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.”