It was Sal.
It had to be.
Despite the cold Pip’s blood raced, warm and fast, hammering through her heart.
She moved mechanically, a thousand thoughts shouting over each other, but she listened to only one. She downloaded the trial version of Photoshop, saved Max’s photo, and opened the image in the program. She enlarged the photo and then sharpened it.
Her skin flashed cold, then hot again.
There was no doubt about it. The numbers projected on Naomi’s phone read 12:09.
The friends said Sal left at ten-thirty, but here they were, all four of them at nine minutes past midnight, and not one of them could have taken the photo themselves.
Max’s parents were away that night, and no one else had been there—that’s what they’ve always said. It was just the five of them until Sal left at ten-thirty to go and kill his girlfriend.
And here was proof that was a lie. There was a fifth person there after midnight. And who could it have been but Sal?
Pip scrolled to the topmost section of the enlarged photo. There was a window behind the sofa on the far wall. And in the center pane was the flash of the phone camera. You couldn’t distinguish the figure holding the phone from the darkness of outside. But just beyond the streaks of white from the flash, there was a faint halo of blue in the reflection. The very same blue as the shirt Sal was wearing that night, the one Ravi still wore sometimes. Pip’s stomach flipped at the thought of his name, imagining the look in his eyes when he saw this photo.
She copied and pasted the enlarged image to a blank document and cropped it to show only Naomi with her phone on one page and the flash in the window on another. Along with the original saved photo, she sent each page to the wireless printer on her desk. She watched from her bed as it sputtered out each sheet, closing her eyes for just a moment, listening to it rattle.
“Pips, can I come in and vacuum?”
Pip’s eyes snapped open. She pulled herself up from her slumped position, the right side of her body aching from hip to neck.
“You’re still in bed?” her mom said, opening the door. “It’s after one, lazy. I thought you were already up.”
“No…I,” Pip said, her throat dry and scratchy. “Was just tired, not feeling so well. Could you do Josh’s room first?”
Her mom paused and looked at her, her warm eyes strained with worry.
“You’re not overworking yourself, are you, Pip?” she said. “We’ve talked about this.”
“No, I promise.”
Her mom closed the door, and Pip climbed out of bed. She got ready, pulling her jeans on with a dark-green shirt, fighting to get the brush through her hair. She picked up the three photo printouts, placed them in a plastic folder, and slid them inside her backpack. Then she scrolled to the recent calls list in her phone and dialed.
“Ravi!”
“What’s up, Sarge?”
“Meet me outside your house in ten minutes. I’ll be in the car.”
“OK. What’s on the menu today, more blackmail? Side order of breaking and enter—”
“It’s serious. Be there in ten.”
Sitting in her passenger seat, his head almost touching the roof of the car, Ravi stared down openmouthed at the photo in his hands.
It was a long while before he said anything. They sat in silence. Pip watched as Ravi traced his finger over the fuzzy blue reflection in the far window.
“Sal never lied to the police,” he said eventually.
“No, he didn’t,” Pip said. “I think he left Max’s at twelve-fifteen, just like he originally said. It was his friends who lied. I don’t know why, but on that Tuesday they lied, and they took away his alibi.”
“This means he’s innocent, Pip.” His big round eyes fixed on hers.
“That’s what we’re here to test—come on.”
She opened her door and stepped out. She’d picked Ravi up and driven him straight to this grassy patch off Weevil Road, leaving her hazard lights flashing. Ravi closed the car door and followed as Pip started up the road.
“How are we testing that?”
“The only way to be sure Sal didn’t do it is an Andie Bell murder reenactment.” Her steps fell in time with his. “To see, with Sal’s new time of departure from Max’s, whether he still would have had enough time to kill her.”
They turned left down Courtland and traipsed all the way to Max Hastings’s sprawling house, where this had all begun five and a half years ago.
Pip pulled out her phone. “We should give the pretend prosecution the benefit of the doubt,” she said. “Let’s say that Sal left Max’s just after that photo was taken, at ten minutes past midnight. What time did your dad say Sal got home?”
