She began walking briskly, rubbing her arms. It would be cold when the sun went down, but perhaps she would get lucky, make it home by then. If she could get a lift to the airport and take the train-Did the locals run on Sundays? Amtrak did, and if they didn’t catch her by New Carrollton, she could make it the whole way. Even on a local, she was willing to bet that she could stall a conductor for a few stops, persuade him that she’d lost her ticket, maybe even been mugged, although that was risky, for he would want her to report that to the police. If only she’d gotten on the train Tuesday, the way she was supposed to. She could tell the conductor that she had a fight with…her boyfriend, and he pushed her out of the car, that was it, and she was stranded and needed to get home. She could sell that story. Hell, she’d once seen a homeless woman ride free from Richmond to Washington, even as she chattered that she was going to meet with the president. It’s not as if they put you off in the middle of the tracks, and if she could make Union Station, she had a shot. She’d call a coworker, or even her boss if necessary, maybe risk jumping the turnstiles on the Metro, anything to get home again. It was all she could do not to break into a trot toward the busy street, with cars rushing back and forth. She felt as if she were running toward the real world, a place of motion and confusion where she could once again safely disappear, that she would have to reach top speed to break through the wall between it and this make-believe kingdom where she’d lived the past five days.

But just as she came to the end of the alley, a patrol car surged forward and blocked her path, and that plump, smug detective stepped out.

“I called you on my cell,” Nancy Porter said. “We weren’t sure you would run, but we were curious to see what you would do when we said we wanted you to meet Miriam. Infante’s at the other end of the alley. And, as you know, there was always a uniform out front.”

“I’m just taking a walk,” she said. “Is that against the law?”

“Infante went to see Stan Dunham this afternoon. He learned some interesting things.”

“Stan Dunham’s not capable of telling anyone anything, even if he were so inclined.”

“See, it’s really interesting that you know that, because you managed not to mention his incapacitation yesterday, and I made a point of not sharing it, because I wanted you to think he could contradict you. Yesterday you indicated that you hadn’t had any contact with him for years.”

“I haven’t.”

The detective opened the rear door. It was a proper police car, with a wire screen between the front and back seats. “I don’t want to cuff you, because of your arm and because there’s no charge on you-yet. But this is going to be your last chance to tell us what really happened to the Bethany girls, Ruth. Assuming you know.”

“I haven’t been Ruth for years,” she said, getting into the car. “Of all my names, I hated Ruth the most. I hated being Ruth the most.”

“Well, you’re giving us your current name today, or you’re spending the night in the Women’s Detention Center. We’ve indulged you for five days, but time’s up. You’re going to tell us who you are, and you’re going to tell us what you know about the Dunham family and the Bethany girls.”

If she had to put a name to what she was feeling, it might have been relief, the knowledge that this was going to end once and for all. Then again, it might have been absolute dread.

“We could show her to you, on the closed-circuit video,” Infante offered Miriam. “Or walk her by you in the hall, let you get a look at her.”

“There’s no way she’s Heather?”

“Not if she’s Ruth Leibig, and she’s all but admitted that was her name. Ruth Leibig graduated from high school in York, Pennsylvania, in 1979 and married the Dunhams’ son the same year. Heather would have been sixteen then. The marriage would have been legal, especially with the Dunhams as witnesses. But how likely is it that Heather graduated high school two years early?”

“I was the one who picked up on that,” Willoughby put in, but Infante didn’t begrudge him that little bit of self-importance. Eventually Infante would have noticed it, too, the date discrepancy. But such facts as the Bethany girls’ DOBs were burned into Willoughby ’s brain, much as the old man had tried to deny it.

“No, Heather was smart, but not so smart that she could skip two grades,” Miriam admitted. “Not even in a parochial school in the Pennsylvania boondocks.”

Infante had gone to Catholic school and thought it pretty rigorous, but he wasn’t going to contradict Miriam on anything just now.

“So what did happen to my daughters?” Miriam asked. “Where are they? What does any of this have to do with Stan Dunham?”

“Our supposition is that he did abduct and kill your girls and that his son’s wife, Ruth, somehow came to be privy to the details,” Infante said. “We’re not sure why she’s safeguarding her current identity, but chances are she’s wanted on a warrant for something else. Or she knows for sure that Penelope Jackson set the fire that killed Tony Dunham, and she’s trying to protect her, although she keeps insisting she has no relationship with the Jackson woman. When we ask about the car, she takes the Fifth. When we ask her anything, she takes the Fifth.”

Nancy leaned in, pushing a glass of water toward Miriam. “We’ve told her that if she’ll give us Penelope Jackson on the murder of Tony Dunham in Georgia, we might be able to cut a deal with her on the hit-and-run here and whatever else she’s running from, depending how serious it is. But other than admitting she was once Ruth Leibig, she’s just not talking, not even to her own lawyer. Gloria’s urged her to make a deal, to tell us everything she knows, but she seems almost catatonic.”

Miriam shook her head. “That makes two of us. I’m numb. All along I kept telling myself that it was impossible, that she had to be an impostor. I thought I had…insulated myself against hope. Now I realize I wanted it to be true, that I thought by coming here I could make it true.”

“Of course you did,” Lenhardt said. “Any parent would. Look, come tomorrow, Monday, we’re going to be able to piece a lot more things together. We’ll be able to check to see if Tony and Ruth ever divorced, what jurisdiction it was in, stuff like that. We’ll track down people from the school, even if the parish is gone. For the first time, we have leads, solid ones.”

“She’s not Heather,” Willoughby put in, “but she has the answers, Miriam. She knows what happened, if only secondhand. Maybe Dunham confided in his daughter-in-law after the diagnosis, maybe she was his confidante.”

Miriam slumped in Lenhardt’s chair. She looked every bit her age now, and then some, her good posture gone, her eyes sunken. Infante wanted to tell to her that she had accomplished much by coming here, that her trip had been worthwhile, but he wasn’t sure it was true. They would have searched Dunham’s room eventually, even without Miriam identifying the link between her household and his. Visiting the old man hadn’t seemed urgent when his name first surfaced, because of the dementia, but they would have started poking around in his affairs soon enough. Hell, up until this afternoon Infante hadn’t even been convinced that Dunham was connected to anyone but Tony Dunham and the ever-elusive Penelope Jackson. That was the one link they had established independently-mystery woman to Penelope Jackson to Tony Dunham to Stan Dunham.

Still, if he was being honest with himself, he had to second-guess his own decision not to visit Dunham as soon as he had the name. Was it because Stan Dunham was a police? Had he hesitated, made a bum decision because he just couldn’t believe that one of their own could be involved in such a sick crime? Should they have locked her up the first night and trusted the accommodations at the Women’s Detention Center to provide all the encouragement she needed to talk? She had played them all, even Gloria, her own lawyer, stalling them, trying to figure out a way to keep from telling them who she was. But she wasn’t gutsy enough, or depraved enough, to try to play the mother that way. Maybe that was the one shred of decency in her, the place where she drew the line. She had run because she didn’t want to confront the mother.