The Winter Sister(44)

Falley shrugged. “Not necessarily. Sometimes people want recognition for what they’ve done. It was almost as if he was toying with us, baiting us toward seeing some piece of evidence.”

She leaned forward then, pressing her hands flat against the table and lowering her voice. “In fact,” she continued, “when we were questioning him, I noticed that he was playing with this hair tie. A scrunchie, actually. Remember those? He had this black scrunchie in his hands, and he kept stretching it out, tying it around one wrist and then the other, and I could see that there were these long blonde hairs tangled up in it.”

The skin on my arms prickled. “Oh my God,” I said. “Did you test the hairs to see if they were a match?”

Falley straightened up and shook her head. “Didn’t have to. When we asked him where he got it, he said it was Persephone’s. Said he found it in front of her locker when he was slipping in a note one day.”

“So the notes were real?”

“Yep. He said . . . oh, how did he put it?” She put her elbows back on the table and rubbed her temples. “He said he wrote her notes all the time. Said he knew what it was like to feel lonely and he wanted her to know that he noticed her.”

“But Persephone wasn’t lonely,” I objected—a little too quickly, maybe. “She was noticed all the time.”

Hadn’t I known by heart the map of veins in her wrists, even when they were shadowed by bruises? If I had the chance, couldn’t I still recognize the catch of breath in her throat as she woke up in the morning? Hadn’t I known exactly who she was, even if I never knew about these notes?

“Oh, I’m sure it was all a load of crap,” Falley said. “Everything that kid said. I don’t think he was totally there, you know?” She tapped the side of her head with her finger.

“So then . . . what happened?” I asked. “If he all but admitted to stalking her, and he said the scrunchie was hers, which—by the way, I highly doubt he just found it in front of her locker—then why wasn’t he arrested? Did he have an alibi or something?”

Falley chewed on her bottom lip, held my gaze, and then shook her head. “I really shouldn’t be telling you all this, especially since it’s still an open case. But—God, I feel like I owe you something. And what are they going to do? Fire me?” She chuckled dryly before continuing. “He had no alibi. He wouldn’t tell us where he was that night. When we asked, he said ‘Out.’ That’s all he said, every time. Just ‘Out.’?”

I felt the ghost of an old rage lift its head inside me. It scratched at the inside of my stomach with long, uncut claws. “Then why wasn’t he arrested?” I asked. “What more did you need?”

“Evidence,” Falley said. “We needed evidence.” She took a deep breath and clamped her lips together, a look of discomfort or disgust gathering on her face. “We only had a few of the notes. Ben gave us some he’d managed to hold on to, but he told us that Persephone usually just threw them away. Tommy admitted that the notes we showed him were his, but the ones we had couldn’t prove malicious intent. The scrunchie didn’t do anything for us because we couldn’t prove where he got it. And his lack of an alibi—well, it could have meant he did it, or it could have meant he was just a petulant teenager bucking against the system by refusing to answer our question. Believe me, Sylvie, any case we tried to build against him would have been thrown out the second it reached the prosecutor’s desk. That’s just how things work, and it’s a big reason why I left. There’s too much red tape and not enough stock put into hunches and gut feelings. And I get it. We can’t put people away on intuition. But it’s still just frustrating and demoralizing, to say the least. I mean—God, sorry—” She waved her hands in the air, as if trying to erase what she’d just said. “This isn’t about me and my crap. I’m sorry.”

“So it was your gut feeling,” I said slowly, “that Tommy Dent killed Persephone.”

Falley opened her mouth, her response practically visible between her lips, but then she closed it again and looked down at her coffee.

“I don’t know who killed her,” she said. “But it was my gut feeling that Tommy knew more about what happened to her than he let on.”

I nodded, as if I understood that kind of feeling, as if I was finally able to comprehend that someone other than Ben might have been the one to kill her.

“And what made you think that?” I asked.

Falley’s eyes flicked toward the ceiling, and I couldn’t tell if she was avoiding looking at me or just pausing to consider the question.

“A lot of it was just his demeanor,” she said. “Something was off. It was as if he didn’t really get that we were questioning him because he was a person of interest in the case. It was like he thought our questions were meant to get his opinion, like he was some sort of police consultant. Like he—like he could lead us to a detail that would blow the whole thing open. He kept asking questions that didn’t make any sense to us, like ‘Did you take any blood from the body?’ or ‘Did you check her pockets for house keys?’ And he was particularly insistent about—”

She stopped, her eyes widening and her mouth drooping open, suddenly aware, it seemed, of what she’d been about to say.