Crazy.

“Drop the knife, Gibbs,” I said.

She purred, “Come on, Sam. Hey…”

Carmen joined the discussion. She crowed, “Jesus H. Christ,” took a little skip-step into the fray, and swatted the knife out of Gibbs’s hand. The blade clanked against the wall and tumbled to the floor. “Cut herself? Shit! This princess? She wouldn’t even use the wrong eyeliner on herself.”

I kicked the knife even farther from Gibbs. I was feeling kind of stupid.

“So she gets to live,” Gibbs said.

I assumed she meant Holly but didn’t say anything at first. I thought it might be wise to leave the next move to Carmen.

Carmen immediately started the you’re-under-arrest process with Gibbs, cuffing her and searching her and reciting Miranda to her like a bored schoolgirl spitting out the Gettysburg Address to a class full of kids who didn’t really care.

I began the process of gingerly removing the tape from Holly’s mouth. It wasn’t coming off easily.

Miranda complete, I asked, “Why, Gibbs? Why does she get to live?” Part of me cared about the answer, part of me was trying to cover my embarrassment over the knife thing. All of me knew that whatever Gibbs said in reply would just be noise.

“Because you got here first. That’s the only reason. If I had called you five minutes sooner, you would have rushed back to Colorado to save me. You know you would have, Sam. But you came in the house, you came down here… Timing. It was just a problem with timing.” Her voice trailed away. “She wanted Sterling, you know? They all did. That wasn’t the deal. One time only, that was the deal.”

Suddenly I got it. I faced her. “Were you in the basilica that day, Gibbs? At Notre Dame? Up in the choir loft?”

Carmen stopped what she was doing.

I glanced at Holly. Above the duct tape, her eyes were wide.

Gibbs smiled. She actually smiled. “Of course I was.” She looked right at Holly. “Chanel suit? Purple? You remember me? She wanted him to come back again. She e-mailed himagain. That wasn’t the deal. She knew the deal. She’d agreed to it.”

I got it all. Every bit of it.

“The deal?”

“Yes. The deal.”

That’s what I meant about the noise. My phone rang.

I checked the caller ID. Alan.

“Yeah,” I said.

Alan’s voice was full of rookie-cop wonder. “I’m at my office with Sterling Storey, Sam. You’re not going to believe this: He says he thinks Gibbs has been killing all those women.”

“Just a sec.” I turned to Gibbs. “Guess what? Your husband survived the Ochlockonee. He’s in Boulder, and he just gave you up to your doctor. Is that romantic or what?”

An army of footsteps erupted above my head. The locals had arrived to take over.

The question of which jurisdiction was going to get first dibs on Gibbs would keep a whole lot of county attorneys across the country busy for a while. Other than hoping that Boulder didn’t win that particular lottery, I wasn’t invested in the outcome.

I spent a couple of hours answering questions for the South Bend police, who seemed to have suffered amnesia about their decision not to keep an eye on Holly Malone, and then I prepared to leave Indiana.

First I kept my promise and called Lucy, letting her know what had transpired in South Bend. She was astonished at the developments. She had some news for me, too, though: The feds had finally tracked down Brian Miles. They’d found him in a big suite at a fancy hotel in the Bahamas where he was on vacation.

Not surprisingly, Carmen had learned more about what had really happened than I had.

When I found her after my interview, she told me that it had indeed been Gibbs, in disguise, who had delivered the Walkman and the duct tape to Holly in the covered dish on the front porch of the Craftsman bungalow. Gibbs’s pitch? She had promised Holly a visit by Sterling, who was offering a carnal encounter in the basement while the turkey was resting on the kitchen counter upstairs. Gibbs instructed Holly to wear the Walkman and follow all the instructions she heard to the letter, which included directions on binding and gagging herself with the tape.

Wow.

I told Carmen I was leaving town and offered her a ride as far as O’Hare in Chicago. She declined. She was determined to stay in South Bend in case there were any loose ends to tie up. What else? She didn’t say so, but I think she still wanted to find that South Bend detective who had called her “ma’am” and then blown her off about Holly’s peril. She wanted to help Orange County win the Gibbs Storey lottery. And she made me promise to tell her what really happened that day between Gibbs and Sterling in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at Notre Dame.

Carmen and I ended up saying good-bye on the sidewalk outside the South Bend PD in one of those poignant moments that I haven’t had many of in my life since I left college. I admit it crossed my mind that had I lingered a little longer in South Bend, Carmen and I might have had only one room that night at the Days Inn, not two.

That was the main reason for staying.

It was also one of the two main reasons for leaving.

The other?

Simon.

I filled the tank in the Cherokee and pointed it toward Minnesota.

I napped away most of the next morning in Angus’s den, and then Simon and I spent a wonderful Friday afternoon arguing whether having turkey and cranberry sandwiches while watching college football the day after Thanksgiving was almost as good as having turkey and stuffing while watching the Lions lose on Thanksgiving.

I lost the argument. I didn’t care.

Sherry and I talked after Simon was in bed for the night. We said what we had to say to each other in about five minutes. I gave Angus a big hug, declined his offer of a bed, and headed south on Interstate 35. I ended up spending the night in a Super 8 in Mason City, Iowa.

Things were feeling a whole lot clearer.

It was my first trip to Omaha, ever. Given that it was the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend and given that I was flying standby, I felt lucky to get there at all.

A taxi took me to Sam, who was flat on his back in the University of Nebraska Medical Center. A Puerto Rican nurse named Yashira was being much nicer to him than he deserved. She was refusing to even try to find his “lost” car keys unless he arranged for somebody to drive him back to Colorado.

The somebody was me.

“It felt just like the heart attack. Maybe worse.”

“That’s what I’ve heard.”

The day before, around lunchtime, Sam had started passing a gallstone he didn’t even know he possessed and had driven himself to the emergency room in Omaha thinking he was having another MI. Two hours of agony in the ER provided enough time for the stone to move on, a one-night stay in the hospital for observation convinced the docs that Sam’s heart was stable, and my presence in Nebraska motivated Yashira to search a little bit harder for his missing car keys.

While I was still trying to find my way out of Omaha, I summed up the obvious. “Kidney stones, gallstones, and heart disease. You’re a picture of health, my friend.”

“Stress might have something to do with it,” he said.

“You think?” I replied.

“That, and the fact I’m fat. Though I might have lost a few pounds. Can you tell?”

Before I found the westbound entrance to I-80, we’d talked a little about Sam’s day-after-Thanksgiving trip up to Minnesota, and I’d answered all his questions about Lauren’s health and the long-term efficacy of Emily’s paw umbrella. The Gibbs and Sterling Storey saga was a little more complicated, though; covering that ground took us almost all the way to Lincoln.