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Ella Davis puts her phone in the pocket of her slacks and goes back to the party.

Her sister is doling out cake and ice cream to half a dozen little girls wearing party hats.

Davis’s daughter, birthday girl and star of tonight’s show, keeps casting greedy eyes at the pile of presents on the sideboard.

Laurie is eight today.

The gifts will be opened soon and soon forgotten—except maybe for Adora, a doll that cost Davis forty hard-earned bucks.

The little girls, fueled by sugar and primed to party hearty, will play games in the living room and their shrieks will fill her sister’s house.

By eight o’clock they’ll be ready to fall asleep while the umpteenth showing of Frozen plays on the TV.

“Who was that?” her sister asks.

“Was it your case?”

“Yes.” One dish of ice cream has already been spilled.

Mitzi, Regina’s beagle, gets on that right away.

“It wasn’t him, was it?” Regina asks, whispering.

“Coughlin?” Then: “Use your fork, Olivia!”

“No,” Davis lies.

“When are you going to arrest him?”

“I don’t kn—”

“Arrest WHO?” a little girl bugles.

Her name is Mary or Megan, Ella can’t remember which.

“Arrest WHO?”

“Nobody,” Regina says.

“Mind your beeswax, Marin.”

“I don’t know, Reg.

That’s above my pay grade.”

When the cake and ice cream have been served and the girls are eating, Davis excuses herself and goes out on the back porch for a cigarette.

She’s troubled by the idea that Frank approached Coughlin in the market, deliberately marking him out, saying to the witnesses to the confrontation this is him, this is the guy who did it, get a good look.

She’s more troubled by the idea that Jalbert may have given Coughlin’s name to the only publication that would run it.

She doesn’t want to believe he’d do that, and mostly she doesn’t, but there can be no doubt that Frank has homed in on Coughlin.

He’s fixated.

Wrong word, she tells herself.

The right one is dedicated.

She’s most troubled by Coughlin himself.

He did seem relieved when Frank said they had DNA, and was happy to give a sample for comparison.

He did know Davis was lying about the girl’s fingerprints on the dashboard of his truck.

But that could have been because he wiped them.

It could also have been because Wicker—poor Miss Yvonne to Jalbert—was never in the cab at all; he could have wrapped her dead body in a tarpaulin and put it in back.

If he got rid of the tarp, it would also explain why they found no hair, prints, or DNA in the truck bed.

But why wouldn’t he have buried her in the tarpaulin?

Or it could have been because Yvonne Wicker was never in the truck at all.

No.

I don’t accept that.

Coughlin also offered to take a polygraph, almost begged to take one.

Frank had shot that one down, and for good reasons, but—

Her sister comes out.

“Laurie’s opening her presents,” she says, with the faintest etch of acid.

“Do you care to join?”

What the hell happened to innocent until proven guilty, Inspector Davis?

“Yes,” Ella says, putting out her cigarette.

“Absolutely.”

Reggie takes her by the shoulders.

“You look troubled, hon.

Was it him?”

Davis sighs. “Yes.”

“Proclaiming his innocence?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll feel better once he’s locked up, won’t you?”

“Yes.”

Later, with the girls in their jammies and clustered on the living room floor, entranced as always when Elsa and Anna sing “For the First Time in Forever,” Ella asks Reggie if she’s ever had a psychic experience.

Like a dream that came true.

“Not me, but my friend Ida dreamed Horst was going to have a heart attack, and two weeks later he did.”

“Really?”

“Yes!”

“So you believe such things are possible.”

Reggie considers this.

“Well, I don’t think Ida is a liar, but I’d believe it more if she’d told me about that dream before Horst had his heart attack.

And it’s not like he wasn’t asking for one, fat as he is.

Look at your kiddo, Els! She loves that doll!”

Laurie is cradling auburn-haired Adora to her chest and Davis suddenly has her own vision: Danny Coughlin stabbing Yvonne Wicker again and again, then climbing on top of her in a cornfield and raping her even as she bled to death.

They know it was a cornfield because there was cornsilk in her hair.

If he did that, he deserves everything Frank throws at him, she thinks.

Then, standing in the doorway next to her sister, she realizes it’s the first time that deadly (and disloyal, that too) two-letter word has entered her thinking.

There’s something else, too, and she’s willing to admit—to herself, only to herself—that it was what really shook her.

Has he been spouting random numbers? Not having to do with anything, just off the cuff? She’s heard Frank do that several times, more since they’ve been investigating the Wicker murder, and it probably means nothing, but he’s lost weight and he’s so fixated on Coughlin…

Don’t use that word! Notfixated, dedicated.

He’s Wicker’s advocate, he wants to give her justice.

Only what if if is the right word?