But Lindley wasn’t even listening anymore. His phone had just buzzed. He looked down to check whatever message had come in.

“Too late,” he told me. “Glass is already here.”

RODNEY GLASS WAS a damn good actor. He seemed genuinely perplexed about why he’d been pulled in for another interview. But he didn’t fool me for a second. He’d been to medical school. Of course he was bright.

“How many times do I have to say this?” he asked, less than a minute into the interview. “I was treating Ryan Townsend for a bloody nose just after Ethan and Zoe went missing. I’ve got Ryan himself, not to mention at least one Secret Service agent, to back me up on this. So can someone please explain what I’m doing here?”

He had a cocky, almost adolescent quality to him, all the way down to his NBA kicks. Was that part of the act, too? Just another way to get the kids at Branaff to trust him? I also had the impression Glass had taken something, maybe even just a Klonopin, to keep himself loose while he was here. He certainly knew his way around pharmaceuticals.

“What about just before Ethan and Zoe disappeared?” I asked. “Where were you then?”

“Isn’t this already in your files, or whatever?” he asked.

“Humor us,” Lindley said. After our initial argument, Peter and I had agreed on one thing. Now that Glass was here, we needed to hit him with everything we had. And maybe some things we didn’t have.

“I was in the faculty restroom, okay? Taking a dump, if you really want to know.”

Lindley scribbled something in his file.

“And how long does it take to walk from the faculty restroom back to the infirmary?” I asked.

Glass shook his head and frowned. “I don’t know. A minute and a half? You tell me.”

“Just about a minute and a half,” I said. “But you weren’t coming back from the restroom, were you?”

“And that’s not really a question, is it?” he said.

“It also takes about a minute and a half to get back from the tunnel under the school, if you hurry,” I told him. “I timed it myself.”

“Yeah, good for you,” he said.

I hated this guy. I really did. The stakes couldn’t have been higher, and I was feeling edgier by the second. I didn’t care anymore that he’d lost a son. That didn’t excuse what he was doing now.

“Before that, you were using the phone from Emma Allison’s locker to send Zoe Coyle a text. One that would get her down into that tunnel just after homeroom,” I went on. “I guess the only thing I’m wondering is whether you planned for Ethan to be there, too, or if you had to improvise.”

Glass actually grinned and looked around at everyone else in the room. There were five of us, including two of Lindley’s agents, recording the interview with a camera and a laptop.