“What are you talking about?” Even though I was confused, a memory zipped through my brain. “Wait, is this about Caro having hypertension when she was pregnant with Teddy? Because that stopped after he was born.”

The cop flipped through some notes on a yellow pad. “According to her doctor, she had an arrhythmia that became an ongoing issue. Your sister didn’t tell anyone, far as we can tell. Her husband didn’t know. Your dad didn’t know.”

No one had explained Caro’s heart issue to me before. “I can’t believe it was serious enough to kill her. She never said anything.”

“She might’ve lived if she hadn’t hit her head,” Villaverde said. “People think a concussion only harms your brain, but it affects your heart. It constricts how it beats. It’s a tragedy, what happened to her, but as soon as we establish that there was no foul play involved, it’s not our department anymore.”

“How do you know there was no foul play?” I demanded. “Why was there no autopsy?”

“Look, a lot of people think an autopsy is automatic,” Villaverde said. “But that’s only true if the person was a victim of violence. Otherwise, it’s largely up to the family. We asked in this case, and her husband said no.”

Of course Theo had refused. Whatever he’d done to Caro had been careful and quiet.

I found the printout of Caro’s email. “I got a message from my sister yesterday. She wrote it just before she died. You need to read it.” I slid it across the table so that he could.

“You got this yesterday?” Villaverde raised a dubious eyebrow. “She died over a week ago.”

“Caro set the message up to go out if she died.”

“How do we know this is legit? Anybody could set something up online.”

“My sister is the only person in the world who’d make these references to our family.”

He gave it a quick once-over. “She called you Dodo in it. That’s your nickname?”

“It was when I was in kindergarten. She was Caro and I was Dodo. That’s what our parents called us.” I didn’t understand why he was zeroing in on the least interesting part of the message. “There’s more to it than that. I keep thinking of Mom, and how you never believe you’re going to end up like one of your parents, until you do.” I took a breath. “That’s a reference to a letter my mother wrote a long time ago. It’s the real reason I know this email is from my sister. Literally no one else knows these details about my family.”

“What details?”

At that moment, it would’ve been easier to strip down to my underwear and hurl myself out a window than tell him the truth. But what choice did I have? “My father used to hit my mother. They argued all the time, and it would get physical. Especially when he was drinking, which was pretty often back then.”

“Were the police ever called?”

I started to laugh, before I caught myself. “We were supposed to act like it didn’t happen. In my family, it was a bigger crime to tell an outsider about private stuff than it was for my father to hit my mom in the first place.” My parents were immigrants from Northern Ireland; nothing was more sacred to them than their code of silence.

“Did your father hit you or your sister?”

“No. We were girls, so it was our mother’s job to discipline us.”

“Did your mother hit you?”

“That’s none of your business.” The words burst out of my chest. I wasn’t there to talk about my mother. She had died of cancer just before Teddy was born. We’d disagreed on a lot of things, but I’d always loved her.

He frowned, but he let that slide. “How bad did it get with your father?”

“When I was fifteen, I found a letter my mom had written, in case anything ever happened to her. She put it in the family Bible.” My chin sank toward my chest, as if I were in confession. The contents of her message were seared into my brain. Ryan Crawley is not a terrible man, but he’s capable of terrible things. If I am beaten to a bloody pulp, or die suddenly in an “accidental” fall, know that my husband is responsible. He’ll be contrite, but it will be too late. Please take care of my girls. I love them.

The memory made me shiver, even all these years later. Caro was away at college then, and I’d called her in a panic to tell her what I’d found. She’d been bizarrely calm. Put it back, she’d told me. Pretend you never laid eyes on it.

How can I do that? I’d cried. He’s going to kill her one day.

Stop being so dramatic, Caro had said. This is just what they do. Ignore it. Focus on your own life.

The cop cracked his knuckles, snapping me back to reality. “Okay,” Villaverde said, returning to the printout of Caroline’s message; I’d gotten up before the crack of dawn that morning so my landlord wouldn’t catch me using her printer. “If you’re reading this, I’m already dead. No matter what it looks like, my death won’t be an accident. Theo killed his first wife and got away with it. Bring him to justice, no matter what you have to do.” He cleared his throat. “Who was this first wife?”

“I didn’t know she existed until yesterday,” I said. “But I confronted Theo about it. He didn’t tell me her name, but he admitted he was married before.”

“He give you any details?”

“I asked if she was buried in the family plot Caroline was being buried in. Theo said no.”

“That’s it?”

Even I had to admit it sounded weak. “He was angry. He couldn’t believe I knew. I can get more out of him. He ran off, and because we were at the gravesite, I couldn’t corner him again. But I’ll—”

“You don’t need to do anything.”

“But I can—”

“This is our job, Deirdre. Just leave it with us.”

“What are you going to do?”

“We’ll check out this tip about the first wife,” Villaverde said. “If there’s anything relevant, we’ll reopen the case.”

“There’s nothing about her,” I said. “I was up all night searching for everything I could find about the Thraxton family. There’s no mention of Theo being married before.”

“If he was, we’ll find out. There’s always a paper trail.”

It was agony, hearing him say if. I sat straighter in my chair. I knew I was someone he’d laugh about later with his partner.

“What was Theo’s alibi?”

“His what?”

“His alibi,” I repeated. “What was it?”

“He was on a business trip to Thailand,” Villaverde said. “But we never followed up on alibis in the case of your sister’s death, because we have it on security camera.”

I remembered a line from an article I’d read: the socialite was caught on multiple security cameras during her run and there was nothing suspicious. But that only meant no one had seen anyone harm her. What if her heart condition wasn’t just from arrhythmia? I tried to think of a way to say that without sounding like a nut.

“We have your sister on tape for most of her run that morning,” he added. “On a bunch of different cams from block to block. Do you want to see it?”

NO, my brain screamed. I didn’t want to watch my sister die. I couldn’t imagine anything worse.

But I said, “Okay.”

I was in a trance as Villaverde led me to his desk, which held a huge computer screen. Before I knew it, I was watching grainy black-and-white footage of Caro. She wore a fitted dark top and leggings, and her blonde mane was pulled back in a ponytail. I watched her jog up to an empty intersection and pause, pressing her hand against the center of her chest.

It was like a horror movie, only I knew exactly how this one ended.

“The one thing that was a little funny was that your sister went running down to the United Nations,” Villaverde said. “Her nanny said she liked to run in Central Park. Any idea why she went south instead?”

“No,” I whispered, my eyes transfixed by the screen.

I watched Caro run, her calm face oddly pained. Had she known she was going to die?

“This is the bad part, at the Isaiah Wall,” Villaverde said.

Caro clutched her chest and paused, but she slowly made her way up the steps, then vanished.

I stared, barely blinking, waiting for more.

“Where did she go?”

“The steps curve up. There’s a blind spot after that landing,” Villaverde said. “She’ll be on screen again in a sec. I can fast-forward . . .”

“No.” I wanted him to leave it. As the seconds ticked by, sweat dribbled down the back of my neck. There was Caro, straightening up at the top of the stairs, rolling her neck from side to side. She took four steps and vanished again. The next camera that caught her was farther away. My sister stepped through a waist-high gate and disappeared.

“Where did she go?” I demanded.