‘No. It was some silly name on the email account. Something made up.’
‘Jesus, Raleigh. You shouldn’t have done that,’ Paul says.
Raleigh looks at his father as if challenging him somehow and says, ‘Do you think he could have been seeing the woman who was murdered?’
Olivia watches the two of them, stunned into speechlessness.
‘No, of course not!’ Paul says. ‘That’s … ridiculous.’
‘He knows our cabin,’ Raleigh says.
‘Are you suggesting that Keith murdered her?’ Paul says, clearly horrified at the idea. ‘Keith can’t possibly be involved with this. He can’t be a murderer. He’s my best friend.’
Chapter Thirty-four
BECKY JUMPS WHEN the door opens and her husband walks in. He’d been too upset to go into the office this morning and then the detectives had called him to come down to answer more questions. She can see that he is shaken. But he’s home from the police station. He hasn’t been arrested.
‘What happened?’ she asks.
‘They asked me if I’d ever been to the Sharpes’ cabin.’ Larry sinks, clearly exhausted, onto the sofa in the living room. ‘They’re still acting like they think I killed her. Why do they think that, Becky? I had an affair with her, but I swear I didn’t kill her.’ He looks up at her, worried.
She sits down beside him. Then, ‘It’s just us now, Larry. You’ve never been to that cabin, have you?’
‘No! Absolutely not. I swear, I don’t know where it is.’
But he’s lied to her before. He could have known about the Sharpes’ cabin somehow.
It’s been on the news this morning, online, that Paul Sharpe has been released without charge. She can’t be the only one who finds that odd. But they obviously don’t think he did it. They must think someone else killed her in his cabin. And they must think it was either Robert Pierce, or her husband, Larry.
Back to square one. Which of them did it? She doesn’t know.
Robert Pierce can’t believe it. Yesterday he was in the clear – gave a press conference and celebrated alone with a few beers; today he learns that Paul Sharpe has been released without charge. He reads about it in the news, and then those damn detectives show up on his doorstep around lunchtime.
‘Mr Pierce,’ Webb said. ‘We’d like to have another little chat with you.’
‘About what?’ Robert said suspiciously.
‘About your wife.’
‘I thought you caught the guy,’ Robert said. ‘Quick work, by the way. What do you want with me?’
‘Well, you see, we had to release him. Not enough evidence.’
‘You’re kidding, right?’ Robert said, his heart pounding harder. ‘My wife’s blood on the floor of his cabin isn’t enough for you?’
‘Oddly enough, no,’ Webb replied. ‘We’d like you to come down to the station.’
‘Now?’
‘Yes.’
And so here he is, back in this claustrophobic room, but this time he has been read his rights, and the interview is being taped. The detectives have let Sharpe go. They will be after him now, the husband. They always think it’s the husband.
‘We think you knew your wife was seeing someone else,’ Webb begins.
Robert says nothing.
‘We know she had a burner phone. We haven’t been able to find it, but we know she had one.’
Robert remains warily silent.
‘Do you know where it is?’ Webb presses.
Still, he says nothing.
‘We know she had one,’ Webb continues, ‘because Larry Harris told us.’
Robert isn’t going to rise to the bait.
Webb gets right in his face and says, ‘We know you had her burner phone, because Harris told us that you called him from it. On the morning of Friday, September twenty-ninth, the day your wife disappeared.’
Robert shrugs. ‘That’s not true. You’ve only got his word for it. He was screwing her – he’d say anything.’
‘We don’t just have his word for it. We have a witness.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘A local boy broke into your house and found the burner phone in your desk drawer after Amanda went missing. But it wasn’t there when we searched the house a few days later. What did you do with the phone, Robert?’
He doesn’t answer. His heart is racing. Instead he says, ‘What boy?’
But the detective ignores his question. ‘We know you lied to us. We know you knew she was seeing Larry. Was she seeing Paul Sharpe, too? Did you know about that? How many numbers were in that phone? Was she sleeping with both of them? That must have been hard to take. We know you had the phone, so you must have known she was planning to meet someone that weekend at that cabin. Which one was it? And you went there, and saw them together, and once she was alone, you bashed her head in.’
Robert says nothing, but his heart is pounding.
‘Maybe the burner phone is at the bottom of a lake somewhere, like the hammer,’ Webb says.
‘I want to call my attorney,’ Robert says.
‘Olivia,’ Paul says to her, in a troubled voice, when they’re going to bed that night, ‘what if Keith was seeing Amanda?’
She’d been thinking the same thing herself, all day, and all evening. Part of her dismissed the idea as improbable. Surely Keith didn’t really know her. He’d met her at the neighbourhood party, like everyone else, but he didn’t work in the same company as Paul and Larry, where she was a regular temp. The chance he was seeing Amanda seems like a stretch. Glenda had never given any hint that she suspected Keith might be having an affair. On the other hand … She answers him quietly, ‘Do you think it’s possible?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think they ever met, other than the party a year ago. He certainly never mentioned her to me. I never thought he was the type to have an affair.’
‘They could have met online,’ Olivia says. ‘They could have met anywhere.’
Paul looks back at her, radiating tension. ‘Olivia, Amanda Pierce was killed in our cabin. I didn’t kill her. But who do we know has been to our cabin?’
And that’s why she’s unsure. Glenda and Keith come to their cabin every summer, for at least a weekend or two. They know the cabin very well. Their fingerprints are everywhere, and perfectly explainable. Keith could have met Amanda there that weekend, and nobody would have known. Because Keith probably would have known that they wouldn’t be using the cabin that weekend.
‘But how would he get in?’ Olivia asks.
‘Keith knows where we hide the spare key,’ Paul says.
‘He does?’
Paul nods, biting his lip. ‘I told him once how we drove all the way to the cabin that time and forgot the key, and how after that we hid a spare in the shed under the oilcan.’
They look at each other, an uneasy dread spreading across their faces. Could it have been Keith, Olivia considers, and not Amanda’s husband, or Larry, or Paul, at all?
‘What should we do?’ Olivia asks.
‘We have to tell the police,’ Paul says. ‘Let them look into it. They can seize his computer.’