“You lied to me, Cruz.”
The kid says nothing.
“You told me you were driving to the Howes’ from your house. But you weren’t.”
“No.”
This admission is a start. “Where were you coming from?”
“Hooper Farm.”
“What were you doing on Hooper Farm?”
“Does it matter?”
“I wouldn’t be asking if it didn’t.”
“I went to see someone.”
“A girl?”
“This kid, Peter Bridgeman.”
Bridgeman? Ed thinks. “He’s Zach and Pamela’s kid?”
“Yeah, he’s my year. Just graduated. I needed to talk to him.”
“At seven in the morning? What was so urgent?”
“Something.”
“Son.”
“It’s just high-school stuff, Chief, okay? But since you asked, that’s where I was coming from.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that before?”
“I didn’t want to get into it.”
“You do realize that a woman is dead, and, like it or not, you’re part of the investigation, and you owed me the truth no matter the question.” He’s using his full-on chief-of-police voice now and he can see from a glimpse of the kid’s face in the rearview mirror that he’s nervous.
“Yes,” Cruz says. “But I don’t want to talk about that part. It has nothing to do with anything.”
“Except you were upset, yes? You were distracted? You ran a stop sign and went speeding down Surfside Road. Officer Falco almost pulled you over. And then a few minutes later, he got the call about Ms. Howe. So you can see how lying to me was a problem.”
“I did run the stop sign and I was speeding,” Cruz says. “I was upset and I was distracted. But I didn’t hit Vivi. I found her. She was on the ground, bleeding from her mouth, her leg sliced open. Someone hit her and left her there, Chief, and I pulled over and called 911. The woman was like a mother to me!” His voice works the edge of tears and then, like a flipped switch, it turns to anger. “Why don’t you just charge me with her murder? Everyone on this island thinks I did it—my friends, my coworkers, my so-called community. I’m Black, so I must be a criminal, right?”
Sit with your discomfort, Ed tells himself. The kid has every right to vent his feelings. “I’m not charging you with anything,” the Chief says. “But you’re all I’ve got, and I can’t help thinking that if I can unravel exactly what was going on with you that morning, I can follow that thread to someone else.” The Chief pulls into the small parking lot at the Monomoy public beach. From here, a path leads to the water. It’s crowded only in the early mornings and early evenings when people are heading out in their kayaks. “Before the running shoes turned up, I could maybe have bought the theory that the driver was some summer kid—or, hell, an adult—who hit Ms. Howe, got scared, and hightailed it out of there. But the shoes turning up in your place of employment makes this something else. I know it wasn’t you who hit her, okay? But someone on this island wants us to think it was you.”
“I’m being framed,” Cruz says. “Just like in the movies.”
“Who would do that?” the Chief asks. “Do you know this guy Donald?”
“No,” Cruz says. “I only work days. I know Justin, the daytime custodian. He’s…kind of alternative, but a good enough guy.”
The Chief drives back to the store. “What did you want to talk to Peter Bridgeman about?”
The kid shakes his head.
“If you don’t tell me, I’ll ask Peter.”
Cruz breathes out and his nostrils flare. “He took a picture on Friday at the end of this party at Fortieth Pole and he sent it to me in the middle of the night. When I woke up and saw it, I called him but he didn’t answer, so I drove over to his house.”
“Was he home?”
“I didn’t see his truck but I thought maybe he’d ditched it at Fortieth and gotten a ride home because he’d been drinking. He has his own apartment above his parents’ garage so I went up the outdoor stairs and I knocked a bunch of times and he didn’t answer, so I left. I figured he was either out somewhere or ignoring me.”
“Did anyone see you there?”
“No?” Cruz says. “I don’t know. His parents didn’t come out or anything.”
“So you left the Bridgeman house and drove straight to the Howes’？”