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“Seriously?” she whispered. “Seriously?”
Reviewing the facts, her mind spinning, she now found herself coming up with an odd alternative scenario. What if she’d been looking at everything totally the wrong way?
It was weird, she thought. Once she’d seen the possibility, she couldn’t unsee it. Once she’d looked at how the facts fitted together, she saw that they could also fit in another way. A completely different way.
Now, she felt totally torn.
She couldn't shake off the horrible feeling that she'd been led astray in this case.
And if that was the case, if the ultimate conclusion led where she feared, then what she dreaded the most might not have happened yet.
Now, May turned and marched to the police department’s exit door. She didn’t want to go back into the interview room yet.
Not until she’d properly thought through the alternative scenario that had just occurred to her.
She might be wrong. She might be misinterpreting something. But if she was right, there was no time to lose. Not when the nondescript gray Chevy, at this very moment, was already driving carefully out of the parking lot after York had finalized and signed his statement at the front desk.
What to do?
Giving in to her policewoman's instincts, May grabbed her car keys and rushed out of the police department, jumping into her own car which was not a police cruiser and could drive the roads unnoticed, like a normal citizen's.
As she jumped into the car, she tried to make coherent sense of her instinctive reaction. She ran the facts through her mind, acknowledging the inconsistencies.
Firstly, it was in what York had noticed, and what he hadn't.
He'd noticed a second phone! May had been stunned when she'd heard that. Those were some serious observation skills, right there. She'd been impressed. Not many people could pick up that kind of thing when observing a random colleague.
But this same observant person had not been able to name the third student he'd said that Coach Adamson had been photographing.
Not until right at the end of the interview when he was about to leave.
And then, May thought about the photos which had so conveniently turned up in Adamson's car, just after the police had arrived to take him in for questioning. Would he really have left them there, in full view on the passenger seat? After concealing all other evidence, including the burner phone?
As May drove down the road, those were the first issues that seethed in her mind. But there were others. There was more.
There was the question of timing.
More than one of the teachers had talked about the change in dynamic that had occurred about six months ago. They hadn't really been able to explain it. Things had soured and gone bad. Information had been circulating that placed some people in a negative light.
A popular teacher had resigned after evidence had come to light against him.
This indicated that something had changed in that timeframe. Something, or someone, had started to influence the environment and it had become toxic.
She'd asked York about it and he'd said he'd only joined at the start of the year and hadn't known what things were like.
But the start of the year was just over six months ago. What if he'd been the one to change things?
What if his arrival had made everything different?
Now, May knew that all of this was mere supposition. And in fact, she would have brushed it aside, if it were not for the final and most troubling inconsistency in the story, the one that had only leaped into her mind as she reviewed the evidence, and which she most definitely could not explain.
Keeping a few cars behind the Chevy, May watched intently as he turned a corner. Where was he going?
Discreetly, she eased around the bend, following. She really didn’t want him to see her. Not when a life might depend on it.
The final issue was that he'd talked about the second victim being discovered in such an out of the way place. "Those trails are very remote," he'd said.
But to May's knowledge, as yet, the whereabouts of Sadie Croft had not been made public. The crime scene had not been disclosed and in fact, because it was such a remote location, they deliberately had not made this common knowledge.
