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Verna turned back to September a little more distracted than before but still rattling down her own path. “Don’t try to tell me you came here to help Stefan. I know how all of you think. You’ve never accepted Stefan like you should.”
    This was the song Verna had sung from the moment she’d married Braden. And though there was some truth to it, it was more that Stefan was just someone none of them wanted to know. It wasn’t because he wasn’t a Rafferty. It was because he was odd and remote and sullen.
    Briefly, September thought about bringing up the Christopher Ballonni case; the story had been all over the news when it occurred and Stefan’s placard suggested the crimes were by the same doer, as the MO was the same. But, as Wes had pointed out, Stefan was “family” in the loosest sense of the word, and as soon as her lieutenant learned of her connection to him, September might be yanked off the case.
    Until that happened, she wanted to garner as much information as possible.
    And, really, she didn’t feel like offering any information to Verna anyway.
    Stefan stepped from behind the curtain, dressed in dark slacks and a white dress shirt. “God, Mom,” he muttered. “Couldn’t you have found me a T-shirt?”
    Verna turned her attention on him, her rigidity melting a little. “I brought your work clothes.”
    “You think I’m going to work after this?” he demanded.
    “I didn’t think.... You look so nice dressed up.”
    September assessed Stefan’s white pallor and the flat line of his mouth and decided Verna must see something that clearly wasn’t there.
    “Jesus, Mom,” he muttered, attempting to brush by September.
    Verna said, “We’ll just go home, then.”
    “Are the two of you living together?” September asked. The last she’d heard Stefan had his own apartment.
    He turned bitter eyes on her. “Just for a while.”
    “Stefan’s going back to school,” Verna volunteered stiffly.
    “You work at Twin Oaks as a teaching assistant,” September said.
    “You know I do,” he retorted.
    Verna added quickly, “He wants to be a teacher. He’s good with children, aren’t you, Stefan?”
    Stefan just gazed at his mother with burning eyes.
    “You were on your way to work early, and then this robber came upon you while you were jogging,” September pressed on.
    “That’s what I said.”
    “Jogging?” Verna stared hard at her son.
    “Yeah, jogging, Mom. I know you don’t think I do anything right, but I’m working on my body.”
    Verna frowned, opened her mouth, then clamped it shut again without speaking.
    “I’d . . . walked to the school. We don’t live that far. And he jumped me. Held a gun on me and made me drink that vile drink.”
    “A stun gun,” September corrected him. Stefan looked as if he was going to deny it, then must have seen something in her expression that changed his mind, because he subsided into silence. “We can see the burn marks,” she told him.
    “Okay, fine. He zapped me. Hurt like hell! ”
    “While you were on the track, he ordered you to drink the drug and when you refused, he hit you with the stun gun, several times,” she added, just in case he felt like lying some more. “Then he robbed you.”
    “Do I have to talk to you?” Stefan demanded. “I don’t think so. You want to make a federal case out of it, go ahead. I drank the stuff because he was going to keep on zapping me, and the next thing I knew I was tied to the pole and it was damn cold!”
    “I’m just trying to get the sequence of events straight,” September explained.
    “Well, now you know.”
    “You were going to say something?” September turned to Verna.
    “I just don’t see why you have to interrogate Stefan. He’s the victim here,” she reminded her.
    Wes’s gaze was on Stefan. “What did he look like?”
    “He was, umm, wiry. Wore a baseball cap. Jeans and a jacket.”
    “Was he black, white?” Wes asked.
    Stefan looked into Wes’s dark eyes and