I took a moment to absorb what I could, to get a better understanding of him. The frigidity I’d felt with his mother wasn’t there. He wasn’t all warm and fuzzy inside, but he wasn’t cold. Calculating. He was … vulnerable.

“What’s this about?” he asked as he cracked open an energy drink and took a large gulp. His Adam’s apple rose and fell, his lack of fat tissue making it easily visible. He dropped onto the only other chair in the room, another rickety recliner, only with a little more stuffing than mine. After crossing his bare feet on the milk crate he was using as a coffee table, he gave me his full attention.

“Do you have roommates?” I asked, looking behind me, not wanting to be caught off guard.

“Not at the moment. My girlfriend left me a couple weeks ago.” He peered into the top of the can. “Said I had commitment issues. Johnny send you?”

He took another long swig, so I figured I’d get right to the point. “I don’t know who Johnny is, but I wanted to ask you about your mother.”

He stopped drinking, coughed lightly, then said, “Bitch ain’t my mother. You come to the wrong place if you think I’m going to answer anything about her. Ain’t seen her in years, anyway.”

I did feel hatred radiating out of him, but also something else. Pain. A thick, caustic pain that seared the back of my throat when I breathed in. Either that or he had a meth lab in the back and I was breathing in the toxic fumes. That would suck.

He looked out the dirty front window, rubbing his bottom lip with his thumb.

I waited a heartbeat, gave his emotions time to level out, then went for the jugular. “She says she didn’t kill Miranda.”

What hit me next felt like a fist in my gut, but he hadn’t moved. I fought the urge to double over, his pain was so powerful, so suffocating. Yet he hadn’t moved. His expression hadn’t changed.

“She’s a liar” was all he said.

“I believe you. I was just wondering if you could tell me what you remember about the time Miranda disappeared. It would really help my case.”

“And what case would that be?” he asked. He turned a heated scowl on me. “She’s in prison. What else is there?”

“There’s justice for Miranda,” I said, but it did no good. He was already deflecting, looking me up and down like I was his next meal, even though I felt very little interest emanating out of him. It was a ploy to change the subject. To put me on guard.

“What’s your name again?”

I leaned forward as nonthreateningly as I could and spoke slowly, gauging his reaction to each word I spoke. “My name is Charley, and I would love for you to tell me what you remember about your sister.”

Sister. That’s when his grief, as hot and raw as if she’d died yesterday, hit me in the midsection again, and I suddenly understood why he did drugs. He was still hemorrhaging so much pain, so much guilt over his sister’s death, self-medication was the only way he could deal with it. But there were better ways. I made a solemn promise right then and there to make sure he found them.

“She was missing for a month before they found her body. Do you remember what happened before she disappeared?”

He took another drink and went back to staring out the window, his jaw working under the weight of his guilt.

“Did your mother hurt her?”

He scoffed aloud before scowling at me, his eyes shimmering, a telling wetness pooling in their depths. “What makes you think I’m going to tell you a f**king thing when I didn’t tell the cops shit?”

“I’m not the cops, and I’m in this for Miranda and Miranda only.”

“She’s dead. Ain’t a f**king thing you can do about that, yeah?”

His torment was hard to see past. My own eyes were watering, too, remembering the frightened little girl in the cable car, remembering her despair, her utter hopelessness. Her belief that she had no value whatsoever. “You were a couple of years older than she was,” I said. “Maybe you feel responsible somehow.”

A slow, calculating smile appeared. He leaned forward, closed the distance between us until his face was in my hair, his mouth at my ear, and said, “I’m glad she’s dead.” His breath hitched in his chest, and it took him a moment to say more. “I wish she’d never been born.”

As cruel and unusual as his words sounded, as vehemently said, they didn’t mean what he would have me believe. I felt absolutely no hatred coming from him. No malice or contempt. I felt only a deep reverence and a debilitating, cutting guilt. That seemed to be going around a lot lately.

He pushed me away from him and stalked down the hall. After giving him a moment to gather myself, I followed. I could feel grief pouring out of him, so without knocking, I opened the door to a tiny bathroom. He was in a state of agony as he splashed water on his face. On the sink next to him was a bottle of prescription pills. According to his file, he’d been suicidal for years, and my guess was that those pills were a very powerful pain reliever. It took something powerful to mask that much pain.

I stepped in as he toweled off his face. “Marcus,” I said as softly and as unthreateningly as I could manage, “you do realize you aren’t actually responsible for her death, right?”

He granted me a flirtatious wink. “Sure.”

He opened the bottle, dropped two large white painkillers into his palm, then popped them into his mouth. He swallowed, waited a moment, then sank to the floor as his guilt devoured him. It was why he’d turned to drugs in the first place. I suddenly understood all too well. He felt guilty for not helping his sister when he had the chance. He’d loved her. I could feel it course through him.