“I saw—” Zoe began, then broke off immediately. She’d been about to say, I saw him do it. That would have gone over well: I saw it in a movie on the back of a superhot guy.
“You saw what, exactly?” said Baldino.
“I saw how he bragged about it,” she said. “And I saw the poker he killed them with. He thought Bert and Betty were rich. He was still trying to figure out where they hid their money. But they didn’t have any money—and now their bodies are in the lake.”
Her voice was shaking.
“Zoe,” said Baldino, “did you and your brother see anyone other than Stan Manggold while you were out at the lake—anybody you knew, anybody you didn’t know, anybody at all? I want you to think carefully about your answer. Because we’re going to write it down.”
At this, Officer Maerz looked up at his boss, as if to say, Are you talking about me? Baldino rolled his eyes and said, “Yes, Stuart, whatever she says, write it down.”
Everyone looked at Zoe, waiting. X’s face flashed into her head. She felt protective of him. He had carried them home.
Just then, there were noises from outside—it sounded like animals had gotten into the garage and toppled the garbage cans.
Zoe’s mother stood.
“Raccoons,” she said. “We’re going to need a quick recess. No questions while I’m gone.” She turned her laptop to face the policemen. “If you have a problem with that,” she said, “you can take it up with legalbeagle.com.”
“Would you like some help, Ms. Bissell?” asked Sergeant Vilkomerson.
“No, but thank you, Brian. The raccoons are just going to have to find a new place to play.”
Zoe stood, her calves rippling with pain, and went to one of the duct-taped windows in the living room. Outside, the clouds had shifted. The moon was a bright, white eyeball in the sky. The mountains were just wavy lines receding into the distance.
She felt weary for the thousandth time. She thought about Bert and Betty, about her father, about the big roiling mess that everything had become.
She thought about X. She knocked on the window—she didn’t know why. He was out there somewhere. She shouldn’t have let him go, but she couldn’t exactly force him to stay.
Zoe headed back to the table. She knew what she was going to say.
“We didn’t see anybody but Stan. Why?”
The moment Zoe said it, she knew she’d made a mistake. Miscalculated, somehow. Even her mother seemed to know she was lying, but how could she? Zoe’s stomach tightened again, like someone was turning a wheel.
Officer Maerz, she noticed, hadn’t written her answer down—not because he’d forgotten but because he knew it would be used against her later. Zoe thought that was cool and kind. In her mind, she put a star next to Maerz’s name, though she knew his little rebellion was about to get crushed.
“Stuart, write down what our young friend just said, word for word.”
This was Baldino. He smiled, drummed on the tabletop, and sat up straight. Now he looked merely three or four months pregnant, like he’d just begun telling people he was having a baby.
“Brian,” he said, “let’s show her the photo. You got it handy?”
So there was a photo. How could there be? And of what? The wheel in Zoe’s stomach turned three times in quick succession.
She was about to speak when her mother startled everyone by slamming her computer shut.
“What photo?” she said. “Why are we only hearing about it now—and why are you playing games with a seventeen-year-old girl?”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Bissell,” Vilkomerson said, as he searched his phone for the picture.
“Why on earth are you apologizing to this woman?” Baldino said. “We gave the kid a chance to tell the truth.”
“I accept your apology, Brian,” said Zoe’s mom. “But you”—she was pointing at Chief Baldino now—“are starting to piss me off.”
It was the Instagram. Brian had an annoying daughter a couple of years behind Zoe at school, and the girl had seen the photo, thought it was hot, and left some lame comment, like YAASS! She’d also shown it to her dad.
The photo showed X from behind, his arms and legs spread so wide that he looked like an actual X. You could see his broad, shirtless back, lit by the glow coming off the ice. You could see the primitive tattoos running down his forearms. You could see Stan cowering miserably at his feet.
“Now, there are many odd things about this photograph,” said Chief Baldino. “For instance, the lake is orange.”
“That’s just a filter,” said Maerz. “Everybody uses them.”
Zoe had stopped listening. She was staring not at X but at Stan. Her mother was staring at him, too. She seemed stunned to see him again after what must have been decades. The man was vile: The buzz cut. The shock-white eyebrow. The ugly boulder of a head. Zoe had not just let him live, she had let him escape. She couldn’t pull her eyes away, even when she tasted bile in the back of her throat.
Baldino began hammering her with questions now: “Can you confirm that you took this photo last night? Can you confirm that you took it outside the former residence of Bertram and Elizabeth Wallace?”
Zoe felt dizzy. Only Vilkomerson noticed. He put a gentle hand on her arm, and said something she couldn’t quite process. Everything was sliding. Everything was flying sideways.
And Baldino wouldn’t shut up.