No link to my identity. Thank goodness.

Tess Hardy says, “Your Honor, defendant’s exhibit ten B. This is an audio exhibit.” She presses a button on the controller and a recording starts.

Oh, crap. That’s my voice booming through the speakers! I shift uncomfortably in my seat, hoping that Ron Reynolds, the only person in the courtroom who knows my voice, won’t recognize it.

“My name doesn’t matter. Just listen. Suzanne Bonanno was buried in the woods in Seabrook, forty feet west of the Reverend Bonus Weare memorial rock—”

Hardy stops the playback. “Is that the voice you heard?”

“It is, yes.”

“Detective, are you aware that the Department of Homeland Security, NSA, and other government intelligence agencies can sometimes trace burner phones?”

I feel a twist in my gut. To my relief, Gagnon is quick to answer.

“I am aware of that,” the detective says. “But by the time we considered contacting them, we’d already arrested a suspect with longstanding ties to the victim.”

Hardy gives a disapproving look, then moves in another direction. “Isn’t it true, Detective, that criminals often return to the scene of the crime?”

“Sometimes they do, yes.”

“And have criminals been known to plant evidence?”

“Of course. It happens.”

“So it’s possible that those items were buried at a different time than the remains were? Maybe at a later date?”

I can tell Gagnon doesn’t want to answer this question, but she has no choice. “Yes. It’s possible.”

“Thank you. No further questions for the witness at this time.”

CHAPTER
100

The man still calling himself Jack Doohan is attempting to do a recon of the Rockingham County courthouse, but the crowds make it impossible for him to assess the sight lines.

Right now, Doohan is about thirty yards from the courthouse steps, getting bumped and jostled. He ducks as a JUSTICE FOR COLE sign almost knocks him in the head. From what he can tell, about a third of the crowd are pro–Cole Wright, another third want him locked up, and the rest are just random nonpartisan nutjobs, the kind who show up at every protest no matter the cause.

When it comes to the question of Cole Wright’s innocence, he could go either way. Doohan is loyal only to whoever’s paying him.

Ever since his deployment to Iraq, crowds make him twitchy. Over there, a mass of civilians could suddenly turn violent. Guns could appear out of nowhere. Sometimes it was hard to tell the good from the bad from the totally innocent, and things got mixed up. Fog of war. Price of doing business.