“I was out in my dad’s boat. We picked up some ladies. Your kid tagged along. We went up the Licking to party. No big deal.”
Will watched him. When the silence was starting to make him uncomfortable, Will said, “You want to try again?”
The young man jutted out his chin, then dropped his head. “We saw the boat, okay? Where the lady cop was killed.”
“When did you see it?”
“First when we went up-river.”
Will wanted the time: around three that afternoon. He started making notes.
“It didn’t look like anybody was aboard,” Zack Miller said. “It was tied up. I didn’t think anything about it. Then it was still there when we came back.”
“What time?”
“I have no idea. Way after midnight. We slowed down, thought maybe we could pull a prank. I ran the spotlight over the boat. We called over and nobody called back. So we pulled alongside, and I was going to check it out, make sure everybody was okay. But John went over. I guess he was trying to impress the girls. When he comes back, he said there was a dead woman in the cabin.”
Will suddenly had a headache. “John got onto that boat?”
“Yes, sir, he did.”
“How long was he there?”
Zack shrugged. “A few minutes. Then he came back and told us.”
“Why didn’t you call the police?”
“I wanted to, but John said not to do it. He made us get out of there and I let everybody off at the Serpentine Wall.”
Will wrote slowly, trying to maintain his composure. Even if John hadn’t killed Kristen Gruber, witnesses now placed him on the boat, and the hair and shoe-print were probably his, too. That must have been why John refused to let the others call the police. He would be in deep shit and there was nothing that Will could do to protect him. He had done too much already. But at least John had an alibi for the time when Gruber was murdered.
He faced Heather, wishing he were interrogating them separately. “Is that how it happened?”
She nodded. “Yes.” She immediately looked down and to the left.
Will didn’t trust the story. Zack didn’t seem like the kind of boater or human being that would check the welfare of anybody who couldn’t do him a favor. But he also knew he had to fight against his bias to believe John was innocent.
“So let me get this straight. You go upriver, see the boat, and there’s no activity on it. You party a few miles upstream. Then when you come back, you stop. Why?”
“There was blood on the portholes. It hadn’t been there the first time.”
Will asked him how he knew.
“I know boats. It was a Rinker Fiesta, in pretty good shape. The first time I was surprised that somebody would tie it up and leave it. But there were other boats and canoes on the river. When we came back toward downtown, it was the only boat left. This time I saw the blood, and it wasn’t there before, when we were going upriver.” The more he talked, the greater the confidence in his voice.