“Let’s assume for a minute that it’s not Sawyer who killed Carrie and Adrienne. Do you think there’s something connecting these two girls for the killer, or were their deaths coincidence? Chosen by chance from a pool of possible girls?” Zach asked Shauna as they pulled back into the lot at NHPD headquarters. They’d been quiet for most of the ride, but that hadn’t surprised him. They both needed to decompress after talking to a family like that.

They’d asked again about Carrie’s last movements, who her friends were. All things they had already asked. Of course, they couldn’t question Adrienne about Carrie’s disappearance any longer, but they could go back and talk to the friends again.

“Could be coincidence. The girls were friends, but Stephanie hasn’t found any post from Sawyer about Carrie in that Facebook group.” Shauna turned to watch him as she spoke, as though gauging his response.

“They were both marked Can’t Be Fucked.” Zach cringed as he said it, but it was a mark of commonality between the girls. It had to be noted.

Shauna nodded. They walked quietly into the building, where they went straight to the third floor to find Ronan. He’d pulled in the two friends who alibied Sawyer for interviews.

“Let’s start soft and light with these guys,” Shauna said. “I’ll go in and see if I can get them to talk to me.”

Zach and Ronan muttered, “agreed,” in unison. She stifled a smile and wondered how long they’d been partners. They were a little like an old married couple.

Well, a testosterone-packed, hot-bodied, justice-seeking old married couple.

“The lawyer’s letter said the boys went to Hemler’s Burgers for dinner.” Ronan tossed the papers he’d been carrying on his desk. “I’ll see if Stephanie can pull video from any traffic cameras around there. Maybe we can spot them and nail down timing.”

“I wish we had a smaller window on time of death.” Zach and Shauna started moving toward the interrogation rooms. They had one of the boys in each room. One was eighteen so his parents wouldn’t be in the room with him, but the other was only sixteen. Neither was in custody or being interrogated for a crime, so no Miranda rights were read or anything along those lines.

“You and me both,” Shauna said as Zach opened the door to the observation room sandwiched between the two interrogation rooms. She looked through the window at Ryan Marcum, a smaller kid who was supposedly a wicked fast right wing on the hockey ice. Poor kid was pacing. Every few seconds, he’d stop and look at the door or sit in the chair before popping up to pace again.

Through the other window, Aiden Fleming sat huddled with his mother, talking in a low voice. Zach reached over and flipped the intercom to listen in on the conversation. Too muffled to hear anything clearly, but they were arguing. Then again, this was a teenaged boy they were looking at. When wouldn’t he argue with his mom?

Shauna flicked her head toward Ryan. “Let me see if I can get our pacer spilling his guts first.”

She walked out and Zach turned on the video equipment in that room then watched Shauna enter, all smiles and softness. She was good at turning up whatever side of her personality suited the case the most. Right now, she wanted this kid to be her best friend. As Zach watched through the glass, she poured it on thick.

“Hi Ryan. My name is Shauna O’Rourke. Soda?” She popped the top on a can of cola and pushed it across the table toward him.

“Sure. Thanks.” The kid nodded and sat down opposite Shauna.

“Thank you for coming down here to talk to us. We’re just trying to nail down everything so we can sort out what happened here, you know?”

“Sure.”

Zach smiled. She was getting him on her side. Getting him to think they were friends. He felt a shard of regret. They should have sent her in to question Sawyer. Maybe she wouldn’t have blown the interview the way he had.

“This your first time at a police station like this?” She asked the question as she shuffled through papers, but she paused to grin almost conspiratorially at him, like they were about to share the world’s greatest secret. “It can be nerve wracking, huh?”

He shrugged and she leaned across the table, one hand outstretched toward him. She didn’t touch him, though. Instead, she laid her hand on the table top as though she wanted to touch him but didn’t. “Don’t worry, Ryan. I’m going to get you out of here as quickly as I can. I’ve just got to find the right forms here.”

She went back to shuffling through the folder, then glanced back to Ryan. “Sorry. How about you tell me the basic gist of things while I figure these forms out? Then we’ll go back and get it down on paper.”

“Sure.” Ryan shifted in his seat and leaned toward her. In a matter of minutes, she’d taken the kid down a notch so his body language was now easy and open.

She offered him one of those fifty megawatt smiles and Ryan flushed slightly. Shauna looked back to her papers and started sorting again. “You go ahead and talk,” she said, with a wave of her hand. “I’ll listen while I sort this out.”

Zach nodded his approval. She was getting his story out there, checking if it matched the lawyer’s narrative. Then, she’d find the forms she was talking about—a made-up form—and get him to give it to her in writing so she could compare all three versions. If there were inconsistencies, they’d drill away at those.

“Okay. So, just talk about that night?” Ryan asked.

“Mm hmm,” she said.

“Well, uh, we just hung out. I think it was uh, about seven thirty. We went out to the clubhouse, to uh, Sawyer’s clubhouse.”

“Mm Hmm.”

“And he was taking a picture of Adrienne. She was on the couch, passed out. He posted that he’d, uh, well...” the kid seemed to need a minute to figure out how to say what Sawyer had done with Adrienne, “that, they had um, you know, uh....”

“Had sex?”

Red flashed high on the boy’s cheeks. “Yeah.”

“Okay.” Shauna kept her response neutral.

“So, he posted it, and we left. We were hungry and she was out, so we, uh, we left and went to eat.”

“Where did you go?”

“Hemmies. I mean, uh, Hemler’s Burgers.”

“Okay,” Shauna said with a nod again.

“So, we went there, hung out, ate. That was it.”

Shauna had given up the pretense of looking for the paperwork. She’d gotten their guy talking. “So, what time was it when you finished eating?”

“It was almost nine-thirty when we left. They were closing in half an hour. We ate and dropped Sawyer at home.”

“What time was that?” Shauna asked.

“Close to ten.”

“It took you almost a half hour to get to Sawyer’s house?” Shauna’s tone was innocent but they all knew Hemler’s was only a fifteen-minute drive to Sawyer’s house.

“Yeah. I mean, no. Not really. We ran into Kyle Lawler and Mike Davies out in the parking lot. We talked to them for a bit. They were going to grab takeout and go to Mike’s house. He thought we might want to go, but we all had practice the next day. Coach is really hard on us if we’re late.”

Zach cursed under his breath. Everything he’d said checked out with the lawyer’s statement so far, and the timeline as far as they knew it.

“Okay, Ryan. Let’s go through this all again,” Shauna said, this time, pulling out a sheet of paper for him to write on. “Can you tell me, how did you know Adrienne was still alive when you left the clubhouse?”

As Zach and Ronan looked on, Shauna pulled him through the information again, bit by bit, looking for inconsistencies. They found none. Even Ryan’s answer to her question about knowing Adrienne was alive added up. He said she’d been passed out, but that she’d rubbed her nose and rolled over on the couch when they were there, like she was sleeping because she drank too much. According to Ryan, she’d been fully clothed, but her shoes had been off.

The interview with Aiden Fleming produced similar results, only his mom facilitated his talking to Shauna with routine threats to pull him from the hockey team if he didn’t cooperate. The stories matched, including the conversation with Mike Davies and Kyle Lawler. Zach would bet those two would support the story as well.

Either the boys were exceptionally good at lying, or they were telling the truth.