“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.
“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.”