The Price of Innocence by Lisa Black

three for soliciting.’
    This only made Lily settle deeper into the upholstery and stare out the window with a sullen cast to her face.
    Frank spoke to his partner instead. ‘Convicted of three of these eight offenses, serving a total of two years in two different sentences.’
    Angela said, ‘That’s our justice system. Eight arrests and she serves two years.’
    ‘And now she gets herself revved up and hops in a cop car. Maybe the judge will be stricter this time.’
    Lily couldn’t maintain the pout, and leaned closer to protest: ‘The drug stuff was misdemeanors.’
    ‘Not the last one,’ Frank said. ‘You were carting around a little too much for personal use.’
    ‘I wasn’t selling it.’
    ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘You can’t get together enough money to make your own business. You were delivering it for someone who could.’
    ‘I got kids to feed.’
    ‘Doesn’t everyone?’ Frank said, though he didn’t.
    ‘Spare me the attitude. Half my customers were cops.’
    ‘Really.’ Frank made sure to speak in a tone of complete disbelief, but he wondered. Marty could have been one of those customers … though all his friends and co-workers had seemed positive that his only drug of choice came in a glass bottle with a twist-off cap.
    ‘You think you knew Marty? You think you know all about your little fallen angel, but you don’t.
I
knew him.’
    ‘I keep telling you, I never met Marty. You got something to tell me about Marty, then tell it, because we’re not your chauffeurs. Pull up to the federal building, Ang. We’ll dump her on their laps.’
    Lily leaned forward, twining her fingers through the mesh divider. ‘You think I’m some drug dealer? Who do you think I learned it from?’
    ‘If I assure you that I don’t think you’re a drug dealer, only a dealer’s crack whore mule, will you get out of my car?’
    The insult didn’t seem to register. ‘Who do you think I learned it from? Marty, that’s who.’
    She flopped back against the upholstery, face flushed, secure in her fait accompli.
    ‘Pull over,’ Frank said when Angela kept driving.
    ‘We
are
investigating his death,’ his partner pointed out, playing the good cop with a subtlety worthy of Hollywood. ‘Marty dealt drugs?’
    ‘Yeah,’ Lily confirmed, nodding for emphasis. ‘
Yes
.’
    ‘When? Back in college?’ Frank guessed.
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘What did he sell? Pot? Crack?’
    ‘Meth,’ she said. ‘And we didn’t just sell it. We made it.’
    Frank tried to picture Lily peering into a glass flask over a Bunsen burner. The mesh barrier diffused the look of her face just enough to suggest the college student she had once been, but only just. ‘You cooked meth.’
    The disbelief in his tone apparently stung her. ‘
Yes
. No – I mean, I didn’t cook it. Neither did Marty.’
    ‘Make up your mind, Lily, are you going to tell us or not? The statute of limitations on a few crystals of meth ran out long ago.’
    ‘How about murder? What’s the time limit on that?’
    The word hung there for a moment while Frank considered how much more of his day he wanted to spend on Lily’s history, which, he suspected, gave the term
revisionist
a new dimension. ‘Is meth what you smoked before walking into the Justice Center, which, by the way, is full of the people who are supposed to arrest people like you?’
    ‘Why are you harassing me?’
    ‘Lily, your pupils are dancing around like dust motes in a breeze. Besides, you jumped into
my
car, remember?’
    She scowled for a moment, but the drugs wouldn’t let her stop talking. ‘We didn’t do the actual cooking. That was two other guys. You had to be, like, a chemist to do that. It was complicated. It stunk, too.’
    ‘Yeah, yeah.’ Frank had spent a short stint in Vice and knew the rudiments of meth labs. The process usually began with cold relief tablets and from there took a variety of routes, which all used solvents like acetone, methanol, benzene or ether. These