The bigger cop looked into the kitchen and saw the two handcuffed men seated at the kitchen table. “Sure. This is your deal.” He glanced over at Garcia and said, “Hey.”

“Hey,” said Garcia.

“You’re Ed’s cousin, right?” asked the cop. “Ed in Homicide?”

“You betcha,” said Garcia. “Tell him I’m sending him a package.”

The officer gave Garcia a crooked grin. “We’ll hang out on the back steps.”

“Appreciate it,” said Bernadette, closing the kitchen door.

Seeing the officers jolted Matthew awake, and he was suddenly twitching in his seat. “Kyra Klein and the drownings in the river, we had nothing to do with those.” He nodded toward Garcia. “He says we did, but we didn’t.”

The horrific family history that the brothers had recounted at the kitchen table, paired with the April death of their sister, had to have some association with the murders. There was too much to be a coincidence. “Even if you didn’t do it, you know who did,” Bernadette told Matthew.

While the younger brother had touched back down to reality, his older sibling was drifting off. Drumming his fingers on top of the kitchen table, the doctor said in an eerily mechanical voice, “This is an early Victorian mahogany dining table. The piece is supported on beautifully proportioned fluted legs and came with two extra leaves, allowing it to extend to a length of nearly ten feet. It came with eight matching chairs, all but one with the original upholstery. I remember the day she picked up the set, at a well-attended auction outside of Chicago.”

“Your mother?” asked Garcia.

“The instant she laid her eyes on it, she had to have it. She called home so excited. She beat out two other bidders.” Luke meshed his fingers together, as if praying. “That same day my sister suffered a fall at the nursing home. Someone had dropped her during a bed transfer, breaking both her legs. When we told our mother, she acted as if we’d bothered her with some minor annoyance. We’d chipped a vase. The neighbor’s dog had excavated one of her rosebushes.”

“Doctor, please,” said Bernadette. “We need your help.”

“How?” asked Matthew. “How can he help? Tell us.”

The younger brother sounded sincere. Bernadette pulled out a chair and sat down across the table from the pair. “I believe someone close to your sister snapped when she died. He’s drowning these girls as some sort of—I don’t know—reenactment or something.”

“An old boyfriend?” asked Garcia.

Luke shook his head.

“Could I have a drink … of water at least,” Matthew croaked.

Bernadette got up, took down a glass from a cupboard, and went to the refrigerator. As she pressed the glass into the water dispenser, she scrutinized the Catholic mosaic decorating the front of the refrigerator. Handmade magnets in the shapes of crosses and flowers, undoubtedly produced by the doctor’s young daughters, held up church bulletins, fall fest raffle tickets, and Sunday school artwork.

Bernadette eyed one of the rare magnets not fabricated by a child’s fingers. “What’s this number?”

“What?” asked Luke.

She pulled the glass out of the dispenser and plucked the red octagon off the fridge. She set the water in front of Matthew and the magnet in front of his brother.

“My Suicide Stop Line,” Luke mumbled.

“You call if you have thoughts of suicide?” she asked.

“Yes.” He lifted his head. “Why?”

“Professor Wakefielder has been passing similar stickers out. A couple of the dead girls had this number. There’s the intersection between the prof and Dr. VonHader.” She walked around the kitchen table. “Who staffs the hotline?”

“Volunteers,” Matthew answered. “I’ve done it a few times.”

“Who else?”

“A slew of people,” answered Luke.

Garcia asked, “Where are you going with this?”

Bernadette said, “Do any of the volunteers also work in your office?”

“Several,” said Luke, his eyes wide and unblinking.

“Do any know the real story behind your sister’s institutionalization?”

“What?” Matthew blurted.

“It would have to be someone who knew how she first landed in the nursing home,” said Bernadette. “Who else knew about the … water discipline?”

“No one else,” said Matthew. “She was taking a bath by herself. Somehow went under. That was the story. We stuck to it all those years, even after Mother and Father passed away. Sometimes I wondered if it wasn’t the truth, we’d been saying it for so long.”

“You never told anyone else?” asked Garcia.

“We confided in no one,” Luke offered. “We trusted no one. It was only the two of us, and … Ruth.”

Bernadette noticed it was the first time anyone in the kitchen had uttered the dead woman’s name, and the word seemed to hang in the air like a cloud left behind by a smoker. Ruth. She was dead, as were so many other women. Shelby. Kyra. Corrine. Monica. Alice. Judith. Laurel. Heidi. She had no idea if Zoe belonged on the same list. Now another one was out there, waiting to be rescued—or buried. Regina.

“Think,” Bernadette said impatiently. “Perhaps someone overheard the two of you talking about Ruth. Someone at your office who also worked on the help line. Maybe you didn’t know they heard, but this person took a sudden interest in your sister. Asked questions. Even started visiting her in the nursing home.”

“Oh, God,” blurted Luke.

“What?” Garcia and Bernadette asked in unison.

“He had a crush on her,” Luke said. “Always had a crush on her, since they were kids.”

“Who?” Bernadette asked.

“But he never saw or heard anything,” Matthew said to his older brother.

Luke, his voice tremulous, added: “I caught him in the hall once, after one of her punishments. A bad one. He’d come into the kitchen and wandered upstairs. I didn’t think he saw anything. But his face, it was euphoric.”

“Is that when he started coming over more?” Matthew asked him.

“Yes,” Luke said numbly.

Garcia frowned at Bernadette. “Who are they—”

She held up her hand to silence her boss. The brothers were immersed in a trancelike exchange with each other. An outsider interrupting with a question might break the spell. Make them clam up.

Matthew, nodding slowly, said, “I remember. Suddenly, he was hanging around more. Our new best friend. Always walking in like he owned the place.”

Luke replied, “Mother and Father didn’t mind because both his parents were patients. Some sort of post-loss depression. They went to our church, too. Nice family.”

“Bullshit,” said Matthew. “The Araignees were as fucked up as our parents. Don’t you remember how they beat him? He’d come over with welts and bruises.”

“He got work as an aide at the nursing home,” said Luke. “He was always hanging around her room, even on his days off. I thought he was being a friend. After she died, he lost interest in the job. Came to work in my office.”

“Told you there was something wrong with him, but you trusted him because he plays golf and listens to public radio.” Matthew sneered at his older sibling. “You had him answering your phones, talking to those needy women, working on your precious suicide line.”

“I didn’t know,” Luke rasped.

Matthew snarled into his brother’s ear: “You’ve been his goddamn dating service.”

“Oh my God,” said Bernadette. It made sense.

“What?” asked Garcia, looking from Bernadette to the two handcuffed men. “Who are they talking about?”

“Wasn’t enough you hooked him up with the women in town here,” Matthew sneered. “You had to send him across state lines, to those classes in Wisconsin. How many girls there do you suppose he—”

“When?” interrupted Bernadette. “When was he in Wisconsin?”

Luke shook his head.

“July and August,” Matthew said.

“The La Crosse murders,” Bernadette said numbly.

“Who are they talking about?” asked Garcia.

“C.A.” She pushed back her chair and stood up. “Snaky son-of-a-bitch.”