Geoff, staring at the photo, said, “Jesus,” as if he’d just figured it all out, too, and I was the only one in the dark.
Alder said, “Talk this through with me. Talk this through.” He sat on the edge of the bed, the other photos sliding together.
It took me so long. It took me a stupid amount of time. And yes, most of the problem was that I was so fixated on you, so laser-focused on your alibi, your motives, your sins, your lies, that what I should have seen as illumination, I saw as a blinding glare. I could only look around the edges of it, like an eclipse.
I said, “He rode a bike because—okay, he rode a bike to get to the party. Everyone else walked, but he rode a bike?”
Geoff was pacing, his hands on his head.
Alder said, “He left Camelot. And they started walking. And so—so they walk there, they stop at the dorms first, maybe they leave at nine. It takes them half an hour. They walk slow because of Mike Stiles’s leg, right?”
And still I didn’t get it.
“He wasn’t with them,” he said. “Not at first. They’re in groups, there are nineteen kids, they’re not taking attendance. Half are already drunk.”
I said, “He wasn’t with them,” or at least I mouthed it. Was that even possible? There was math involved. I grabbed a Calvin Inn notepad and pen from Geoff’s desk and wrote:
8:45-ish? Camelot ends
9:00 start walking
9:30 mattresses
9:58 first mattress photo
9:59 first photo of Serenho
10:45 leave mattresses
11:05 back in dorms
Geoff took the pen from my fingers and drew a circle around the first five items, everything from the end of Camelot to Robbie Serenho’s first photo. Next to it, he wrote 1:14. It was so much time. Even if the show had ended a few minutes later.
He said, “How long do you think it takes to bike from the gym to the mattresses?”
“It was muddy,” I said. Only the dumbest of my thoughts were processing fully. I said, “Alder, you’re not recording this, are you?”
He shook his head. “Should I be?”
“No.”
Geoff said, “I ride a five-minute mile when I’m lazy. Let’s say pedaling fast over 1.4 miles of muddy terrain, maybe on a kid’s bike, let’s say conservatively ten minutes. Extra conservative, fifteen minutes. Even though we’re talking about a teenage athlete with a ton of adrenaline.”
I said, “He’s still got almost an hour.”
My face was in my hands, because my face was hot and my hands were ice-cold.
Alder slid down to the carpet, lay on his back, stared at the ceiling. He said, “Are we nuts? Maybe we’re nuts. So wait: He picks Thalia up backstage. Maybe he tries to get her to come to the mattresses. Maybe he’s told his friends he’s coming, right? They start fighting, they head toward the gym. Whatever happens, happens. He freaks and realizes he needs an alibi. If he goes back to the dorms, he won’t be accounted for over the past forty-five minutes.”
“Plus he probably wants a drink,” Geoff said.
“Right. And he wants his friends. So he needs to get to the mattresses fast. He looks around and sees a kid’s bike, or maybe there’s some faculty bike, whatever. He rides up, ditches the bike in the woods, and as soon as he’s there he makes sure they see him. He pretends he was there the whole time.”
“They don’t see him come up?” I said. “They aren’t like, Where’d you come from?”
Geoff said, “Okay, so maybe they don’t notice, or maybe they forget. Or maybe they cover for him later. But he sees that Scalzitti still has the camera. The pictures don’t even start till he’s there. Maybe he grabs the camera and turns on the timestamp.”
Alder, still on the floor, said, “Oh my God oh my God. Can I call Britt?”
I said, “I just—that’s a lot of crafty thinking for a drunk guy.”
“Who said he was drunk?” Geoff said. “Maybe he was stone-cold sober. Or sure, maybe he was wasted the whole time. Those aren’t sober actions. Doing it to begin with. Throwing her in the pool. Stealing a bike and plowing through the woods.”
I said, “You’re using circular logic. We’re going off a streak on his sweatshirt. It could have been months old. He’s a teenage boy. It could’ve been from something else. That could be someone else’s sweatshirt.”
“Right,” Alder said. “And this is not particularly useful in court. Robbie had a dirty sweatshirt so Omar’s innocent. That’s not—” He finished the sentence by rolling over onto his stomach, his face on the carpet.
I said, “It’s not a thing.”
But still: I felt my edges blurring.
I’d believed for so many years that it was Omar, that it was settled, even as my doubts about the case against him—and my suspicions about you—started pecking at me, a bird ready to escape its shell. And then the shell cracked, it fell to pieces, and the only plausible explanation was it was you.
It was you, it was you. Everything fit. You had motive, you had opportunity. You’d done one terrible thing, so you must have done another.
The most moronic thought: It couldn’t have been Robbie, because look at the carefree way he’d jumped into the pool the other day.
Alder and Geoff were staring at the photo again. Somewhere in the same building, Robbie and his family slept. Somewhere out there, so did you.
23
There was once a man they caught because he claimed he hadn’t left the state—but the dead bugs on the windshield of his rental car could only have come from outside California.
There was a man they caught because he’d ordered the knife on Amazon.
There was a man they caught because his name was on the Starbucks cup in her trash.
There was a man who was told that his wife’s body had been found in the woods. He arrived on the scene and instead of running toward the police tape, he ran to the exact spot where he’d left her body.
There was a guy whose claim of earlier consensual sex fell apart because his semen was in her body, but not in her underwear or pants. “Because dead women,” the prosecutor explained, “don’t stand up.”
There was a woman who managed to cut her captor’s driver’s license into twenty little pieces and swallow them so when they found her body his ID would be in her stomach. And they arrested him. They brought him in for questioning. But they never pressed charges against him.
24
Back in my own room, I lay in bed trying to think. If Robbie killed her, if Robbie lost his temper and became violent, it was likely over you. What else would make him that angry? Well: Some people have rage right below the surface, and an overcooked potato is enough to incite domestic homicide. As far as I knew, that wasn’t Robbie. She’d never gone to class with bruises on her face. She was coming from your show. Had he seen something between the two of you?
I remembered the seed of my own initial unease: the way Thalia turned her head offstage, the way she mouthed What? as if someone were back there, waiting for her, upset with her. You were in the orchestra pit, conducting. Omar’s presence in the theater would have been noted. Whereas Robbie Serenho could slip backstage, could walk straight through the clusters of waiting actors with no more than a whispered “Robbie, you’re not supposed to be here!” Their fight could have started when she came offstage and told him to leave. Or maybe he was back there because the fight had begun hours earlier. Maybe he was coasting on hours of rage. Maybe he knew exactly what he was planning.