“I’m just thinking out loud here, but leaving size out of the equation, how likely is it that Althea could have killed them both? I mean, a woman in her sixties against two young girls? You’d think at least one of them would have gotten away. Unless they were tied up. They weren’t, were they?”

“Not when they went in the water. The divers scoured the pond for rope, tape, anything that could have been used to bind them, but they came up empty.”

“Then how could she have pulled it off?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it? In fact, it’s one of the things that kept nagging at me.”

Lizzy’s head came up sharply. It was the first sign he’d given that he had doubts about Althea’s guilt, and she seized on it. “You don’t think she did it.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you had doubts. You just said you did.”

“Not initially. The bodies were discovered in your grandmother’s pond, weighted down with rocks, and if there’s one thing this job teaches you, it’s that there’s generally a reason the obvious suspect is the obvious suspect. But it isn’t my job to decide who’s guilty and who’s not. It’s my job to follow the evidence. And in this case there were some things that just didn’t add up.”

“Like what?”

“Like why our tipster didn’t come forward when we asked him to contact us again. Not even when we upped the reward. And then there’s motive. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why your grandmother would have wanted to harm two young girls, and then dump them in her own pond, where she had to know they’d eventually be found. People have said a lot of things about Althea Moon over the years, but no one ever said she was stupid.”

“No,” Lizzy said evenly. “She wasn’t. So who?”

Roger shook his head. “That’s the other problem. It’s much harder to prove someone didn’t do something than to prove they did. For better or worse, big cases tend to take on a momentum of their own. The evidence points in a certain direction, and that’s the direction everyone looks. The media, the public, and, yes, sometimes even the law. It takes something substantial to shift that momentum in a new direction, and we just didn’t have that. We didn’t have anything.”

“So you were fine with letting everyone believe Althea was guilty?”

Roger rose stiffly from his chair. “Come with me, Ms. Moon.”

Lizzy caught Andrew’s eye as they followed Roger into the house. They passed through the kitchen and living room, then down a short hall lined with three doors, two of which stood open. The first was a small guest bath. The second appeared to be Roger’s bedroom, furnished with only a bed, a bureau, and a treadmill stationed in front of the window.

The last door was closed. Roger said nothing as he pushed it open, stepping aside so Lizzy and Andrew could enter ahead of him. The room was small and dim, the blinds closed against the afternoon sun. There were no furnishings of any kind, just stacks of cardboard storage boxes on the floor in the center of the room.

Lizzy looked from the boxes to Roger. “What’s all this?”

“This,” Roger said wistfully, “is my career. Or was. Personal notes on every case I worked as a detective.” He stepped into the room, making a beeline for a pair of boxes set slightly apart from the rest. “And these,” he said, laying a hand on the top box, “are the Gilman files.”

Lizzy eyed him warily. “Should you even have those?”

“They’re not official police documents. Just stuff I kept together so I could work the case from home. Notes mostly.” He lifted the lid and pulled out a handful of small black notebooks. “I’ve been accused of being a pack rat, but the truth is, I think better on paper.”

Lizzy stepped closer, peering into the carton at the jumble of notebooks and file folders.

“There must be hundreds of pages here. What is it all?”

“Notes on basically everything I could remember at the end of every day, stray thoughts, offhand remarks I wanted to follow up on. Impressions I jotted down after interviews and daily briefings. Anything I thought might eventually fit somewhere.”

“How on earth did you find time to do all this?”

“Like I said, some of us give our lives to the job. My wife and son were killed not long after I made detective. They were on the way back from my son’s tae kwon do match in Manchester. The roads were icy, and the car jumped the median into oncoming traffic. I was supposed to go with them that night, but I was stuck in an interview. Maybe if I’d been driving . . .” His eyes flicked briefly from hers. “My son was eleven.”

Lizzy’s throat went tight. Apparently her radar was spot on. A wife and a son. How was it possible to even survive such a loss? To keep putting one foot in front of the other when you’ve lost everything that mattered?

“I’m so sorry.”

Roger hunched his shoulders, clearly uncomfortable with his grief. “After that, there was just the job. And my notes. Anyway, it’s all here.”

Andrew moved closer, craning his neck to inspect the contents of the carton. “I can’t believe you saved all this.”

“My brother’s a criminal attorney. The first thing he told me when I joined the force was never get rid of your notes, because you never know when a case is going to come back to bite you in the ass. I never forgot it. You have no idea how many times some tiny detail has ended up shining new light on a case. Not that this is likely to be one of those cases. God knows I’ve spent hours looking for something I might have missed. Unfortunately, I never found it.”

Lizzy’s admiration for Roger Coleman ticked up another notch. “You seem to have taken the case very seriously.”

“I took all my cases seriously, but I admit this one hit me hard. I know what it’s like to lose a child, but I never had to wonder what happened to my son. For better or worse, I knew. The Gilmans didn’t. And they still don’t. I can’t imagine what that must be like, to wake up every day and know my child was gone and have no idea how or why. It’s also why I agreed to talk to you. It struck me when Andrew told me you were thinking about digging all this up again that maybe the Gilmans weren’t the only ones who deserved answers.”

“Thank you, Detective.”

“Roger,” he reminded again. “I’ve got seventeen years under my belt as a detective, and in all that time there were only three cases I couldn’t close. This was one of them. I’m telling you this because I need you to understand that my only stake in all of this is getting at the truth, and that anything I may find is in that interest alone. I don’t work for you.”

“I understand. I’ll wait to hear from you. In the meantime, I was thinking of talking to the Gilmans.”

Roger’s face darkened. “You’re certainly welcome to try, but I doubt you’ll get very far. The last time I had contact, Fred Gilman nearly tore my head off, and Mrs. Gilman looked like a ghost. Not that I blame either of them. He wanted someone’s head on a pike, and she just wanted it to be over. They needed closure, and I couldn’t give it to them.”

“Maybe we can still give it to them,” Lizzy said quietly. “If I can just make them see that that’s what I want too, they’ll talk to me.”

“Maybe so,” Roger said, though he sounded less than convinced. “I was sorry to hear about your grandmother, by the way. She seemed like a good woman, despite what was happening in her world. I wish our paths could have crossed under different circumstances.”

Lizzy met his gaze squarely. “She didn’t hurt those girls, Roger.”

“You have no idea how much I’d like to believe that, Ms. Moon.”

“It’s Lizzy,” she corrected. “And I’m guessing it’s not half as much as I’d like to prove it to you.”

TEN

Lizzy was quiet on the ride back. She could feel Andrew’s eyes sliding in her direction now and then, but she was too busy digesting what she’d learned about Randall Summers’s negligent handling of the investigation to make conversation. And yet, in a perverse way, it gave her hope. She’d been operating under the assumption that the police had simply run out of leads, when the truth was the investigation had been quietly and deliberately quashed.

It was clear now why Roger had walked away from a nearly twenty-year career with the Salem Creek Police Department. She barely knew the man, but she’d seen enough to know he wasn’t the type to stomach collusion and blatant malfeasance, which was what Summers’s actions amounted to. Which was why she believed him when he said he’d comb through his notes in search of some previously missed clue. Not because he wanted to help her, but because he wanted to get to the truth. Because that was how he was built.

“Here we are,” Andrew said, as they pulled into the drive. “Home again.” He put the truck in park and turned to look at her. “You haven’t said much since we left Roger’s. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” She was clutching her purse with one hand, the door handle with the other, ready to be alone with her thoughts. Instead, she sagged back in her seat. “It’s just a lot to take in, you know? To find out the chief of police was willing to let my grandmother take the fall for something she didn’t do because he wanted to run for mayor one day. What kind of man does something like that?”