And the lead investigator on the Vance case.

And the State Attorney General’s office.

You need to call all of them, right now.” Mitchell had spent thirty years learning to hear the difference between the desperate demands of the guilty grasping at anything and the sound of a person who has genuinely seen a door where everyone else sees a wall.

What he heard in Elena’s voice, against all his training and all his caution, was the second thing.

He had heard the first thing thousands of times, the grasping of the condemned, and it had a particular quality he had learned to recognize and to steel himself against, a scattered, frantic, all-directions desperation, a person throwing every possible claim at the wall in the hope that one might stick.