Page 105 of The System

“You sent it to me.”

“Because you asked me to. I didn’t know you’d share it with her.” He looked at Kieran.

“She just needs to know about her sister. You have to understand that,” Carina argued. “Wouldn’t you want to know if it was your long-lost twin?”

“I have a brother who’s one year older than me, and he’s an asshole, so it honestly wouldn’t surprise me.”

“Kev, I’m being serious here.”

“Carina, if this is going to get you in trouble, it’s okay,” Kieran said.

“It won’t get her in trouble. It could get me in trouble.”

“No, it can’t. I’ll talk to Jason, if you need me to.”

“You understand that I don’t need to share this with Marin’s lawyer right away, don’t you? I’m not legally required to tell him what I know the day after I learn about it. I need to have the investigators look into this anyway. The trial isn’t going to be for months.”

“He’s pushing for a speedy trial,” Kieran shared. “He told me this morning in a text message. He wants to get that in front of a judge sooner rather than later and get her to trial since she’s not getting out on bail.”

“Yeah, and because he’s probably afraid we’ll keep finding stuff like this,” Kevin replied. “Look, Kieran, I don’t know you. You seem nice, but your sister has done some things here.”

“Allegedly,” Kieran countered.

Carina smiled and turned to Kevin.

“Is she a lawyer, too?”

“No,” Carina replied.

“I was married to one for a while, though,” Kieran added.

“That has nothing to do with Diego. That’s all you,” Carina said, wishing she could wrap an arm around Kieran’s shoulders as they sat in the diner booth across from Kevin, but they’d agreed to pretend like they weren’t anything more than friends for this meeting.

“Well, it doesn’t matter whom it has to do with. With this plus the murder of Nick May, your sister isn’t getting out. We couldn’t get the cigarette burns admitted in, but we can get this. I don’t want to lose my job or risk an ethics inquiry here, Carina.”

“You’re telling me that my sister murdered a homeless woman?” Kieran asked him.

“A homeless teenager,” he corrected.

“That’s according to this foster brother who, Marin told me, tried to get her to have sex with him, and she refused. He faked those cigarette burns.”

“How do you fake cigarette burns?”

“He gave them to himself,” Kieran replied.

“Why would anyone do that?” Kevin argued.

“And why would someone kill another person?” Kieran asked back. “It only has to make sense to them.”

“Well, it made sense to Marin May, apparently. She knew this girl. They’d all been in the same house together. And the sworn affidavit I have from the boy speaks to the cigarette burns when he turned Marin down for sex more than once.”

“You’re seriously telling me a teenage boy turned a willing girl down for sex? Come on,” Carina said, shaking her head. “What’s the likelihood of that?”

“He says that he liked another girl who had been his foster sister the year before. She’d turned eighteen and was out of the system then. She’d been living at a shelter, and they’d started dating a little,” Kevin explained. “Then, one day, the girl was just gone.”

“Gone how?” Carina asked.

“Did you not read the statement?”

---