“Jesse, I’m the one asking questions. Stay focused, please. You knew she was going to kill him?”
“Yes.”
“Spicy. I’m seeing you in a whole new light.”
“I’m…” He swallows hard. “Liam…”
Since he’s busy trailing off and I’m an impatient man, I move on to the next topic. “She’s rash, injects him with venom, he goes down quite quickly. She calls you because she now doesn’t know what to do with the body. I wasconvincedthe person who removed the head was someone who’d worked preparing the meat. But you know someone else who would know a lot about human anatomy and wouldn’t be squeamish when it came to removing a head?”
“A medical examiner,” he replies hoarsely.
“Bingo. I’m so good at this.”
Jesse seems less pleased about my success. “I knew I was fucked the moment Michaels said your name,” he says. “I was absolutely fucked. We weren’t good enough at it. My expertise is in examining bodies. Piecing together a story of what happened by looking at their skin, their trauma, the decay, not… hiding bodies. I knew that if we removed everything that could allow a medical examiner to identify the body, there was a possibility we could get away with it.
“We were careful. We did what we could to deal with the body while there were still people at the zoo. And then we came back later to finish up where we’d left off. We were careful about the cameras. We tried to stick to areas she knew was safe from being caught. From the beginning, I told Lacey not to take the head to the crematorium. She told me that she goes with the bodies and that she’d only place the head in right before they took the bag. That they never open the bag. That she would personally be there to drive the body to the crematorium and to watch it burn. And even though I left feeling confident she listened when I told hernotto put the head in the bag, she put the fucking head inthe bag. She never expected them to send off the bag without her knowing about it.
“It fucked everything up. There were too many variables with the crematorium. When I left that zoo, I told her to take that fucking head and we would remove the teeth and dispose of it someplace it would never be found. I gave her places. I told her what to do, but she lied to me and secretly went with her idea and it fucked us over. I should have done it.”
“You should have. Honestly… I think you’d have gotten away with it. The bones in the hyena’s pen were buried deep enough that it would’ve taken that hyena a long time to reach them. My bet is it would have gotten bored before it did. And even if it did uncover a few bones here or there, I doubt the young kids cleaning those pens would have been able to distinguish between a human bone and an animal one.”
“That was because the hyenas had already dug quite a bit of that hole. It didn’t take us long to dig it deeper and cover it. So how did you know it was me?” Jesse asks.
“Your report was less detailed than normal. Don’t get me wrong, you weren’t sloppy—I’m sure you knew if you were, I’d have noticed—but there was just something a little off about it. You are a very detailed person. You are determined to figure out what happened no matter how long it takes you, but you seemed less obsessed with the body. You did everything by the book, but nothing more.
“Second, you would never fucking pass up an opportunity to bore us over some theory of venom. You’d pin us down and bore us to death until we just walked away, like when you show us pictures of your tarantula.
“Third, I didn’t catch it right away, but I did the second time I logged onto your computer. It solidified my suspicions when I went to your history and realized that you’d opened that tab about poisonous insectsbeforeZach died.
“Fourth, when you opened your wallet, you had a ticket from the zoo that nearly fell out. I couldn’t tell if it was for the same day but realized that if you had been to the zoo and walked around the exhibits, you wouldn’t need me to make a list of animals that were venomous because you are quite smart. You remember so much of what you see. I bet you remember every venomous creature in that place. My guess is that you’d been to the zoo to see Lacey or to help her make decisions leading up to the day of his death.”
“That’s it?” Jesse asks. “That’s all it took? They’re such simple fuckups too.”
“They are. Things most people wouldn’t see or notice or even care about but are enough to destroy everything you were working for. Now I want to hear the parts I don’t know.”
“There’s nothing?—”
I shake my head. “Nah, don’t give me that shit. While both of you might have known he was following Nadine, neither of you knew he went after her that night. There’s no fucking way you’d have sat back with Nadine missing if you did know. How do you know this guy?”
“Lacey… dealt with him before.”
“He abused her?”
Jesse won’t maintain eye contact with me, telling me we’re already in the territory of “not quite the truth.”
“Let’s roll back. How did Lacey and Zach come in contact in the past?”
Jesse is squeezing his glass so tight I’m surprised he hasn’t broken it yet. I pull it out of his hand before he does, and he withdraws his hand.
“Just fucking arrest me and get this over with,” he says.
I finish my pie and lick my fork as I watch him.
“Did he abuse you?”
He shakes his head. “No.”
“But you know him.”
