“He was watching a video on his phone, mumbling,” she said. “It was right before your eyes. Everyone’s. And all anyone could focus on was Ricky’s profile in the video as if he was the Unknown Partygoer, a person who doesn’t even exist. They made him up.”

The picture still wasn’t coming together. She seemed to be suggesting that Ricky was involved in Charlotte’s death. That there was something in that video everyone was missing.

Tears were spilling from Jessica’s eyes. She was having a hard time catching her breath.

Matt went to her, rested his hands on her shoulders. “Deep breaths,” he said, demonstrating by inhaling loudly through his nose, out through his mouth.

When she seemed to be breathing regularly again, she said, “Ricky gets confused, so I wasn’t sure. He kept saying you didn’t see what you thought you saw that night. And he kept watching the video on his phone. When he passed out later, I searched his phone and found the video.”

“What are you saying, Jessica?” Matt said. “That I saw Ricky pushing the wheelbarrow that night, that he saw me? Is that what he told you?” Matt’s mind jumped to seven years ago. The figure stopping, head turning right at Matt as if making eye contact. Ricky was on the football team and wore a letterman jacket, but Matt had seen the name PINE on the jacket. He was sure of it. But he’d never told anyone about seeing something that night, so Ricky had to have been there.

“You’re not listening,” Jessica said.

Either it was the alcohol—in Matt’s system or Jessica’s—but she wasn’t making sense.

“Not Ricky,” she said.

“Then who? Who, Jessica?” She said Ricky was with a date that night, but it wasn’t making any sense.

Jessica had her phone in her hand. The first frame of the video of the party. “I didn’t know if he was confused, if he was imagining it. I sent the video to the Free Danny Pine site, knowing you’d see it. If what Ricky was saying was true—if you really saw them that night—you’d understand the video.”

She ran her finger across the phone and the scene of the boys chugging beers popped up, Danny in his undershirt surrounded by boys in letterman jackets, the mystery man’s profile—no, Ricky’s profile—on the fringes of the frame.

That’s when Matt saw it, and it nearly leveled him.

He turned and ran out the door.

CHAPTER 60

SARAH KELLER

Keller scrutinized the man in the conference room of the US Attorney’s Office in Lincoln. Next to the man was a lawyer. She had curly hair and an air of confidence.