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I killed him. But it’s not what you think.

Sitting across from Josiah Nicholls now, Ripley’s first thought was that she was sharing airspace with the man who killed her mentor. She’d promised Ella she wouldn’t hurt him, and now she was weighing up the consequences of upsetting her partner.

‘Keep talking,’ Ripley said calmly.

‘Frank isn’t who you think he is.’

Ripley took two deep breaths. This son of a bitch wasn’t making it easy to stay professional. ‘Frank was exactly who I thought he was. He was an old friend of mine.’

‘At the FBI?’

‘I’ll ask the questions. Why did you kill him?’

‘Because he was a failure.’

Frank had his flaws, God knew, but a failure? That wasn’t a word anyone got to pin on him, least of all this amateur killer sitting opposite her. She wanted to reach across the table and slam his face into the cold metal until he choked on that word.

‘You better start explaining yourself.’

‘In 2002, someone was killing sex workers in hotel rooms in Kissimmee. And after every kill, they left a black candle burning at the scene.’

Ripley cast her mind back 22 years. A vague memory surfaced. ‘The Black Candle Murders.’

‘Yes. And one of the victims was Cassie Nicholls.’

The pieces rearranged themselves and formed a new picture. Josiah Nicholls might be a young kid who’d lied his way into a cold case group with a fake name, but he was also nursing a very real 22-year-old wound.

‘One of the victims was your mom.’

‘Yes. Cassie Nicholls left behind a 7-year-old boy. That was me. And guess who was assigned to the case?’

‘The FBI,’ said Ripley. She looked at Josiah Nicholls for the first time – really looked at him – and saw past the swollen lip and the cheap coffee shop uniform he still wore. She saw the young boy hiding inside the twenty-nine-year-old man.

‘Correct. The FBI. In particular, Frank Sullivan. It took me years to find that information. Do you know how hard it is to get details about FBI investigations?’

‘Yes.’

‘So, I researched Frank Sullivan. I found out where he lived, so I uprooted and moved a hundred miles west just to be near him, just to ask him some questions about the case.’

‘And?’

‘And what do you think?’ Josiah spat the words out.

His voice raised an octave. ‘Frank couldn’t remember.

He’d forgotten practically everything about the case because hey, who cares about sex workers, right?

Screw those whores. They’re disposable fodder for perverts, nothing more. But you know what was strange?’

‘What?’

‘Frank could magically remember everything about that woman with the stone eyes. Funny, huh? He remembered the floral pattern on her sofa, the exact sequence of albums stacked next to her record player. He remembered the barometric pressure on the day her body was found, the name of the rookie patrolman who contaminated the secondary entry point, the exact shade of lipstick Jennifer Marlowe wore in her high school graduation photo. But you know what he remembered about my mom?’

Ripley nodded for him to continue.

‘That she was too attractive to be a sex worker. That was it. Like he was trying to say that it was my mom’s fault for having to work the streets. Like her death was her own fault. Never mind that she was a single mom doing everything she could to keep me alive.’

Ripley felt the weight of those dual narratives.

One preserved in crystalline detail, the other discarded like yesterday’s news.

She understood the bitter calculus of it.

Some victims captured the imagination and haunted investigators for decades.

Others were reduced to numbers the moment you left the room.

And as much as she respected Frank, she couldn’t deny that Josiah Nicholls’ resentment was justified.

‘I’m sorry,’ Ripley said.

‘Don’t feel sorry for me. You know, some nights I would wake up and imagine a black candle burning in my bedroom. I’d see that night through my mom’s eyes, so I thought – what if Frank saw his obsession right there in the flesh? So I made it real.’

Ripley’s phone vibrated against her hip. She pulled it out, keeping one eye on Nicholls as she checked the screen. There were two pictures attached.

The first was pile of papers on a brown desk. Ripley zoomed in and saw the name MARLOWE beside a case number. The second was of Ella’s irritatingly-smooth fingers holding a plastic bag full of white stones.

The same stones that had replaced Frank’s eyes.

She slid her cell across the table with the picture still loaded. Josiah leaned in for a closer look. ‘You recognize these?’

Josiah hovered over the photo on Ripley’s phone. His eyes moved as if he were trapped between two opposing emotions, and neither was winning. A small crease formed between his brows. He touched the image on the screen once. Then he blinked and pulled his hand back.

‘Yes,’ Josiah said.

‘What are they?’

‘Bricks. Pebbles.’

‘My partner found them in your apartment. As well as a police report of the Jennifer Marlowe case, by the looks of it.’

For two seconds, his expression hovered in a realm that might have been fear. He clamped his lips together until the veins in his neck stood out. A wavering breath escaped his nose. Ripley couldn’t tell if he was angry, crushed, or carefully plotting some maneuver to keep one step ahead of her.

‘Both mine.’

Ripley took a moment to see this whole thing at a glance.

First a confession, then evidence that confirmed the killer’s motive, then evidence tying Josiah Nicholls to Frank’s murder.

They had him dead to rights. Ripley might as well escort Nicholls out of this room straight into the nearest supermax.

But Frank Sullivan was just one half of this puzzle. There was still the curious death of Diana Jewell to figure out.

‘What happened after Frank?’ Ripley asked.

‘How do you mean? I went home.’

‘You know what I’m talking about.’ She kept her tone level, though her mind spun with questions. She wanted him to name Diana Jewell on his own.

Josiah’s lips thinned, but he offered no reply. He had relaxed earlier when discussing Frank, almost as though he’d rehearsed that confession. Now, he appeared guarded. His gaze darted to the wall and then back to Ripley’s face.

‘Get a taste for killing, did you?’ she continued. ‘You got your revenge against the Bureau. Did it stop there?’

His hand shifted on the table as if he aimed to conceal a twitch of nerves.

No name crossed his lips. Ripley concluded he either had no idea who she meant, or he was dancing around it on purpose.

She straightened her shoulders. ‘If you want to keep quiet, go right ahead. I’ll give you enough rope to hang yourself. Sooner or later, you’ll slip up.’

‘I’ve told you everything,’ Josiah said.

She had hoped he would ask a pointed question, something that would prove he knew about Diana Jewell. Instead, he looked blank.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘You’ve had your chance. We’ll see what forensics digs up. Maybe physical evidence will explain what you won’t.’

And Ripley was up and out of the door. Not because she’d run out of questions, but because she needed time to think. Out in the corridor, Sheriff Bauer appeared clutching his cell. Given the grin on his face, he’d been watching the interrogation.

‘Ella just sent me the pictures from his apartment,’ Bauer said. ‘We got him.’

They had everything they needed, but Ripley’s mind was elsewhere.

It was speculative, bordering on conspiracy, flying in the face of a direct confession and damning physical evidence. But Ripley couldn’t stop asking herself one question:

Why was Josiah Nicholls lying?