“Jesus, no,” he replied. “I was a shit. I did not deserve to have her as my sister, but I didn’t do that to her, and I’ve paid more than any person should have to pay for the lie of saying I did.”
“Once you say something like that,” she explained, “it’s a lie that’s almost impossible to come back from.”
“Do you think I don’t know that?” he asked bitterly. “I tried to recant my story. I tried to get them to believe me, but all they could hear was the confession that I’d made. It’s as if they were just so locked on to that, there was nothing else to even consider.”
“Well, think about it,” she stated. “Why would there be? You were there. Your DNA was all over the murder scene, and the forensic evidence led to you. You confessed. As far as any law enforcement knew at the time, it was an open-and-shut case.”
“I didn’t do it though,” he repeated. “I didn’t have any motivation, and nobody would talk to me about that.”
“That’s because it’s easy to consider the motivation was being siblings,” she explained. “Whether I personally can see that much hate between siblings or not doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.”
“I didn’t hate her,” he argued, tears welling up in his eyes. “Dear God, I didn’t hate her at all. She was my sister, so why is it nobody can believe that?”
“Nobody can believe that because you confessed,” she repeated. “So we get on this endless loop that just doesn’t stop.”
He shook his head, and his shoulders started to shake.
Simon glanced at Kate.
She understood what that look meant. She could see Rick was reaching his breaking point, and Simon could see it too. Maybe he wanted her to put a stop to this, and he probably saw this as difficult to watch in many ways. But this was her job. She tried to be compassionate yet a hard-ass as needed.
Simon cleared his throat to catch her attention again. When she looked over at him, he raised his eyebrows.
She just studied him for a long moment, then turned back to Rick. “I want you to come down to the station,” she stated, “and give us a formal statement about where you were the last few days. I need an alibi to make sure that everybody doesn’t immediately think you’re the suspect.”
“Too late,” he snapped. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”
“I came to simply talk to you. Then you ran, which didn’t help your case. And now you’re sitting here, giving me guff again,” she noted quietly. “So you tell me how you want to play this. Last time you got belligerent and difficult, which made things tough for everybody. And nobody could get to the bottom of the truth. Then, once you confessed, you sidelined all the search for the real culprit,” she explained. “You do that again, and all those man-hours to find the murderer will cease on this case too, and it becomes something that you don’t really want to deal with again.”
Rick shook his head. “I tried to recant.”
“And like I said,” she added gently, “it’s a one-way street. Sure, you can recant, and you know what? With any luck, we might do something about it, but chances are good that it won’t make a damn bit of difference because, once you say those words, and everything else points to you…” She shrugged and left it there.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked. “You’ve got to understand that no way in hell I can go back to jail.”
“I hear you. It all depends on if you’ve kept your nose clean and out of trouble all these years since you got out,” she explained. “And then we really need to tear apart your life.”
He stared at her in shock. “Why? What did I do?”
“Somebody waited all this time, until you got out of jail, before they turned around and committed another murder—just like one you were put away for. Making you the perfect patsy for this again. All to avoid prison themselves.”
He shook his head. “But why? I didn’t do anything to anybody.”
“If you had a bit of a shady history at some point in time, what are the chances you pissed somebody off, and they’re just out for revenge?”
He stared at her. “I didn’t think anybody hated me like this.”
“Maybe they don’t. Maybe they’re just playing with you. Maybe you took a girlfriend from them. Maybe you screwed them over with somebody else. Like a drug deal or something, and they’ve been waiting a long time for this. Maybe it has nothing to do with your sister, but it was a way to get back at you.”
At that, his face whitened. “That would be unconscionable,” he whispered.
She looked at him and said, “When it comes to murder, the motives are interesting. There always is one, but sometimes you have to dig a little deeper to find it.”
He shook his head. “But what you’re saying is that I could actually be to blame for my sister’s death.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “I’m not saying anything about that,” she argued. “If somebody killed her to get back at you, that still doesn’t mean that you’re at fault. Whoever did this is at fault. So don’t go getting hung up on the blame game,” she warned, “because that can go wrong very quickly.”
He shook his head. “If they did it to get back at me, then I am to blame.”