Cameronbarelygetsthesliding glass door shut and locked before I launch into my first question. “What were you talking to Reggie about?”
He stiffens at the confrontational edge to my voice but answers anyway. “I needed to ask him for some advice.”
“About what?”
He raises a hand like he is going to rub the back of his neck again but lowers it and shoves it into his pocket instead. “Let’s talk over lunch. Food should be here any minute.”
“I want to talk about it right now,” I argue, because Leah’s accusations have cast everything that I thought I knew for certain into a new, garish light.
“Okay. I was asking Reggie if there was any way I could sit in the room with you during your questioning, if you wanted me to. I already knew the answer, but I had to check in case there was some loophole that I didn’t remember. There isn’t, so I’ll have to wait in the lobby until you finish.”
The tension in my shoulders softens at his answer. “I don’t think that your brother would have let you sit in there with us, either way.”
He sets his phone down on the countertop and then looks back up at me. “Jalen is the least of my worries right now.”
“What else is bothering you, then?” I ask, because he was definitely holding back something earlier, and I should have asked him what it was right away.
“The security footage came back.”
“That’s great!” When his mouth turns down at the edges, I add, “Isn’t it?”
“It would be, but . . .” he starts, then looks back down at the counter.
I try to fill in the blanks to dispel Leah’s conspiracy theories before they have a chance to take root. “But what? The footage was grainy? Or were the cameras not pointing in the right direction?”
“No, the cameras were impressively clear, and all of them had a backup solar-powered battery. You can see that the person snuck up behind Delaney and . . .”
I reel at the fact that the killer was caught on tape. “Why am I being called back to answer more questions if they’ve got the killer on video then?”
He sighs. “The footage was turned over to the police directly. The only reason I know any of this is because the founder of the security company is one of Jalen’s fraternity brothers from Howard, so he called my brother to give him a heads-up. I guess that, based on the person’s size and frame, he was pretty sure that whoever killed Delaney was a woman.”
I shake my head furiously. “There is no way that it was any of the other women. I was thinking last night that you should check the perimeter, because someone probably hopped the fence. If itwere a woman, she had to be from the outside. Can Jalen call his college friend back to ask him to review the fence line?”
“Jalen’s friend reviewed the perimeter footage too. There was no breach.”
My legs go wobbly as I stumble to the nearest chair. This entire time, I was hoping there was still some way it was all an accident. And if it wasn’t, I was certain that it was someone from the outside, either related to Delaney’s paranoia, or the person that they said was supposed to be in jail.
There was no breach, though. The footage proves it. I was under the same roof as someone capable of murder the entire time and didn’t even know it. I even saw Val and Leah at the station last night. We hugged and cried over Delaney’s death together. Could one of them have been acting the entire time? Did I hug akillerand not even know it? Or does this mean there is only one possibility, one that I dismissed from the start?
“Do you know if Judith ever showed up for questioning?”
“She hasn’t,” he says, following my train of thought. “They have been trying to locate her, but it sounds like she took off. She never showed up at the station to give a statement, either, but that stays between us. I’m not supposed to know that information.”
“Cartwright told you that?”
He nods.
“Then it has to be Judith. There isn’t any other explanation.”
He kneels down in front of the chair I am sitting in and takes my hands into his. “No matter what happens next, I promise that I will protect you. Since I am cleared by the footage, Reggie has offered to help Jalen with your defense, and the three of us will fight this for you until the very end.”
“Thank you, but I don’t have anything to worry about, right? I was upstairs in my room when she was killed.”
“I know that you were,” he says, and looks down at our joined hands, swiping his thumb across the back of mine.
I rear back. “Wait. What did you mean when you said you’re going to help me fight this? You don’t really think . . .”
When he lifts his eyes from our hands, his pained expression makes it all click into place. I stand up out of the chair so fast that I almost knock him backwards in the process.
