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“How did you do it?”

“Told him I’d meet him by the Fall Flower after he was done with Corey,” she said. “For old times’ sake.” She shuddered.

Sampson said, “And then he drove you down here?”

“After I pulled a gun on him and ordered him to drive me to where a can of avgas had been stashed for me. Then I had Sentinel drive here.”

“You shot him from the back seat, then set the Audi on fire,” I said.

“I did.”

“Who got you the avgas?”

“An innocent intermediary whom I decline to name,” she said evenly.

Sampson said, “You seem to have little remorse over this.”

“I have none,” Locket said, now meeting our eyes and gazing at each of us in turn. “Sentinel deserved it. No—he deserved worse.”

I took a stab in the dark. “Did Anna deserve it too?”

The high troll of the north looked down as if she were studying just how far to the ground it was from six stories in the air.

“Lainey?” I pressed.

Locket kept staring at the space below her as she said, “Anna wasn’t as crazy as she let people think, you know. She’d heard me talk about what Sentinel had done to me, but that night, at, like, four in the morning, she put it together and confronted me by the river.”

“So you killed her and staged the scene,” Sampson said.

She did not reply, just kept looking down. Several moments passed before Locket finally glanced at us. “Anna said she was going to tell you two.”

Sampson nodded and said, “Lainey? Alice? Can you come off that girder there?”

“Why?”

“Because we’ve got to place you under arrest for the murders of Dylan Sentinel and Anna Stein.”

She smiled weakly. “Detectives, I can’t stand the thought of prison, of being locked inside anywhere for long.”

Before either of us could move, she pivoted on the girder and stood sideways.

And then the last high troll lurking beneath the Bridge to Nowhere let go of the rebar over her head and pitched backward into six stories of nothingness.

106

TWO DAYS LATER, I still couldn’t get the haunting image of Lainey Locket—Alice McCall—falling to her death out of my mind.

I knew it would be a long time before that image left me.

Bree, Ali, Damon, and I had flown commercial to South Bend, Indiana, yesterday, and Nana Mama had come via air ambulance this morning with nurse Juanita Jones, who’d insisted on returning to work despite the trauma of the other evening’s events.

We were all at Notre Dame University for the NCAA Division One track-and-field finals.

Juanita pushed my grandmother in her wheelchair up the ramp to our seats. Nana had an oxygen cannula below her nose and a blanket over her lap despite the heat, but she seemed as alert and happy as I’d seen her since she’d fallen. Juanita and Nana Mama sat directly behind us, next to my dad, who had flown up from Florida with his wife, Alicia, who was also in a wheelchair.

Ali sat to my left, Bree to my right, and Damon was on Bree’s other side directly in front of my grandmother.

“Can we see the Touchdown Jesus from here?” Ali asked.