Aaron wasn't dead.
The round went through his shoulder.
He was on the concrete with his white shirt going dark, repeating, "Dirty. Dirty."
When Ortiz got the cuffs on him he lifted his head and looked at me.
"You think you won."
I didn't answer.
He laughed, soft. "You don't walk away from this either."
I said, "I wasn't planning to."
It was light when I saw Reese again.
She was in the hallway outside the homicide unit, sitting in one of the molded plastic chairs. Her eyes were swollen. When she saw me she came up off the chair and got both arms around my ribs.
"Maren. Let's go home."
I put my hand in her hair.
"Reese," I said. "I can't go home."
She went rigid against my chest.
Ortiz was standing at the end of the hall. She didn't push us.
I took out the debit card to my joint account and pressed it into Reese's hand. Everything I'd saved over three years was on it.
It was not clean money.
I had a list of names and amounts in a sealed envelope my lawyer was holding. Every dollar matched against a family. Restitution. Whatever a family is allowed to take from the woman who tidied their mother's apartment after.
Reese was shaking her head. "I don't want money. I want you."
My throat hurt.
"Stay in school. Don't come back for me."
She held on.
I unclamped her fingers, one at a time. I had to look at the wall over her shoulder to do it.
The interview room door closed behind Ortiz, who'd gone in with a folder.
When she came back out she said, "Pryce-Hollister's started talking."
I nodded.
She put a digital recorder down on the table between us in the small windowless room.
"Maren Doyle. Tell me about the seven."
I looked at the laminate of the tabletop.
The first sentence I said was: "Case one. Maeve Devlin. Thirty-five. She did not slip in the bathtub."
Ortiz's pen paused.
I kept going.
Every name was a piece of rotted meat coming out of me.
I knew confessing didn't put any of them back. I knew getting threatened didn't make me innocent.
But starting then, those seven women weren't going to be a one-line entry under "accident" anymore.
Aaron's trial ran six months.
His defense hired the most expensive lawyer south of the Mass Pike. They were trying for a not-criminally-responsible plea — Brookline childhood, OCD diagnosis at fourteen, a quiet six weeks in a McLean unit at twenty.
The morning of the verdict phase he came in wearing a clean charcoal suit. His hair was combed. Without the cuffs at his wrists you would have read him as a guest in the gallery, not a defendant. The Globe had run a photograph of him on B1 under the caption Beacon Hill financier maintains innocence.
I went up as a cooperator under a plea agreement.
He looked at me the whole time I was on the stand.
The defense attorney came at me on cross. Tall, white-haired, a softer voice than Aaron's but a harder hand with a witness.
"Ms. Doyle. You admit that you knowingly cleaned the scenes."
"Yes."
"You admit you accepted large cash payments to do it."
"Yes."
"Then, Ms. Doyle, is it not possible that to reduce your own sentence, you invented Mr. Pryce-Hollister's role in these deaths."
The gallery hummed. In the back row Reese was sitting very still.
I looked at the lawyer.
"No."
He smiled. "Evidence."
I looked up at Aaron.
His mouth had a small quiet smile on it, the one he used to wear in the white conference room when he was waiting for me to say I was finished.
The prosecutor stood up.
"Your Honor, the Commonwealth would like to enter exhibit forty-seven."
The bailiff dimmed the lights.
The screen behind the bench came up to a video, gray and grainy, time-stamped three years ago, the night of the first case. The camera was facing a vacant storefront across Washington Street from the Strand Vaudeville House.
A man in a navy overcoat with the collar up walked into frame and unlocked the chained side door of the Strand. The clock in the corner of the image read 1:08 a.m.
A second figure appeared at 1:51 a.m. — a woman with a Tyvek bag, gloves on. Me.
There was forty-three minutes of footage of Aaron Pryce-Hollister inside the Strand before I'd been called in.
It wasn't clean footage. The lens had been smeared. But it was enough.
The defense lawyer's face changed.
Aaron's smile didn't slip so much as evaporate.
In the row behind the witness stand Ortiz was sitting with her hands in her lap.
The video had been left behind by Laura Mendes before she died.
She'd hidden her last piece of leverage in the one place Aaron Pryce-Hollister would not look.
A vacant rat-trap storefront across the street from his own first murder. Boarded up. Pigeons in the second floor. Nobody had been inside in a decade.
She'd lost. She had not lost all the way.
Sentencing was in February. It was cold.
Aaron got first-degree on Maeve Devlin and Laura Mendes, second-degree on five more, and a stacked sentence that came out to life without parole at MCI-Cedar Junction.
I got seven years at MCI-Framingham. Coercion, voluntary surrender, and substantial assistance had taken about thirty off the top of what a clean read of the cleanup work would have gotten me.
They walked me out of the courthouse through the side door, hands cuffed in front, a Suffolk County deputy on either side.
Aaron was being walked out the same way, two minutes ahead of me.
In the corridor between the courtroom and the transport bay, he stopped.
"Maren."
I stopped too.
He turned his head. His expression was the same as it had ever been.
"Do you really think you can pay this off."
I looked at him.
"I can't."
He smiled, like that had been the answer he wanted.
I said, "So I'm going to live it back."
His smile fixed.
A deputy put a hand on his shoulder and walked him on.
They put me into a separate van.
Through the wire mesh on the window, past the granite stairs of the courthouse, Reese was standing in the crowd. She had a bunch of white roses against the front of her coat.
The roses weren't for me.
They were for Maeve Devlin and Laura Mendes and Sloane Reyes and the four others I had still not stopped naming in my sleep.
Reese didn't cry. She nodded at me, hard, one time.
I nodded back.
The door rolled shut.
The city went past the mesh in fast slow pieces. The Suffolk County Jail, the rotary at South Bay, the highway.
I shut my eyes.
The first thing he had ever said to me came back into the dark.
You looking to clear what your old man left you?
Three years ago I had thought a debt was money.
Later I learned the heaviest debt is human lives.
I'm going to live the rest of mine inside that ledger, awake.