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"Are you going to solve this?" Ron asked as my employer prepared to leave.

She smiled and nodded. She was impeccably dressed as usual, wearing a three-piece charcoal pinstripe suit, a white shirt, and a black tie, but I could see the small signs that told me she had dressed in haste. "I plan to," she said. "There's already something fairly striking in what Fifteen said." She leaned over to kiss Ron on the cheek. "If you get done first, come up and see me in the room. If I get done first, I'll come back here. Then we can get something to eat."

She left, and Ron shook her head. "She thinks I did it."

"No, I disagree. She has no idea who did it, not yet. But, to be honest, you are on her list of suspects."

She sighed. "Do you think I did it?"

I shook my head. "No, I don't. If you had had a knife in your hand last night, when you were punching her, could you have stabbed her? Yes, I think that's possible. But I know you pretty well by now, and I have trouble imagining that you got up in the middle of the night, found a knife somewhere, went to the room, stabbed her, and then came back here and went back to bed."

"What did Mom mean about something in what Fifteen said?"

"I've been thinking about that, and I have an idea what it might be. But we need to talk about something else first. You agreed to this last night, and now it's obviously much more important than it was then. Come on." We stood up and I led her to her desk chair. She sat down, and I swung my employer's chair around so I was facing her.

"Ron, please tell me about your birth parents and your sister."

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