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“Do you have some ID?” he asked politely, pulling out his notebook again.
We handed our driver’s licenses over, and then I sat with my hands in my lap. I tried not to look down too often, so I wouldn’t keep staring at the blood.
“Ann Arbor,” the officer said when he had taken our address down. “That’s a ways from here.”
“Yes,” Eddie said. “I told you, we’re on our honeymoon.”
“Have you ever been to Coldlake Falls before?”
“No.”
“Never picked up hitchhikers around here?”
I snapped my gaze to the officer, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at Eddie.
“Hitchhikers?” Eddie asked, bemused. “No, we don’t pick up hitchhikers.”
“Never?” the officer asked.
“Never.”
“If you haven’t been to Coldlake Falls before, what brings you here for your honeymoon? As opposed to, say, anywhere else?”
Eddie glanced at me. Officer Syed followed his gaze, as if remembering I was in the room.
“There was an ad in the local paper,” I said as both men stared at me. “In the travel section. For the Five Pines Resort. We thought it looked nice.”
“Was that girl a hitchhiker?” Eddie asked Officer Syed.
The officer frowned at him. “What?”
“That girl. Rhonda Jean.”
“Is that her name?”
“So she said.”
Now Officer Syed was staring at Eddie again as if he’d said something wrong. “I don’t know if she was a hitchhiker. Was she hitchhiking when you found her?”
“I don’t know. She was standing by the side of the road.”
“What road?”
“I don’t know the name of it. The two-lane road that leads off the interstate.”
Officer Syed blinked at Eddie calmly. “She was standing there in the middle of the night as you drove down the road.”
“Yes,” Eddie said.
“On your way to the Five Pines Resort.”
“Yes.”
There was a heavy silence as Officer Syed rubbed the side of his nose and looked down at his notebook again. He was not in charge of this situation. It felt like something bad was about to happen. Like something bad was already happening. Which, of course, it was.
“Okay,” Officer Syed said at last, picking up his pen. “I think we should start from the beginning.”
There was a brief knock on the break room door, and then it opened. Two men came in. One was wearing a brown suit that was grievously rumpled. The other, oddly, was wearing a navy blue warm-up suit with white stripes down the sides. It zipped up to his chin.
