He got out and hugged his wife hard, pressing his beard-stubbly cheek to her smooth one, saying nothing at first, concentrating on holding back the tears that wanted to come.
“Honey,” she said. “Honey, you got him. You got him, so what’s wrong?”
“Maybe nothing,” he said. “Maybe everything. I should have brought him in for questioning. But Jesus Christ, I was so sure!”
“Come in,” she said. “I’ll make tea, and you can tell me about it.”
“Tea will keep me awake.”
She drew back and looked at him with eyes as lovely and dark at fifty as they had been at twenty-five. “Are you going to sleep, anyway?” And when he didn’t reply: “Case closed.”
Derek was away at camp in Michigan, so they had the house to themselves. She asked him if he wanted to watch the eleven o’clock news on the kitchen TV, and he shook his head. The last thing he wanted was ten minutes of coverage on how the Flint City Monster had been brought to bay. Jeannie made raisin toast to go with the tea. Ralph sat at the kitchen table, looking at his hands, and told her everything. He saved Everett Roundhill for last.
“He was furious with all of us,” Ralph said, “but since I was the one who finally called him back, I was the one who took the incoming fire.”
“Are you saying he confirmed Terry’s story?”
“Every word. Roundhill picked up Terry and the other two teachers—Quade and Grant—at the high school. Ten o’clock Tuesday morning, as arranged. They got to the Sheraton in Cap City around 11:45, just in time to pick up their conference IDs and be seated for the banquet lunch. Roundhill says he lost track of Terry for an hour or so after the lunch was over, but he thinks Quade was with him. In any case, they were all back together by three, which is when Mrs. Stanhope saw him putting Frank Peterson’s bike—and Frank himself—into a dirty white van seventy miles south.”
“Have you talked to Quade?”
“Yes. On the way home. He wasn’t angry—Roundhill’s so pissed he’s threatening to call for a full-scale investigation by the AG—but he was disbelieving. Stunned. Said that he and Terry went to a used bookstore called Second Edition after the banquet lunch, browsed, then came back for Coben.”
“And Grant? What about him?”
“He’s a she—Debbie Grant. Haven’t reached her yet, her husband said she went out with some other women, and when she does that she always turns off her phone. I’ll get her tomorrow morning, and when I do, I have no doubt that she’ll confirm what Roundhill and Quade told me.” He took a small bite of his toast, then put it back on the plate. “This is my fault. If I’d pulled Terry in for questioning Thursday night, after Stanhope and the Morris girl ID’d him, I’d have known we had a problem and this wouldn’t be all over TV and the Internet now.”
“But by then you’d matched the fingerprints to Terry Maitland’s, isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”
“Fingerprints in the van, a fingerprint on the van’s ignition key, fingerprints in the car he abandoned by the river, on the branch he used to . . .”
“Yes.”
“And then more eyewitnesses. The man behind Shorty’s Pub, and his friend. Plus the cab driver. And the bouncer at the strip club. They all knew him.”
“Uh-huh, and now that he’s been arrested, I have no doubt we’ll get a few more eyewits from Gentlemen, Please. Bachelors, mostly, who won’t have to explain to their wives what they were doing there. I still should have waited. Maybe I should have called the high school to check on his movements on the day of the murder, except it made no sense, being summer vacation and all. What could they have told me except ‘He’s not here’？”
“And you were afraid that if you started asking questions, it would get back to him.”
That had seemed obvious at the time, but now it only seemed stupid. Worse, careless. “I’ve made some mistakes in my career, but nothing like this. It’s as if I went blind.”
She shook her head vehemently. “Do you remember what I said when you told me that was how you meant to do it?”
“Yes.”
Go ahead. Get him away from those boys as fast as you can.
That was what she’d said.
They sat there, looking at each other across the table.
“This is impossible,” Jeannie said at last.
He pointed a finger at her. “I think you’ve reached the heart of the matter.”