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“I need you to look at me, Mr. Stanton,” she said.

She was sitting at small end of the “L” shaped cushioned bench that wrapped around the table the man was cuffed to. Her phone, resting on the table between them, was recording.

“Why should I?” he demanded poutily, still pointedly looking away from her.

“Because we’re trying to solve a series of murders, and it sounds like you might have been a witness to one of them,” she said simply.

“How do I know you’re not going to mock me like your partner did? Or worse, accuse me of being involved? Maybe I should invoke my right to counsel.”

"You could do that," she said, hoping the desperation she felt wasn't leaking into her voice. "But you should consider all the consequences of that decision. It might make us view you as something more suspicious than just a witness. And if a witness is all you are, why would you want to create that misimpression with the people investigating this case? Do you want us to view you as a person of interest, Mr. Stanton? I know that I don’t want that.”

“That sounds like a threat, Ms. Hunt,” he said, finally turning to look at her.

“It’s not,” she said. “I’m just telling you how this typically works. I don’t like it, but it’s the reality. Plus, you requesting a lawyer has other drawbacks.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m just going to be straight with you, Oliver,” she said, invoking his first name for the first time. “This is three murders in three nights. Nobody is safe right now. And if you get an attorney, we can’t talk to you, at least not until a whole bunch of legal wrangling takes place. That’s valuable time we lose when we could be hunting for this killer. You could be inadvertently helping them. Now, of course, it's your right to have an attorney. If you want one, I'll call Detective Riddell down here right now. He'll read you your rights, and you can invoke your right to counsel right after. But if you didn't kill Robert Chandler—and I don't think you did—then your best bet is to come clean. Tell me what you saw. It could save lives."

His body, which had been stiff as a board when she started, had gradually softened as she spoke. By the end, his shoulders had slumped in resignation.

"I want to, but I'm afraid," he said.

“Why?”

“Because I’m ashamed,” he muttered.

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“What I have to tell you will paint me in a terrible light,” he said quietly. “I’m worried that it might actually put me in legal jeopardy. Can you assure me that isn’t a concern?”

“Oliver, I’m so anxious to solve this case that I’d love to make that assurance,” she said, “but that wouldn’t be true. If you committed a crime, you might be at legal risk, depending on the nature of it.”

“Then how can you possibly expect me to be forthcoming?” he pleaded.

“Because there are two things I can assure you of,” she said gravely. “The first is that if you provide information that leads to the capture of whoever’s doing this, it could go a long way to mitigating any punishment you might face for potential crimes. You might even get immunity if your help was significant enough.”

“You think that’s likely?” he asked hopefully.

“I think it’s possible,” she clarified. “But there’s another side to that coin. If you clam up and there’s another murder, one that your information could have prevented, then you could be viewed as an accessory to that murder. My bosses want this case solved, and if they can’t catch the person responsible, you better believe some of the blame is going to land at the feet of the person who let it happen when they could have stopped it. My recommendation is to just tell the truth and trust that the system will take note of that.”

“But I don’t trust the system,” he said flatly.

Jessie sighed. It might be time to bring in Riddell. She doubted that his heavy-handed tactics would work any better than hers, but she was out of options.

“But,” Stanton added, “I do trust you , Ms. Hunt. And I believe that if you know I acted in good faith, you wouldn’t let them throw me to the wolves. So I’ll put my trust in you and tell you what I know.”

“Thank you,” she said.

He began by explaining what he’d seen tonight, how he’d gone below deck to go to the bathroom, only to hear strange noises and go back up top, where he found Chandler near death, with the bottle jammed in his throat.

“And then you saw what you say was a—ghost commit the murder?” she said carefully.

“I didn’t actually see the stabbing,” he corrected. “Only the aftermath. The ghost was a woman. She was wearing a wetsuit. When she saw me, she looked straight at me, put her finger to her lips to shush me, and smiled at me. Then she dived into the water.”

“Did you recognize her?” she asked, not commenting on the oddity of a ghost in a wetsuit.

His face scrunched up in anguish.

“I will answer that, but you have to let me get there in my own time.”

She fought down the urge to tell him they didn’t have time.

“Okay, Oliver, I understand” she replied, forcing a sympathetic smile to her face, before adding, “while we’re at it, I’d also love to know why you were on Chandler’s yacht in the first place.”

