Page 90 of Everything You Want Me to Be

That fit with the remorse bit the profiler talked about and was consistent with the wounds.

“What did you do with the knife?”

“I threw it in the lake along with her purse. Then I went home and burned my clothes and took a shower.”

“Where did you burn your clothes?”

“In the fire pit behind the garage. I used lighter fluid and made sure all the ashes had scattered.”

“Did your wife or your mother-in-law see you come home?”

“No.” He paused and swallowed. “I didn’t see anyone. I went straight to my room—the office, I mean—and stayed there for the rest of the night. I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking about... the future.”

I rubbed my chin and leaned back in the chair. Lund’s head hung from his body like some useless, dead weight and he sat absolutely still; I could barely tell he was breathing.

“Why her purse?”

He glanced up at that, for the first time in the interview, but his eyes skittered immediately away.

“Why’d you take her purse, Peter?” I asked again.

“I needed to get the key.”

Jake’s eyes flashed and I leaned back in.

“What key?”

“She had a key to a locker at the Rochester bus station. She’d said everything we needed to leave town was in there. She had a suitcase ready to go and two one-way tickets, in both of our names, to New York City.

“She held it up when I asked about the money and explained what it was. Then she put it back in her purse and started threatening me. Later—afterwards—I realized I needed to take the key; otherwise the whole affair would be discovered. I didn’t know then about the condom, that my DNA would be identified. So I took her purse and took the key out of it, then threw it in the lake, too.”

“Where’s the key now?”

He lined up his knuckles on the edge of the table and took his time before replying in a low, offhand tone. “In my desk at work.”

“You didn’t go to the locker?”

“No. I was going to wait until the case was closed and then destroy the... evidence.”

I stared at him: his bent head, his carefully placed hands, the sag of his shoulders under the fancy suit. It fit. It all fit, and everything I knew about being a lawman told me I was sitting across from Hattie’s killer, but something still nagged at me.

“You went to a lot of trouble, didn’t you, Lund? Thought this all through.”

He shrugged. “I thought I did.”

“So tell me this: How’d you go from swearing up and down that you had nothing to do with Hattie’s death not three hours ago to signing your life away now?”

“Mary.” He answered immediately.

“Protecting Mary?”

“That’s what I was trying to do—protect my family. I didn’t know until Mary came today that she’d seen me and Hattie together. She... said she’d testify against me, about what she saw. At that point I knew there wasn’t any hope in lying further. I wasn’t going to get away with it.”

Lund looked up again and met my stare. “To be honest, I’m kind of relieved. I’d just like to get all this over with and start serving my time. Can I do that?”

He glanced at the lawyer, who seemed to remember he was there as more than just a rapt audience member, and the two of them asked to have a minute alone to discuss sentencing options.

We tossed him back in the cell with his lawyer for company and drove to the school, found the key, and took it to the Greyhound station in Rochester. Inside the locker we found Hattie’s missing suitcase, still gleaming and smelling like new, and an envelope holding three hundred-dollar bills, a note from Lund breaking off the affair, and two one-way tickets to New York, exactly as he’d described.