Page 58 of The Lie Maker

“Okay, well, if that’s that, have a great day,” Lana said, reaching for the door handle.

“Wait.”

Lana took her hand off the door.

“Don’t do a story,” Knight said.

“Why not?”

“We’ve known each other awhile, and I’m asking you, as a favor, not to run any story at this time.”

Lana smiled. “Yeah, we’ve known each other for a while, so you know that when you make a request like that, alarm bells start going off in my head. Something’s going on that you don’t want me to know. At least not yet.”

Knight looked down into her paper bowl, spooned out the last few drops of her chowder.

“Okay, we’ve always played fair with each other. If you hold off writing anything now, I’ll tell you why I want you to sit on this.”

“And?”

“And when I have it nailed down, you’re my first call.”

Lana thought about that. Slowly, she said, “Okay.”

Knight balled up her napkin and the cracker wrapper, tucked them into the empty bowl, put the lid back on, and slipped it, and the plastic spoon, back into the paper bag.

“There might be a connection,” she said.

“Are you saying they might not have drowned?”

“Oh, they drowned,” she said. “The question is how they drowned. Whether they had help. Drownings are tricky. A lot of possible evidence is washed away. There’s no real crime scene to search because they’re out in the middle of the fucking water.”

“So what makes you think they might have had some help?”

Knight went quiet, clearly debating how much to reveal. After a few seconds, she said, “We didn’t notice this at first, but there was something in common between the two incidents.”

Now it was Lana who was quiet. Waiting.

“Both of them had some minor bruising on their wrists.”

“What, like they’d been tied?” Lana asked. “Wouldn’t that be pretty obvious?”

“Yeah, it would be, if they’d been tied. But like I said, this was more subtle. More like someone was gripping their wrists.”

Lana tried to picture what the detective was describing.

“The bruising was consistent on both wrists, on both people. As if someone was maybe straddled over them, holding on to their wrists to keep them down.”

“Down? Down where?”

“Under the water,” Knight said.

Thirty-Two

Jack

The next day I printed out a new backstory for Bill. Five thousand words of an imagined life for the guy that I thought would be easy enough for him to get into. Nothing so technical that he couldn’t bluff his way through it. I called Gwen on the hotline and she said she would send her guy around to pick it up.

“How’s an hour from now?” she said.