“Get in,” Jamie said, tense. She yanked open her own door, slid inside, and jerked the door closed. Harley fumbled with her door, then put her backpack in the footwell, and tried to get her legs over it as she climbed awkwardly inside.
“Jesus Christ,” Jamie muttered, beyond exasperated as Harley finally closed the door after her.
“Why are you so mad?” Harley said on a sniff.
“Why didn’t you tell me about the boys? Oh my God, Harley. This is . . . with what happened to Emma . . . at the Ryersons’!”
“That’s why we couldn’t say anything! Marissa was attacked. That’s no joke! The boys were just . . . they just came by earlier.”
“You knew this and you didn’t tell me. Even after someone. . . came in . . . and your friend was terrorized.”
“Okay. I’m awful! What do you want me to say?” Harley demanded in a high voice.
“The truth! All of the truth! And if Marissa doesn’t tell Cooper, I will.”
“Great. Good for you.” Harley subsided into wounded silence.
Jamie clamped down on her own fury. She wanted to argue and scream and badger and keep on pointing out all the flaws in Harley’s teenage logic, but it wouldn’t prove anything useful.
They drove in silence the rest of the way home. At the house, Harley leaped from the car and tried to yank her backpack free, and it was all she could do to get the book-filled bag free from the footwell.
“Don’t say anything,” Harley snapped as Jamie got out of the car. She ran up the back steps and fumbled with her key. She glanced back at Jamie, as if expecting her to say something. In fact, Jamie had a lot to say that she was forcibly keeping to herself.
“And you don’t swear,” Harley added, before pushing open the door and disappearing into the house.
* * *
Cooper sat at his desk, the twenty-year-old binder with the notes on Emma’s attack open in front of him. He’d gone through the pages on his classmates and found a few discrepancies from his own memory. These he planned to follow up on with each particular classmate to see how they recalled the events of that night today. One in particular was Dug saying he and Race had gone home together, and Race saying he’d gone home alone. Later, Dug had said the investigator had gotten it wrong, that he and Race had arrived at the Ryerson house together, but he’d been dropped off on the way home, to which Race concurred. Race had also dropped off Mark Norquist, which was how Cooper, who’d been in his own car with Tim and Robbie, remembered it.
The book also held the notes on the interviews Detective Corliss had had with Dr. William and Nadine Ryerson, Ted and Serena’s parents, and with Dr. Alain Metcalf, who’d dropped Nadine home that night because she and her husband had had a big blow up at the River Glen General Hospital “Glen Gen” Donors Night party. After the fight, Nadine had left with Dr. Metcalf. Several hours had passed before she had him bring her home, which Mrs. Ryerson had not wanted to talk about, apart from saying she’d fallen asleep on the good Dr. Metcalf ’s couch. Nadine had asked Metcalf to drop her off; she hadn’t wanted him to come in, in case her husband had beaten her home. As it turned out, Dr. Ryerson was not there. Nadine was the one who’d discovered Emma on the floor, bleeding, and had called 911. Dr. Ryerson had appeared on the scene about the same time as the ambulance, still somewhat inebriated, apparently one of the sources of the earlier fight between his wife and him.
There were additional notes added later. One being that although the Ryersons had initially projected a united front, within the year of the attack on Emma Whelan, they were divorced. Dr. Ryerson left the area soon afterward for Palm Desert, California, with a woman named Kayla, another source of the fight at the charity event. Ryerson had subsequently made Kayla his second wife.
The final note was that, after staying in River Glen until her children, Ted and Serena Ryerson, were through high school, Nadine Ryerson moved to Lake Tahoe with her fiancé, Dr. Jay Campbell, an anesthesiologist. After that, there were no further additions to the case binder.
Cooper looked up Nadine’s information and learned she and Campbell were now married and had moved from Lake Tahoe to Bellevue, Washington. Ryerson and Kayla were now residing in Bend, Oregon. Both of them were within driving distance, so it would be easy to have face-to-face interviews at some point.
Cooper eventually came up for air. He didn’t really have a workload as Verbena was writing up a domestic violence, he said/she said case and Howie was deep into Marissa’s attacker. He was being cagey and uninformative with Cooper about what Marissa had told him in yesterday’s interview because she was his stepdaughter. Howie had called her on the phone. Not really the ideal way to depose her, but about the only way Laura would allow him to do it. He’d griped a bit about Cooper’s ex to him this morning, but not much. He wanted to keep the investigation into Cooper’s stepdaughter carefully neutral, although he had admitted he’d mostly gotten the same description of the attacker from Marissa that Crake, O’Hara, and Cooper had: big man in bulky, black or gray ski gear, a knitted ski cap over the face with eye holes. Blue eyes, she thought . . . or maybe brown. Cooper had tried to ask further questions of Howie, but his partner had lifted his hands and said that was all he knew.
But what it really meant was that was all he would talk about.
As if divining that one of his investigators wasn’t busy, Chief Bennihof stuck his head out of his office. “Patrol’s on its way to Theo’s Thrift Shop. A
