“I find that hard to believe.”
“That’s because you’re not Kristen, lady.”
“You can call me Detective Henderson, or detective, or officer.”
“Whatever,” he said. All his sobbing from the night at Hyde Park Square was gone. In its place sat a fuming defiance.
“So why’d she pick you up? You look pretty ordinary to me. Are you some hot lover on the prowl for cougars?”
“As if.” He gave a mordant laugh. “She wanted to deflower me. It excited her.”
Will resisted the in
voluntary urge to shake his head. He listened to the intonations of John’s voice; could it have been the one he heard behind him the previous night? Then there was John’s pale, short hair: someone might mistake him for bald, especially if she didn’t get a good look. He forced his jaw to unclench.
Henderson sat still for a few beats. “It must have been exciting for you.”
“I wanted somebody my own age. But the girls my age don’t like me. Kristen did. She thought I was mature. She said I had good judgment, that I acted very mature.”
“You’re not showing it so far,” Henderson said. “She’s dead. We have your admission that you were on her boat the night she was murdered and the evidence to back it up. Now we know you were her lover. It’s not looking good. I’d say when you were on the Licking River with your friends and saw her boat. It put you in a rage. While they were passed out, you unlashed the Zodiac, went back, and murdered her.”
“I didn’t kill her!” His face contorted.
“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.