It was the motive for someone else’s.

For five years that reading had been nothing but a theory, unprovable, waved away.

And now the theory had a location.

It was in a child’s denim jacket, in a small hand, being carried down a prison corridor toward the truth.

The prosecution’s handling of the missing phone was, in retrospect, a small masterpiece of how a real weakness in a case can be transformed, through confident narration, into an apparent strength.

The phone was gone; that was a fact, and a troubling one, because a competent murderer motivated by a personal argument would have no particular reason to steal the victim’s phone, whereas a killer with something to hide in the victim’s records would have every reason.