“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 eye-wits 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.”
She sipped her tea thoughtfully, then looked at him over the rim of her cup. “There’s an old saying that everyone has a double. I think Edgar Allan Poe even wrote a story about it. ‘William Wilson,’ it was called.”
“Poe wrote his stories before fingerprints and DNA. We don’t have the DNA yet—that’s pending—but if it comes back as his, it’s him and I’m probably okay. If it comes back as someone else’s, they’ll cart me off to the loonybin. After I lose my job and get sued for false arrest, that is.”
She lifted her own piece of toast, then lowered it again. “You have his fingerprints here. And you’ll have his DNA here, I’m sure of it. But Ralph… you don’t have any fingerprints or DNA from there. From whoever attended that conference in Cap City. What if Terry Maitland killed the boy and it was the double at that conference?”
“If you’re saying Terry Maitland has a lost identical twin with the same fingerprints and DNA, it’s not possible.”
“I’m not saying that. I’m saying that you don’t have any forensic proof that it was Terry in Cap City. If Terry was here, and the forensic evidence says he was, then the double must have been there. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
Ralph understood the logic, and in the detective novels Jeannie liked to read—the Agatha Christies, the Rex Stouts, the Harlan Cobens—it would have been the centerpiece of the final chapter, when Miss Marple, Nero Wolfe, or Myron Bolitar revealed all. There was one rock-hard fact, as unassailable as gravity: a man could not be in two places at the same time.
But if Ralph had confidence in the eyewitnesses here, he had to have equal confidence in the eyewitnesses who said they had been in Cap City with Maitland. How could he doubt them? Roundhill, Quade, and Grant all taught in the same department. They saw Maitland every day. Was he, Ralph, supposed to believe those three teachers had colluded in the rape-murder of a child? Or that they had spent two days with a double so perfect they had never even suspected? And even if he could make himself believe it, could Bill Samuels ever convince a jury, especially when Terry had a seasoned and crafty defense lawyer like Howie Gold on his side?
“Let’s go up to bed,” Jeanette said. “I’ll give you one of my Ambiens and rub your back. This will look better in the morning.”
“You think so?” he asked.
4
As Jeanette Anderson was rubbing her husband’s back, Fred Peterson and his older son (now, with Frankie gone, his only son) were picking up dishes and setting the living room and the den to rights. And although it had been a remembrance gathering, the remains were pretty much the same as after any large and long houseparty.
Ollie had surprised Fred. The boy was your typical self-involved teenager who ordinarily wouldn’t pick up his socks from under the coffee table unless told twice or three times, but tonight he’d been an efficient and uncomplaining helper since Arlene had at ten o’clock turned out the last of that day’s unending stream of guests. The gathering of friends and neighbors had been winding down by seven, and Fred had hoped it would be over by eight—God, he was so tired of nodding when people told him Frankie was in heaven now—but then came the news that Terence Maitland had been arrested for Frankie’s murder, and the damn thing had cranked up all over again. That second cycle almost had been a party, albeit a grim one. Again and again Fred had been told that a, it was unbelievable, that b, Coach T had always seemed so normal, and c, the needle at McAlester was too good for him.
Ollie went back and forth from the living room to the kitchen, carrying glasses and piles of dishes, loading them into the dishwasher with an efficiency Fred never would have expected. When the dishwasher was full, Ollie set it going and rinsed more dishes, stacking them in the sink for the next load. Fred brought in the dishes that had been left in the den, and found yet more on the picnic table in the backyard, where some of their visitors had gone to smoke. Fifty or sixty people must have washed through the house before it was finally over, everyone in the neighborhood, plus well-wishers from other parts of town, not to mention Father Brixton and his various hangers-on (his groupies, Fred thought) from St. Anthony’s. On and on they had come, a stream of mourners and gawkers.
Fred and Ollie did their clean-up work silently, each wrapped up in his own thoughts and his own grief. After receiving condolences for hours—and to be fair, even those from total strangers had been heartfelt—they were unable to condole with each other. Maybe that was strange. Maybe it was sad. Maybe it was what literary types called irony. Fred was too tired and heartsick to think about it.