“The confession gets tossed,” Stride repeated.

Tish thought furiously. “I was there,” she insisted. “Finn wasn’t hopped up on drugs. He wasn’t talking about his mother. He was back there. In the park. With Laura.”

“You didn’t let me continue,” Stride said. “Four, we recovered the murder weapon. The baseball bat.”

“What?”

“Peter Stanhope had it. Ray Wallace gave it to him as a little gift. We tested the bat, and Finn’s fingerprints are not on it.”

“That’s not possible.”

“There are fingerprints we can’t identify, but they don’t belong to Finn,” Stride said.

“So maybe he wore gloves.”

“In July?”

“What about DNA? Test the semen.”

“Even if it matches, all that proves is that he jerked off near the murder scene.”

“Damn it, Jonathan, he told me he killed her.”

“Five,” Stride continued, holding up his last finger, “the confession gets tossed because the only two people who heard it are you and Finn.”

Tish shrugged and held up her hands. “So what? What difference does that make?”

“No one will believe you. You have no credibility.”

“Excuse me?”

“No one will believe you because you are a manipulative, self-serving liar.”

Tish shot to her feet. “How dare you! What the hell are you talking about?”

Stride stood up, too. “Don’t play games with me, Tish. I don’t appreciate it when someone twists me around her finger. I don’t appreciate it when someone toys with people who are close to me. I don’t appreciate it when someone uses me and lies to me in order to further some secret goal. What’s your motive, Tish? Why are you really here?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tish said.

But she did. She saw it in his face. He knew.

“I’m talking about the fact that I have one more suspect to add to the list,” Stride said. “Finn, Peter, Dada, and now you.”

Tish looked down at his desk. She wilted back into the chair. “No, Jonathan, you’re wrong.”

“I found Dada. Or rather, he found me. He told me that he followed Laura to the beach that night.”

“It’s not what you think,” she said.

“He saw you, Tish. He saw you and Laura together. You were there.”

37
___________

Stride waited for her to deny it, but she didn’t.

“Okay, you’re right,” Tish said, looking like a flower that had been left out of water. “Yes, I was there that night. I should have told you long before now, but I never wanted anyone to know. It was private. It was something for me and her. But you can’t possibly believe I would ever harm her. I loved her.”

His voice was hoarse with anger. “You’ve lied to me over and over. You lied about where you were that night and what you were doing. You lied about remembering the fight between you and Laura. You were at the crime scene when Laura was murdered, and you never said a word about what you saw. You’ve deceived me from the outset.”