Twisted

occasionally.
    “You’re Mr. Rhyme.”
    “Lincoln, please.”
    Susan introduced herself and thanked him effusively. Then she asked, “How on earth did you know what Anthony was going to do?”
    “He told me himself.” A glance at the walkway to the house.
    “The path?” she asked.
    “I could have figured it out from the evidence,” Rhyme muttered, “if we’d had all our resources available. It would have been more efficient.” A scientist, Rhyme was fundamentally suspicious of words and witnesses. He nodded to Sachs, who tempered Rhyme’s deification of physical evidence with what he called “people cop” skills, and she explained, “Lincoln remembered that you’d moved into the house last summer. Carly mentioned it this morning.”
    The girl nodded.
    “And when your ex was at the town house this afternoonhe said that he hadn’t seen you since last Christmas.”
    Susan frowned and said, “That’s right. He told me last year that he was going away on business for six months so he brought two checks for Carly’s tuition to my office. I haven’t seen him since. Well, until tonight.”
    “But he also said that the path from this house to the street was steep.”
    Rhyme took up the narrative. “He said it was like a ski slope. Which meant he had been here, and since he described the walk that way, it was probably recently, sometime after the first snow. Maybe the discrepancy was nothing—he might’ve just dropped something off or picked up Carly when you weren’t here. But there was also a chance he’d lied and had been stalking you.”
    “No, he never came here that I knew about. He must have been watching me.”
    Rhyme said, “I thought it was worth looking into. I checked him out and found out about his times in the mental hospitals, the jail sentences, assaults on two recent girlfriends.”
    “Hospital?” Carly gasped. “Assaults?”
    The girl knew nothing about this? Rhyme lifted an eyebrow at Sachs, who shrugged. The criminalist continued. “And last Christmas, when he told you he was going away on business? Well, that ‘business’ was a six-month sentence in a Jersey prison for road rage and assault. He nearly killed another man over a fender bender.”
    Susan frowned. “I didn’t know about that one. Or that he’d hurt anybody else.”
    “So we kept speculating, Sachs and Lon and I. We got a down-and-dirty warrant to check his phone calls and it turned out he’d called Musgrave a dozen times in the last couple of weeks. Lon checked on him and the word on the street is that he’s for-hire muscle. I figured that Dalton met somebody in jail who hooked him up with Musgrave.”
    “He wouldn’t do anything to me while my father was alive,” Susan said and explained how it had been her dad who’d gotten the abusive man away from her.
    The woman’s words were spoken to all of them, clustered in the snow around the van, but it was Carly’s eyes she gazed at. This was, in effect, a stark confession that her mother had been lying to her about her father for years and years.
    “When the plan with Musgrave didn’t work out this afternoon, Dalton figured he’d do it himself.”
    “But . . . no, no, no, not Dad!” Carly whispered. She stepped away from her mother, shivering, tears running down her red cheeks. “He . . . It can’t be true! He was so nice! He . . .”
    Susan shook her head. “Honey, I’m sorry, but your father was a very sick man. He knew how to put on a perfect facade, he was a real charmer—until he decided he didn’t trust you or you did something he didn’t like.” She put her arm around her daughter. “Those trips he took to Asia? No, those were the times in the hospitals and jails. Remember I always said I was banging into things?”
    “You were a klutz,” the girl said in a small voice. “You don’t mean—”
    Susan nodded. “It was your father. He’d knock me down the stairs, he’d hit me with a rolling pin, extension cords, tennis rackets.”
    Carly turned away and stared at the house. “You kept saying what a good man he was. And all I could think of was, well, if he was so damn good, why didn’t you want to get back together?”
    “I wanted to protect you from the truth. I wanted you to have a loving father. But I couldn’t give you one—he hated me so much.”
    But the girl was unmoved. Years of lies, even those offered for the best of motives, would take a long time to digest, let alone forgive.
    If they could ever