“I can explain that too,” he assured her. “It’s all part of the same story.”

“Please go ahead,” she said, doing her best not to look at her phone to check the time.

He closed his eyes as if the memory of what he was about to say was too painful to share while being watched. Then he launched in.

"Three years ago, these members, casually referred to as the yacht club bros by others, were partying at the club bar. It was a Monday night, and there was almost no one else there. Our normal bartender had the night off, so I was working the bar. The bros had a young woman with them, a very attractive brunette, probably in her early twenties if I had to guess. I didn't get her name. She was a little tipsy when the evening started. But by the time the bar closed a few hours later, she was decidedly drunk. Everyone else, save for me, was long gone. The group decided to take the party onto one of their boats. So the whole bunch of them—all six—left with this young woman.”

“Whose boat did they take?” Jessie asked.

“Mr. Cisco’s,” he answered, “Joel Cisco.”

“Okay, sorry, go on,” she said.

“My apartment complex was being tented for termites at the time, so rather than get a hotel for those three nights, I had decided to just crash in my office to save some money. The couch in there pulls out into a bed. Around three in the morning, I heard some voices. I left my office and saw the members. They had returned and were shuffling by the front of the club toward their cars. They all looked very somber. I noticed that the young woman wasn’t with them.”

At that last comment, Jessie felt a shiver run through her body. She could see where this story was headed, and she didn’t like it. But she kept quiet, not wanting to say anything to stop Stanton from continuing.

“I didn’t think a ton about it,” he went on. “But a few nights later they were back in the bar, this time with a couple of different women. I ran into Mr. Chandler and Mr. Cisco in the restroom and casually asked if the young woman from the other evening would also be joining them tonight. Their reaction was severe.”

He stopped for a moment as if girding himself to say what he knew had to come next. After a few seconds, he resumed.

“Mr. Chandler slammed me up against the restroom wall without warning, pinning me there,” he said with a wince of recollection. “While I was trapped, Mr. Cisco leaned in close to me. He said there hadn’t been any woman there the other night and if I ever said anything different, they’d hire someone to, and this is a direct quote, ‘cut me open and choke me to death with my own intestines.’ Needless to say, I kept my mouth shut.”

“Why didn’t you leave the job after a threat like that?” Jessie asked.

He shook his head as if shocked that she didn’t understand.

“For one, I hadn’t heard anything about this girl on the news, and believe me, I’d been paying attention. So I assumed that whatever happened couldn’t have been that bad,” he said. “I tried to tell myself that these members just lost their heads for a minute and overreacted.”

She thought he might attempt to leave it there, but then he continued in a quieter voice.

“But that was just self-delusion,” he admitted. “The truth is that I worried that they would see me leaving as a sign that I couldn’t be trusted and that they might do something to me. And while I’m not proud of it, there was another reason.”

He stopped talking again. Jessie said nothing, allowing him the space to build up his courage.

“After that incident in the restroom,” he finally said, “all six of them regularly overtipped me. It was lavish. Every time one of them left the club, he’d slip me a hundred dollars, sometimes two. On the Christmas after it happened, my collective holiday tip from the six of them was $6000. They basically paid me off not to ask questions. And since I didn’t officially know about any wrongdoing, I took the money and kept quiet.”

“And it stayed like that for three years?” Jessie said.

"Yes, until this week," he said. "Then Mr. Peterson was killed, followed by Mr. Boyce. That's why I was on this yacht. Mr. Chandler was suspicious and demanded I come out here and tell him everything about your investigation. I did, of course. It's not like I had any special information. But the subtext was clear. I was sure that he wanted to know if their deaths had anything to do with that night. And I'm positive that he was about to ask me that directly just before he died."

“Which brings us to the ghost,” Jessie said.

“Yes,” he said, casting his eyes down at the table in front of him.

“Who was she, Oliver?” she asked, though she already had a strong suspicion.

He looked up.

“I only saw her face for a few seconds,” he whispered, “but I swear it was her—the girl from that night. The way those men reacted when I brought her up, I just assumed she was dead, that they had done something to her and tossed her body overboard. But she looked right at me, and I'm positive it was the same girl. On my honor, Ms. Hunt. The ghost of that young woman killed Robert Chandler."