Jon Talton - Powers of Arrest

“You’re slick,” she said. “You got off the Zodiac, forced her back into the cabin, handcuffed her, and then you got out your knife…”

“No!” he screamed.

“Then you went back to your friends, and you were with them when they went back downriver and saw her boat. You could claim you found her for the first time. You could have called the police, but you didn’t.”

“I already told you, I wanted to!”

“That’s not what your friend, Zack Miller, said.”

“He’s not my friend,” John said.

That was true enough, Will thought. He also knew that Henderson had interviewed the three girls on the boat individually and they all admitted that John had wanted to call the police after he found Gruber’s body. But Henderson kept that to herself, kept the pressure on John.

Leaning forward, she said quietly, You must have really hated her to do such a horrible thing…”

“I cared about her! I was grateful to her!”

The room stayed silent for a long time. The prosecutor was getting antsy. Henderson turned motherly again. “I can understand. So you started out a little reluctant with her, you wanted a girl your age. And then you fell for her. She was attractive. Did she know you cared about her? How did she react?”

“She laughed at me afterwards and never took my call again.”

“Did that make you angry?”

“It hurt.”

“And made you angry.”

“Yes.” His mouth turned down violently.

Will saw a stranger’s face. It chilled him. His right quads starting jumping. It had come to this: what if he was wrong? What if John were about to confess?

Henderson said, “You wanted to get back at her.”

“No.” The stranger’s face went away.

“These photos: you on the bed, you and her. Where were they taken?”

“In her condo.” But Will already recognized the surroundings. At least that wasn’t a lie.

“It must have really pissed you off when she dismissed you.”

“It hurt,” he said. “I didn’t understand.”

“Did you know she saw other men?”

“No.” He sounded surprised.

“You sure? She broke up with you, she was two-timing you. That would make any man really angry. Mad enough to take revenge.”

“No! Never!”

“Mad enough to kill her.”

“I didn’t kill her!” Now the tears were coming down and his hands were helpless to wipe them away.

She let him stew for several minutes. Will had a sudden sense of disorientation. For a moment, from the back with her fair hair, Henderson looked like the avenging ghost of Kristen Gruber. The ghost pointed and spoke: “How about these pictures here?”

“We went bike riding.”

“Where?”

“The trail out in Loveland, that used to be train tracks.”

Will whispered, “Goddamn.”

“It’s a nice place,” Henderson said. “Do you go there often?”

“A few times.”

“Have you been there this spring?”

He nodded.

“Speak up, John.”

“Yes,” he said. “I was out there a few weeks ago.”

“With some friends?”

“Alone.”

Henderson flipped through her portfolio and put a photo of Lauren Benish in front of him.

“Did you see her?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure. She’s pretty. I would have noticed.”

“I bet you would have. I bet you did. She was also murdered last weekend.”

John’s face lost all its color.

“Now wait a minute…”

“John, we know you went to bars at Oxford. She was a nursing student at Miami. What if I have a witness who said you were on the trail with her and then started stalking her?”

“That’s crazy! I never…”

Henderson said, “Let’s go through this again.”

Dodds turned down the speaker and said, “What do you think?”

“We don’t have enough to hold him once his mother gets here with a lawyer,” the prosecutor said.

Will shook his head, looked back at Cheryl Beth for some reassurance. She telegraphed it. He said, “I don’t know what the hell to think, J.C. He’s lied and lied. But he’s not bald.”

“You can buy a bald cap from the Internet. It’d be a good disguise, because that’s the first thing any witness would remember.”

Will said, “You don’t really think…”

“No,” Dodds said. “He’s tall but looks out of shape. I don’t see him overpowering Noah Smith. He doesn’t have a knife.”

Now the hole in Will’s stomach was big enough to drop a baseball through.

“But,” Dodds continued, “It’s all what a jury believes.”

He turned the speaker back up.

“So she liked it rough,” Henderson was saying. “Liked to be tied up.”

“Not by me,” John said. “I didn’t like that. It scared me.”

“You never tied her up?”

“I wouldn’t. She wanted me to. She wanted me to call her names and slap her, force myself on her. She said it helped her get off.”

Henderson shook her head and pushed back the chair. “Now you’re lying to me again, John. Why would any woman enjoy that?”

He tried to answer but couldn’t form the words through his sobs.

When he was able to speak, they could barely hear him. “I tried to understand why she was that way. Finally, she told me she’d been raped when she was twenty-five. She’d been on duty when it happened. I don’t know if that had anything to do with how she was, but that was all she’d tell me.”

A tap came at their door and a uniformed officer stuck his head inside.

“His mother and lawyer are here, raising hell.”

They made it out to the parking lot and into the car before Will’s phone rang. Cheryl Beth could only hear his side of the conversation.

“Yes, chief…I told Detective Dodds this morning and Covington brought him down for interrogation…No, sir, he lives with his mother, my ex-wife…No, sir…” She watched his face lose its color. “I haven’t read it yet…I don’t know how they could have put together the information about Noah Smith…”

She felt her body tense at the mention of Noah’s name.

Will kept talking, “So the Oxford cops said nothing?” The voice on the other end talked a long time. Will silently gripped his leg. “Sir, with all due respect to Lieutenant Fassbinder, he’s misremembering. I urged him to go public with the connection between Oxford and Gruber. I think it might help bring forward some new witnesses, throw the suspect off balance. Lieutenant Fassbinder declined my advice…Yes, sir…I’d really like to be there. If for no other reason because I think the suspect still might try to make contact with me…”

The police jargon both amused and horrified her. “Contact me.” Sure as hell.

“I don’t believe John is the suspect, sir,” Will said. “He’s stupid and was in the wrong time and wrong place. Based on that, he might end up like Noah Smith, who was a suspect once himself…”

Cheryl Beth hadn’t even considered that. She watched Covington cops coming and going.

Will gave a final “yes, sir” and put the phone down, a defeated look on his face.

“The Dayton Daily News had a story this morning saying the suspect in the Miami killings had committed suicide in Cincinnati last week. The chief wants to know how they put that together. How the hell do I know? We never released Noah’s name. The newspaper didn’t even call me for a comment. Hank Brooks was helpful, giving a ‘no comment,’ which makes a good reporter think something’s being hidden. Goddamn it to hell…”

She put a hand on his arm. He slumped into the seat.

“Now I have to explain this disaster with John. And Fassbinder told the chief that I was the one who said we shouldn’t go public with the connection between Gruber and your students. Damn him. If you don’t mind, would you pull the knife out of my back?”