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“That I can promise.” She tilted her head. “So if Blackwell is in Jersey, why aryou here instead of being there?”

“I’ll drive over tomorrow.”

“Why not let the FBI handle it? You could let it go. You’re alive. You won.”

He didn’t want to talk about it. And then he did anyway. He’d never cared before if anyone thought him an obsessed lunatic. He shouldn’t now. But he did.

“I had a sister. Six years older than me. She raised me, pretty much. Breast cancer took our mother in her twenties.”

A dull pain throbbed to life in the middle of his chest. Then came the flood of guilt. “Our father was working the graveyard shift. I was a teenage brat, wanted pizza. We lived too far outside of town. The only pizza shop didn’t deliver that far out. I begged her into it. I stayed home and played video games. She drove out for the pizza. She always tried to make up for the fact that I had to grow up without a mother. I was a spoiled little shit, pretty much.”

“Jack—”

“Anyway, she never came bace

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