“Around twelve-fifty,” he replied.
“OK. Let’s allow for some misremembering and say it was more like twelve-fifty-five. Which means that Sal had forty-five minutes, door to door. We have to move fast, Ravi; use the minimum possible time it might have taken to kill her and dispose of her body.”
“Normal teenagers sit at home and watch TV on a Sunday,” he said.
“Right, I’m starting the stopwatch…now.”
Pip turned on her heels and marched back up the road the way they’d come, Ravi at her side. Her steps fell somewhere between a fast walk and a slow jog. Eight minutes and forty-seven seconds later, they reached her car, and her heart was already pounding. This was the intercept point.
“OK.” She turned the key in the ignition and pulled back onto the road. “So this is Andie’s car, and she has intercepted Sal. Let’s say that she was driving for a faster pick-up time. Now we go to the first quiet spot where the murder theoretically could have taken place.”
She hadn’t been driving long before Ravi pointed.
“There,” he said. “That’s quiet and secluded. Turn off here.”
Pip pulled off onto the small dirt road, packed in by tall hedges. A sign told them that the winding single-lane road led down to a farm. Pip stopped the car where a widened passing place was cut into the bushes and said, “Now we get out. They didn’t find any blood in the front of the car, just the trunk.”
Pip glanced at the ticking stopwatch app as Ravi was crossing around the front to meet on her side of the car: 15:29, 15:30…
“OK,” she said. “Let’s say that right now they’re arguing. It’s starting to get heated. Could have been about Andie selling drugs or about this secret older guy. Sal is upset; Andie’s shouting back.” Pip hummed tunelessly, rolling her hands to fill the time of the imaginary scene. “And right about now, maybe Sal finds a rock on the road or something heavy from Andie’s car. Maybe no weapon at all. Let’s give him at least forty seconds to kill her.”
They waited and she watched the muscles in Ravi’s jaw clench and release.
“So now Andie’s dead.” Pip pointed down at the gravel road. “He opens the trunk”—Pip opened her trunk—“and puts her inside where her blood was found.” She bent down and lifted the invisible body, struggling to lay it on the carpeted trunk floor. Then she stepped back and shut it.
“Now back in the car,” Ravi said.
Pip checked the timer: 20:02, 20:03…She put the car in reverse and swung out onto the main road.
“Sal’s driving now,” she said. “His fingerprints get on the steering wheel and around the dashboard. He’d be thinking of how to dispose of her body. The closest possible forest-y area is Lodge Park. So maybe he’d come off Weevil Road here,” she said, swerving, the woods appearing on their left.
“But he’d have needed to find a place to get the car up close to the woods,” said Ravi.
They chased the woods for several minutes, searching for such a place, until the road grew dark under a tunnel of trees pressing in on either side.
“There.” They spotted one together. Pip signaled and pulled off onto the grassy patch bordering the forest.
“I’m sure the police searched here a hundred times, as these are the closest woods to Max’s house,” she said. “But let’s just say Sal managed to hide the body here.”
Pip and Ravi got out of the car once more: 26:18.
“So he opens the trunk and drags her out.” Pip re-created the action, noticing Ravi avert his eyes. He’d probably had nightmares about this very scene, his older brother dragging a dead and bloodied body through the trees. But maybe, after today, he’d never have to picture it again.
“Sal would’ve had to take her pretty far in, away from the road,” she said.
Pip mimicked dragging the body, her back bent, staggering slowly backward.
“Up here’s fairly hidden,” Ravi said once Pip had dragged her about two hundred feet through the trees.
“Yep.” She let go of Andie: 29:48.
“OK,” she said, “so the hole has always been a problem; how he could have had time to dig one deep enough, anyway. But now that we’re here”—she glanced around the dappled woods—“there are quite a few downed trees. Maybe he didn’t need to dig much at all. Maybe he found a shallow ditch ready-made for him. Like there.” She pointed to a large mossy dip in the ground, a tangle of old roots creeping through it, still attached to a long-fallen tree.
