Roger nodded. “She did.”
“But you didn’t believe her.”
“The neck of the vial was cracked when we retrieved it from Heather’s pocket. There was nothing to test, no way to verify its contents. We thought a sedative of some kind might account for how someone your grandmother’s age could have overpowered two young girls. We were doing our jobs, Ms. Moon.”
“I was there the day you came with your men,” Lizzy said softly. “I let you in.”
“Yes,” Roger said, the slight inclination of his head an acknowledgment that they’d officially crossed into uncomfortable territory. “I remember.”
Lizzy stood abruptly and moved to the railing, the combination of anger and memory making her vaguely queasy. Andrew must have sensed her mood because he was suddenly beside her, sliding a hand over hers on the railing. He said nothing, but the question in his eyes was easily read.
Are you okay?
When she nodded that she was, Andrew turned back to Roger. “You bring up a point that’s always bothered me, Roger. Althea Moon was five feet two, tops, and I doubt she weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet. Is it likely that she was strong enough to inflict the kinds of head injuries the girls sustained?”
“Only Darcy, the younger of the two, sustained a head injury,” Roger explained gravely. “Blunt force trauma to the left temporal and parietal areas. Subdural hematoma. Gruesome stuff. But the ME couldn’t be certain as to her definitive cause of death. There appeared to be some pulmonary hemorrhaging, which is sometimes seen in drowning victims. Hard to say, though, after so much time in the pond. Heather was strangled. Crushed trachea, two broken cervical vertebrae. Lungs looked clear, which means she was dead when she went in.”
Lizzy couldn’t help feeling a grudging respect for Roger Coleman. Eight years had passed since the Gilman girls were murdered and he still remembered their names, referring to them as Darcy and Heather, rather than mere faceless victims.
Andrew had fallen silent, his brows pinched, as if trying to work out something in his head. “Was there a time lag between the two deaths?” he asked finally.
Roger shrugged. “The level of decomposition was similar for both girls, but that has more to do with how long they were in the water than with actual time of death. It’s likely they died in close succession, but we can’t know for certain. There’s a lot we can’t know for certain.”
“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
