A Good Marriage(105)

I spread everything I had on Zach’s case across our living room floor, hoping some new story might effortlessly emerge. But the disjointed pieces just lay there. There would be additional evidence to work with eventually, once the prosecution turned over its own material. But I could not do Zach’s bidding for one moment more.

I picked up Amanda’s journal and flipped through it again, trying to see what to make of it now that I knew that Amanda’s dad and Carolyn were both dead. The descriptions of the calls and hang-ups, of the moments she believed she was being followed, were extremely detailed. They also seemed to fit a pattern. The calls were almost always during the day; the times that Amanda believed she was being followed, at night. Week after week. Often on a Wednesday or Thursday night. Detailed or not, they could have been a part of Amanda’s delusion, but it did seem odd that something completely imagined would fit such a realistic pattern.

Then I spotted the card from Blooms on the Slope. Also, there were the anonymous flowers. Those had not been a figment of Amanda’s troubled imagination. Somebody had sent them. Not her stalker, necessarily—she was a beautiful woman, she could have had any number of “secret admirers”—but it could have been.

Could Zach have been pretending to stalk Amanda as a cover? Had it all been a setup so that he could kill her and get away with it? I’d invented an insurance policy when I went to talk to Xavier, but Amanda’s death triggering some huge financial payout was something to consider, especially given that Zach needed money to save his company. I regretted not showing Matthew at the flower shop a photo of Zach. He’d said that the man was a “circle.” Zach had sort of a round face, I supposed. Doughy, actually.

Like Millie had suggested, maybe Zach had even paid someone to kill Amanda for him, and the fingerprint on the stairs belonged to that person. The thought of Zach hiring someone so incompetent sparked the tiniest bit of satisfaction.

I picked up the envelope containing Zach’s warrant records from the loitering incident. I slid the papers out, reading through them more closely this time. It was very easy now to picture Zach being so belligerent with the cops that spring night all those years ago. “April 16, 2007,” it said on the papers. Wait, that date rang a bell. Then it came to me: April 16, 2007, was the night Sam and I met.

Come on, Zach, seriously?

I typed the name of the street corner where Zach had been loitering into Google Maps. Sure enough, there was the blue dot on the corner of an alley tucked behind The Rittenhouse, the fancy building where that med school party was held. Zach had been arrested because he refused to leave a spot where he’d been waiting, watching for me? I wondered for a moment if Zach had been there, in the shadows, watching as Sam and I kissed for the first time. What would have happened if the police hadn’t made Zach move along?

I shuddered as I put down the warrant papers and picked up Millie’s investigation file. I turned to the fingerprint results and the close-up images of that bloody print Millie had taken the night I first called her. It looked so innocuous in these photos—a swirled pattern in a brownish red barely visible on the dark metal. But there were other, more vivid photographs taken from a few paces back, ones of the blood-soaked stairs and the walls that told a much more terrifying story.

Such violence in an otherwise empty room. So much blood in so many places. The force it would have taken. The rage.

Zach. It wasn’t impossible.

Behind the crime scene photos and the fingerprint analysis, there were internet searches, old printouts about Zach from ZAG, Inc.’s website, information on the Hope First Initiative, and maps of the neighborhood, but nothing about Zach’s new company, as far as I could tell. There were also notes in Millie’s handwriting. It seemed she’d gotten at least one of the patrol officers to talk to her. “Off the record” she’d scrawled at the top in big letters, probably to humor him. It was a list of who they had spoken to and when. “7/2 Party Guests,” followed by a list of names.

I flipped through more of the pages in the file, my eyes catching on a preliminary medical examiner’s report (blunt force trauma) that Millie and Vinnie definitely had no legitimate business possessing. There was a time of death estimate, between 10:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. on Thursday, July 2. July 2 was a Thursday? I’d assumed the party had been Friday or Saturday night. But Friday, July 3, was a legal holiday because the Fourth of July fell on a Saturday, making a wild Thursday-night party possible. With the holiday, Zach’s arraignment could easily have been delayed until Monday.

The party had been on a Thursday. Last Thursday.

The same awful night Sam had his blackout.

I forced myself to focus as I flipped more quickly through the rest of the pages, pausing on a personal items inventory, also from the medical examiner’s office. It was a list of the clothing and personal belongings Amanda had on her the night she died, alongside a photograph of each item. “Two black YSL sandals, one pair white jeans, one white top, silver Cartier watch, one silver earring.” I turned to the next document—the fingerprint analysis. The blood whooshing in my ears was deafening. But wait, no—

I flipped back a page. One silver earring. My hands were shaking so hard, it was difficult to make out the image in the photograph.

But there it was: long and thin and shimmering silver. I’d seen the earring before. Of course I had. Or its twin, coiled like a snake in the palm of my hand.