“He would’ve needed to make it deeper,” Ravi said. “She’s never been found. Let’s allow three or four minutes for digging.”
“Agreed.”
When the time came she dragged Andie’s body into the hole. “Then he would’ve needed to fill it again, cover her with dirt and debris.”
“Let’s do it, then,” Ravi said, his face determined now. He stabbed his boot into the dirt and kicked a spray of soil into the hole.
Pip followed suit, pushing mud, leaves, and twigs in to fill the small ditch. Ravi was on his knees, sweeping whole armfuls of earth over and on top of Andie.
“OK,” Pip said when they were done, eyes on the hole now invisible against the forest floor. “So now she’s buried, Sal heads back.”
37:59.
They jogged back to Pip’s car and climbed inside, kicking mud all over the floor. Pip did a three-point turn, swearing when a four-by-four barreled by.
When they were back on Weevil Road, she said, “Right, now Sal drives to Monroe, where Howie Bowers lives. And he ditches Andie’s car.”
They pulled into the road a few minutes later, and Pip parked out of sight of Howie’s bungalow. She locked the car behind them.
“And now we walk to my house,” Ravi said, trying to keep up with Pip, her steps breaking into an almost-run. They were both concentrating too hard for words, their eyes down on their pounding feet, treading in allegedly Sal’s years-old footsteps.
They arrived outside the Singhs’ house, breathless. A sheen of sweat had broken out on Pip’s upper lip. She wiped it on her sleeve and pulled out her phone.
She stopped the timer and stared at the numbers, hairs rising all over her body. She looked at Ravi.
“What?” His eyes were wide and searching.
“So we gave Sal an upper-limit time window of forty-five minutes between locations. And our reenactment worked with the closest possible locations and was almost inconceivably efficient.”
“Yes, it was the speediest of murders. And?”
Pip held her phone out to him and showed him the timer.
“Fifty-eight minutes, nineteen seconds,” Ravi read aloud.
“Ravi.” His name fizzed on her lips and she broke into a smile. “Sal couldn’t possibly have done it. He’s innocent; the photo proves it.”
“Shit.” He stepped back and covered his mouth, shaking his head. “He didn’t do it. Sal’s innocent.”
He made a sound, gravelly at first. Then a quick bark of laughter, laced with disbelief. A smile unfolded slowly across his face, and he laughed again, the sound pure and warm. Pip’s cheeks flushed with the heat of it.
And then Ravi looked up at the sky, the sun on his face, and the laugh became a yell. He roared up into the sky, neck strained, eyes screwed shut.
People stared at him from across the street, and curtains twitched in houses. But Pip knew he didn’t care. And neither did she. Her eyes prickled with tears as she watched him in this raw, confusing moment of happiness and grief.
Ravi looked down at her, and the roar cracked into laughter again. Before Pip knew what was happening, he’d wrapped his arms around her and lifted her from her feet. Something bright whirred through her; a feeling with wings. Ravi’s breath was in her ear, laughing and crying as he spun her round and round.
“We did it!” he said, putting her down so clumsily that she tripped over his feet. He stepped back and wiped his eyes, looking suddenly embarrassed. “We actually did it. Is it enough? Can we go to the police with that photo?”
“I don’t know,” Pip said. She didn’t want to take this away from him, but she really wasn’t sure. “Maybe it’s enough to convince them to reopen the case; maybe it isn’t. But we need answers first. We need to know why Sal’s friends lied. Why they took his alibi away from him. Come on.”
Ravi took one step and hesitated. “You mean, ask Naomi?”
She nodded and he drew back.
“You should go alone,” he said. “Naomi won’t talk if I’m there. She physically can’t talk. I bumped into her last year, and she burst into tears just looking at me.”
“Are you sure?” Pip said. “You, out of everyone, deserve to know why they did it.”
“It’s the way it has to be, trust me. Be careful, Sarge.”
“OK. I’ll call you right after.”
Pip wasn’t quite sure how to leave him. She didn’t want to leave him. She touched his arm and walked away, carrying that look on Ravi’s face with her.