Lemmie fell silent again, staring at her rotating glass, then furrowed her brows and looked at Donnally as though she just realized that they hadn’t started the conversation at the same place and with the same knowledge.

“You know who my father is, right?”

“Only what he told me.”

“How about I’ll start with a prologue?”

Donnally nodded.

“He was a staff lawyer for the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations in the 1950s. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt. He was hired at the same time as Bobby Kennedy, but stayed on after Bobby wised up to what was going on and left.”

Now Donnally recognized the name. Matt Hamlin, known in the press at the time and now in history books as Mad Matt. He’d read about him in a political science class at UCLA.

“After that blew up, my father stopped using the name Matt and only used Matthew, and always stuck in his middle name, Hutchinson, to help in the disguise. Matthew Hutchinson Hamlin.”

“But your father was young in the Red Scare days, and young people get in over their heads.”

“He was no younger than Bobby and Bobby knew when to get out. My father stayed and enjoyed every minute of it.” Lemmie smirked. “You know why he asked you whether you’d be videotaping the memorial service?”

“I assume it’s because experience suggests that killers sometimes appear at the funerals of their victims, just like some arsonists join the crowd to watch the fires they set.”

“What experience suggests has nothing to do with it. He only thought of it because if he’d been the killer, he would’ve shown up to enjoy his work. That’s what he did in the old days. Look at the photos from when people who’d refused to testify before McCarthy’s committee got arrested and perp-walked down the steps. He’s always there, in the crowd watching, wearing his G-man fedora, glorying in their humiliation.”

Donnally now understood why all of Lemmie’s novels were about dysfunctional families and psychologically abused children, most from the perspective of bewildered little girls or alienated women. He imagined that in one or more of those books was a scene of a mother cowering under her husband’s stare.

For the first time since he stood gazing at Hamlin’s body, he was beginning to get a sense of what had made Mark Hamlin, Mark Hamlin.

“And you and Mark grew up identifying with the victims.”

Lemmie nodded. “I think that’s how Mark got into the mind-set that the cops were the real crooks.” She let go of her glass and spread her hands. “Think of the people McCarthy and my father went after. Dashiell Hammett. Langston Hughes. Arthur Miller. Lee Grant. Garson Kanin. Martin Ritt. Joseph Losey. Orson Welles.”

It wasn’t lost on Donnally that the last four were movie directors, like his father.

Before he had a chance to comment, she flattened her palms on the table and said, “I know who you really are.”

Donnally felt his body tense, not because she’d somehow figured out who his father was, but because her voice had the are-you-now-or-have-you-ever-been tone about it.

What he was, and had always been, was the son of Don Harlan. And because of his name change, she must’ve put some work into tracking him.

But who he was inside and separate from his role as an ex-cop and the special master in her brother’s murder, she was never going to find out.

He decided to punch back. “Nothing turns a person more quickly from a witness into a suspect than them taking the time to investigate the investigator.”

Lemmie smiled. “Then it looks like I’ve been a suspect for twenty-five years.”

“How do you figure?”

“I’ve always been interested in what happens to the children of famous people. You’ve been on my radar since I saw your father’s first Vietnam movie in film class in college, Shooting the Dawn, and found out your older brother had been killed in the war.”

Donnally cringed, flashing back to himself staggering out of the movie’s premiere as a young boy, as bewildered and horrified as one of Lemmie’s fictional little girls.

“And I learned in the Pentagon Papers that your father himself made up the lie that had led to your brother’s death.”

Donnally had made the same discovery in high school. That’s what prompted him to move out of the house at sixteen and to change his name at eighteen.

“Your father portrayed the Vietcong as pure evil, and the Vietnamese villagers as if they’d brought the My Lai and Korean massacres on themselves, and he portrayed every American soldier as a maniac driven to wanton violence by the enemy. If that’s how he viewed your brother, I wondered how badly he twisted up his surviving kid.”

Donnally didn’t respond. She was right about his father, but she was only partly right about him. He’d moved up to San Francisco and became a cop as a way of untwisting himself.

“And as bent as your father was,” she continued, “I couldn’t figure out how you came out so straight, until today.”

Donnally had no interest in heading down the road of amateur psychoanalysis; he had a professional back at his house.

“Except his last film,” Lemmie said. “It was like a confession to all his past sins. I saw it in one of the art houses downtown.” She smiled. “It didn’t get much in the way of distribution. I doubt it played up in Mount Shasta.”

When Donnally didn’t engage the issue by offering a smile back, hers faded and she said, “Is that how he communicates with you, through movies?”

Donnally pursed his lips and shook his head. His father’s recent movie represented more than just an attempt to communicate with the public, it was also—in a fitful, stumbling sort of way—an attempt to communicate truthfully and honestly with his wife and son.

But opening this door further into his and his father’s lives wouldn’t get Donnally closer to understanding who might have wanted to kill Mark Hamlin, so he tried to slam it shut.

“Is this a hobby of yours?” Donnally asked. “Or a form of self-defense?”

Lemmie drew back. “Touché. I guess I was getting a little intrusive.” She paused, her face displaying the uncertainties and anxieties within, her hand now gripping her unmoving glass. “The truth is I do it to try to figure out whether I’m normal or not. To try to gain some perspective. Otherwise I’d just have my brother to compare myself to.”

“And how twisted was he?”

“I think he had no more respect for the truth than your father did. He fictionalized everything.” Lemmie’s upper teeth worked against her lower lip again, then stopped. “Is there such a word as ‘theatracized’? If so, that’s what he did. Truth wasn’t real. Victims’ suffering wasn’t real. Everything was an act in a play.”

Lemmie’s eyes went wide and her mouth fell open.

Donnally could tell she was seeing something in her mind that wasn’t visible to him.

Tears formed and squeezed out onto her cheeks as she blinked.

“I’m afraid . . . I’m afraid even death didn’t seem real to him until the moment he faced it himself.” She swallowed hard. “Do you . . . do you think he knew he was dying?”

Donnally knew the truth. There was no reason to think Hamlin was unconscious when he was strangled. But that wasn’t the answer he chose to give.

“I don’t know,” Donnally said. “There’s no way of knowing.”

He never viewed himself as a human polygraph, but Lemmie’s last sentences had taken her off the suspects list.

Lemmie reached into her purse, withdrew a tissue, and wiped her eyes. Her voice hardened again as she asked, “Doesn’t the condition of his body mean . . .”

Donnally understood she was referring to her brother’s erection and answered, “Not necessarily, that happens sometimes when a victim has been strangled. We still haven’t gotten the toxicology report, so we don’t know whether it was induced medically.”

“And you don’t know about other drugs yet, either?”