I open the passenger-side door and pull everything out of the glove box. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but if Mr. Collins is the Magpie Man, I’ll find proof.

“Jess,” Danny says, and when I turn, there’s a crowd gathering, students with a free period who look from me to their phones and back again. There’s no escaping what I’m doing. It’s everywhere, and Mrs. Bradley will kick me out if I’m wrong.

That’s why I have to be right.

No one says anything. They watch me like I’m not real, so I continue like they’re not real either.

There’s nothing under the seats except empty coffee cups and scrunched-up parking tickets, so I open the trunk and push past the junk until I find a laptop bag. It’s light but not empty, and when I unzip it, I see her face, over and over again, reprinted on countless newspaper reports. I see my mother and the horrible headlines my dad did his best to hide from me.

That’s when I turn to Danny with tears in my eyes and say, “Call the police.”

Then I hold the articles up to the camera and say, “I have proof.”

Chapter 123

It’s the secretary who comes out first, asking me what I’m doing in the parking lot, but I don’t reply. I sit, holding the articles, waiting for the police to take him away.

When the period ends, the crowd grows until kids from every grade are there.

A single beep over the loudspeaker tells me the teachers are coming. It’s their not-so-secret code that shit is going down. It usually means a fight or trouble at the front entrance. But this time, it’s me, sitting next to Mr. Collins’s open car while Danny films every moment.

When the police car arrives, it slowly pushes its way through the crowd until Lorraine steps out, crouches next to me, and asks if I’m okay.

I nod but don’t say anything, just hand her the articles, and she passes them to another officer wearing gloves, and I wonder if I’ll ever see them again.

“This isn’t enough evidence to arrest him,” she says, and I point at the rope in the trunk and the shoes caked in dirt.

“You should check those for DNA,” I say. Her face says it’s still not enough, so I ask, “When was the last murder?”

Lorraine shakes her head, and as she checks her phone, I say, “It was Tuesday, April seventh. Ask Mr. Collins where he was that day.”

The pieces didn’t fall into place right away. But between breaking into his car and Lorraine arriving, I remembered something important. The day Lorna Banks was killed, Mr. Collins wasn’t here. He was at the educator conference in London.