Swithen blinked slowly. “Or maybe a fireplace poker.”

“What do the police say the weapon was?”

“They don’t say. They don’t have it.”

“They’ll have pictures and measurements of the victim’s blunt trauma.”

“The police are very professional here,” Swithen agreed.

“They find the lug wrench, they’ll match it to the wounds.”

“And there’s the blood on it, too,” Swithen said.

“Lug wrenches aren’t porous. The assailant would wash it clean.”

“What if it didn’t belong to the assailant?”

“Are we playing what-if now?” Liddon asked.

“Like on a TV mystery,” said Swithen. “What if this would-be killer used some poor innocent bastard’s lug wrench?”

“You mean, what if he took it from Poor Bastard’s car trunk and put it back with blood on it?”

“It could be like that. Poor Bastard might be someone whose bit Branden poached and he even threatened Branden publicly.”

“What-ifs are tricky to think through,” Liddon cautioned.

“Yeah, like then how does the real assailant get the police interested in Poor Bastard?”

“Especially if he’s already a suspect himself.”

“Right. They have to think he might’ve set up Poor Bastard.”

“The tip on Poor Bastard has to come to the cops from a third party who’s paid a bundle to do it but has no connection whatsoever to the real assailant.”

“What-ifs are tricky, though,” Swithen said. “If the real assailant tries to pay somebody to blow the whistle on Poor Bastard, he’s asking to be blackmailed.”

“There are safe ways to do it,” Liddon said. “Several ways.”

Neither of them spoke for a while.

Then Liddon said, “In court, are you sure you’d never use a word like bit, piece, or bitch?”

“Sure I’m sure. This was two guys talking. Court is serious.”

Liddon nodded. “You’ve hired yourself a defense attorney. You’re pretty much my ideal client.”

Sitting up straighter in his chair, grinning, Swithen said, “I can’t wait to see justice done.”

“Even as imperfect as justice often is.”

Neither of them moved to shake the other’s hand.

“My dad’s waiting to see you. I’ll take you to him.”

They crossed the drawing room, but before Swithen could open the door, Liddon said, “Wait. I have a what-if of my own.”

“I’m getting good at this.”

Liddon said, “What if you experienced something so astounding that it could turn your concept of life upside down, blow apart your idea of how the world works.”

“Astounding—how, what?”

“Doesn’t matter. Just say there was something that happened, something so difficult to get your head around, you needed to think hard about it.”

“You have a close encounter of the third kind or something?”

“No. Something more astounding. Just say it’s something, once you experience it, you need to think hard about it. But suppose you saw that chances were, if you thought about it enough, you would have to change almost everything about yourself.”

“What’s everything?”

With a sweep of his hand, Liddon indicated the elegant room with its priceless antiques and by extension the house and the inheritance.

With a wry contempt for the very concept of being astounded by anything, Swithen said, “And if I don’t think hard about this experience? If I just say ‘Screw it, I don’t care what it means,’ and instead I just keep on keepin’ on?”

“Then nothing changes for you. You lead the life you always wanted to live.”

“Then why is this even a what-if? I’m not that big a fool, and for sure, you’re not.”

Liddon didn’t reply.

Frowning as though having doubts about his defense counsel, Swithen said, “What does this have to do with me, you, and staying out of jail?”

“Nothing,” Liddon said. “If I hadn’t already decided to say ‘Screw it,’ I wouldn’t have come here. We both know what we want, and there’s no reason we can’t have it.”

Clearly puzzled by this entire exchange, Swithen said, “You sure you’re all right?”

“I’m more than all right,” Liddon assured him. “I’m the best there is in a courtroom. If I put my mind to it, damn if I might not convince a jury that Branden Jones is the one who ought to be on trial for assault with intent to kill himself.”

Fifty

After recovering from the jalapeño, Riddle apparently decided that the pantry might contain additional dangerous items that made another snack too risky. He turned out the light, closed the door, and sat with his back to it.

On the floor with her veterinarian, Puzzle seemed to think that she was the recipient of a most relaxing massage, for she purred and sighed as Cammy pressed firmly on all the joints of her hind legs in search of some indication of how Riddle could have performed as he did.

The previous evening, when she’d first seen the creatures, they impressed her as sophisticated mammals with some of the qualities of primates. By the time she had gone home, she regarded them more as primates. The complex and sustained curiosity they displayed by so methodically examining the contents of the living-room desk, the reasoning they revealed in their raid on the pantry, and the upright running posture that Riddle exhibited in his reaction to the hot pepper argued that they were hominids. But the only hominids on Earth were human beings and the extinct races of ape-men from which it was thought they had evolved.