Everyone Here Is Lying(21)

They tell him he’s being videotaped, and they begin.

“We have a witness who saw your car going into your garage at around four o’clock yesterday afternoon,” Bledsoe says.

At first, he denies it. He wants to deny that any of this is happening at all. He shakes his head. “No. That’s impossible. I wasn’t there.”

“But someone saw you there, William,” Bledsoe says. “One of your neighbors saw you. And then he went away overnight on business and didn’t come into the station to let us know until this morning. You’ve got some explaining to do.”

William places both hands over his face and begins to sob. He sobs as if he’s broken. He is broken. He will never survive this. But as he cries, and the detectives watch, he realizes that there is an instinct for survival deep inside him somewhere. Finally, he pulls himself together and wipes his eyes with his hands. Gully pushes a box of tissues at him. They’re waiting, as he stares down at the table. They think they’ve solved the case, the smug bastards, he thinks. Well, it’s not that simple.

“I didn’t do anything to her,” he says. “I don’t know where she is.” The detectives simply look at him, waiting. “I was there,” he admits at last, sensing his own doom. They’ll never believe him. “I decided to go home early for a change. I thought the house would be empty. It was Tuesday, and Michael had basketball practice and Avery had choir, and I thought they wouldn’t be home until about a quarter to five.”

“Go on,” Bledsoe nudges, when he stops.

“It’s just that I never get to be alone,” he says. “There’s always people around—I have such a busy practice, I’m run off my feet at the hospital, and everyone’s in the house when I’m home, and I just needed some space. I’m only ever alone when I’m in my car.” How stupid he sounds. Gully nods as if she understands, but Bledsoe doesn’t move at all, not even a twitch. “But when I went into the kitchen, Avery was there.” Gully seems sympathetic, so he talks to her. “I hung up her jacket, because she’d thrown it on the kitchen floor.” He can’t go on.

“Okay,” Bledsoe says, “what happened then?”

William swallows. “I asked her what she was doing at home by herself. And she told me she got into trouble and was kicked out of choir. I told her that she should have waited for her brother, but she got really mouthy with me. I lost it and—I slapped her.” He stops. It was much more than a slap, but he’s not going to tell them that. He’s not going to tell them everything.

“And then?” Bledsoe asks.

“I apologized! I told her I was sorry, that I should never have slapped her. That I loved her, and I should have behaved better. But she wouldn’t say anything or look at me.” He looks Bledsoe in the eye and says, “And then I left.”

He can tell Bledsoe doesn’t believe him. “That’s why I was so certain she must have run away, at least initially,” William rushes on. “You see? She was angry at me for slapping her, so she must have left the house again after I did, and someone took her, and you have to find her—”

Gully interjects. “Why didn’t you tell us before that you were in the house, that you were the one who hung up her jacket? It might have saved us a lot of time.”

“Because I knew how it would look—that you’d assume I’d done something with her, but obviously I didn’t.”

“It’s not obvious to me,” Bledsoe says heavily.

William looks back at the detective, afraid.

Bledsoe leans in closer to William over the table. “You were there. You had an argument and you slapped her. No one has seen her since. No one saw her leave the house. I think she left the house in the trunk of your car.”

William feels himself go pale. “No.” He shakes his head. “No, that’s ridiculous. That’s not what happened.”

Bledsoe leans back in his chair again and says, “You’d think a father who wanted his daughter back more than anything would have told us that he’d been there, that he’d hung up her jacket. An innocent father who wanted to see his daughter alive again wouldn’t have lied to the police.” He adds, “To his wife.”

The detective’s face swims before William’s eyes. He feels a tightness in his chest.

“We’re having your car processed in the lab—every square inch. We’ll soon know if your daughter was in the trunk of your car.” Bledsoe leans in even closer. “We’ve already found something else in your car.”

William slumps in his chair. He feels like he’s had all the stuffing kicked out of him. Finally, he says, “That has nothing to do with my daughter.”

Bledsoe says, “An untraceable phone, so carefully hidden. You have a lot of secrets, Dr. Wooler.”

“I was having an affair,” he says bluntly.

“With who?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

The detectives wait, staring him down. At length, Bledsoe says, “That car of yours—the Infiniti G37 sedan—it’s new, isn’t it?” William nods. “The burner phone was unexpected. I can understand how it was missed in the initial search of the car in your garage. There’s a secret compartment in the rear-seat armrest, something put there by the carmaker, but not widely known. It’s there if you google it. You obviously knew about it. Is that why you bought that car, Dr. Wooler?”