It wasn’t Pollard’s respectable demeanor. Quentin had met plenty of people, not just in his career but throughout his life, whose kindly exteriors housed evil, untrustworthy hearts. It was something else—the earnestness with which he talked about April Cooper, maybe—that made Quentin think that, whether or not Robin Diamond’s mother, Renee, truly was the infamous teenage murderer, George Pollard believed she was. “We hid out in a movie theater—a revival house on the outskirts of town,” he was saying now. “We sat through the same movie for three screenings—at first it was so she could stay hidden. But at some point . . .”

“Yes?” Summer said.

“At some point, she stopped being who she was and I stopped being who I was, and we were just two teenagers, watching an old movie. Holding hands in the dark.”

Quentin glanced at Summer. He wished his phone were recording. “You never forgot her,” he said.

“Not a single day has gone by when I haven’t thought about her. I’ve read everything I could about the murders. I lurk on all the true crime message boards. I watched that terrible TV movie, back in the day . . .”

“But you never contacted the police,” Summer said.

Pollard shook his head.

“You never said a word about her to anyone—not even your wife.”

“No.”

“You kept her secret.” Quentin said it without anger, without judgment. Though the “why” was implicit. “You let her live.”

Pollard gave Quentin a slight, sad smile. “Our whole lives, we tell ourselves stories, don’t we? I was a kid, and I was in love, and so I told myself the most powerful story I could about her. In order for the story to work, though, she had to be innocent.”

Quentin said, “Why would a killer return to the scene of her ugliest murders, less than a week after they took place?”

Pollard’s face relaxed. “Exactly,” he said. “A guilty person would never do something like that, would they? They would want to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the crime scene. Everybody knows that.”

Pollard stood up. Quentin took the cue. He picked up his phone. Summer did the same, and they both thanked him for his time, shook his hand.

“I almost forgot.” George Pollard removed a sealed, legal-size envelope from his pocket and handed it to Summer. “This is my stub from the movie we saw at the revival house,” he said. “I kept it all these years. But I’m thinking you guys might want it.”

When they were alone in the elevator, Quentin spoke for the first time since he and Summer had left the office. “What I said about a murderer returning to the scene of the crime. I hadn’t meant it as a rhetorical question.”

“I know you didn’t.”