concrete. ‘Whose toes might that be?’

'Don't quote me on it, but she mentioned upsetting a few people recently with her power station idea. I saw some stuff in the news about it, too, but that was as far as I looked. The whole thing was another one of Becca's… illusions.'

‘What power station project?’

‘Granville South Power Station. That big bastard down by the bridge. You can’t miss it.’

Ella remembered passing it on the cab ride from the airport. ‘What was Rebecca doing with it?’

‘Overhaul. Modernization. Smart grid infrastructure.’ Frank pronounced each word with the careful enunciation of someone reciting a foreign phrase. ‘I don’t know the technical crap. Meant to cost six million dollars. Don’t ask me how much of that actually went into the power station.’

‘How many people knew about Rebecca’s kickbacks?’

‘No one other than the people on the receiving end.’

‘The public didn’t know? There weren’t leaked rumors or anything?’

‘I doubt it. The public just had a problem with the power plant itself.’

‘Like who?’

‘I don’t know. Like I said, Becca didn’t give me names. All she said was that some people were being 'unreasonable.' That was Rebecca-speak for anyone who got in her way. The only altercation I ever saw was when some guy in city hall got in her face. I was a plant in the audience.’

‘What did this guy say, exactly?’

‘Like hell if I remember. Something about this new project giving a middle finger to God. Dumb religious stuff.’

Ella snapped to attention. She exchanged a look with Ripley, who nodded to press further. ‘Do you remember what he looked like?’

Frank flicked his cigarette out into the lake, then hesitated before taking out another. ‘No. Sorry.’

‘When did this city hall meeting take place?’

Torres' face contracted with the effort of memory retrieval. ‘It was a Friday night, back in summer. That’s all I remember.’

What struck Ella wasn't what Frank was saying – it was what he wasn't. The careful way he laid out facts without speculation, the cop's instinct for preserving chain of evidence. Even in grief, he was building a case file, one detail at a time.

The question was: who had decided Rebecca Torres' sins deserved death rather than prosecution?

'Thank you, Frank. If you think of anything else that might be useful, please call us.'

‘Will do. Please find who did this. ’

Ella and Ripley left Frank Torres on his blood-money deck while he chain-smoked his way through grief and guilt. Lake Hudson sparkled below him like nothing had changed, but two things had shifted in Ella's understanding of the case.

One: the killer might have revealed themselves to Rebecca Torres in the past.

And two: the G on Rebecca Torres’ forehead stood for greed.