“Is that all?”
“Isn’t that enough?” Tish asked.
“Did he use Laura’s name?” Stride asked.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“It’s a simple question, Tish. Did Finn say he killed Laura?”
“No, but who else would he mean?” Tish said. “What is going on?”
“I think we’re done here,” Stride said. “Thanks for coming in.”
Behind her, Maggie opened the office door and stood beside it.
“We’re done? That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Are you going to arrest him?” Tish asked.
“No.”
“No? What more do you need? I mean, look, this isn’t what I expected. I admit that I was wrong. I was convinced Peter Stanhope was involved. But now you can match Finn’s DNA to the crime scene. He told me he was there. He told me that he killed her. This is the break we’ve needed.”
“For your book?”
“Not just for the book. To solve the case.”
“The confession is useless,” Stride told her.
“Useless? How can you say that?”
Stride held up his hand and counted on his fingers. “One, Rikke hired a lawyer. The law says we can’t talk to Finn anymore without his lawyer present. Because I was stupid enough to talk to you about this case, a defense attorney can make a persuasive argument that you were acting as an instrument of the police in questioning Finn. Result? The confession gets tossed. Two, Finn was recently discharged from the hospital and was almost certainly under the influence of painkillers when you talked to him. So his attorneys will argue that he was not in full possession of his faculties. The confession gets tossed. Three, the fact that Finn did not use Laura’s name leaves doubt about who he was talking about. The confession gets tossed.”
“That’s crazy.”
Stride gestured to Maggie. “Tell her.”
Maggie closed the door again and sat on the edge of Stride’s desk. “Serena and I did some digging into Finn’s past. His mother abused him. The cops think Finn snapped and bludgeoned his mother to death. With a baseball bat. They let him walk because they couldn’t prove it, and frankly, no one wanted to see him put away. Getting rid of that woman was a community service, they figured.”
“Poor Finn,” Tish said softly.
“You get the picture?” Maggie said. “Regardless of whether Finn said Laura’s name or not, his attorney will argue that it’s memory transference from the death of his mother. I mean, hell, he said this came to him in a dream? Who knows what his brain has concocted after years of drug and alcohol abuse?”
“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.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“You’ve irreparably compromised this investigation.”
“Without me, there would be no investigation,” Tish reminded him. “I’m the only reason anyone cares. If I made mistakes, they weren’t with any malice. You have to understand-”