“And this poor girl died all those years ago? Is that linked?”

  “It keeps coming up but maybe just because it’s shared history. There doesn’t seem to be a link. Not that I can find.”

  “Sad waste of a life.”

  “For sure.”

  “She was depressed?”

  “That’s part of the riddle. There’s no sign of anything. No one thought she was. She was in a supportive relationship, she was winning races, and going to the Games. There’s only one problem.”

  “Which is?”

  “The coach who I thought was poaching athletes approached Deena about moving out to Stanford. But Deena told her she wasn’t leaving Iowa.”

  “Sounds like she liked it there.”

  “Right. But according to Coach Almonde, she said her boyfriend might be open to moving.”

  “Why would that be?”

  “She doesn’t know. The conversation didn’t go much further, and Deena died early the next morning.”

  Lucas grunted. “Another man.”

  “Huh?”

  “That’s what I reckon. Why does a woman in a so-called happy relationship not want to leave but say her man might? Because there’s another fella.”

  I thought about that. Coach Almonde suggested Deena had implied as much. Was Forrest that guy? It was hard to fathom, even not knowing anything about Deena Senza. But if it wasn’t Forrest, did he know anything about it? He wrote in his diary that she was ghosting Greg. Obviously, she hadn’t done that—she died before she could.

  We finished our beers, and Lucas opened a second for all three of us. As much as I enjoy a good beer, it wasn’t my usual mid-morning snack. But then, traditions. Plus, sitting on the lush grass in the sunshine with two great mentors made me feel like I was on vacation, if only for a moment.

  Lucas handed me two beers, and I poured one into the ground for Lenny. Then I sipped mine.

  “Let me ask you a question,” I said. “You ever been in a place you needed to get out of without anyone seeing you do it?”

  Lucas laughed. “More often than not.”

  “So how would someone do that?”

  “There’s as many ways as there are grains of sand on the beach, mate. What’s the lay of the land?”

  “So the body was found in the warm-up pool, but the medical examiner says he was drowned somewhere else.”

  “Different water?”

  “Exactly. And the only logical place is in the attached shower rooms, but you can’t drown a person in a shower.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “You wouldn’t?”

  “Nup. You can do it. It just ain’t easy. In fact, it’s real hard.”

  I didn’t care to know more. “The evidence suggests it happened in one of those huge recycling cans with wheels.”

  “A wheelie bin?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Full of water? It would work, but you gotta get the guy in there and then fill it up. He’d more or less have to be held at gunpoint.”

  “The cans are filled with water and ice—used as ice baths after races.”

  “So he might have been in there already? That’s handy. Yeah, it would work, then. Close the lid like it was garbage.”

  “Wouldn’t there be some breathing room at the top?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Think about Archimedes.”

  “The philosopher?”

  “He was more a mathematician. But among his many discoveries was the idea of water displacement.”

  “The guy in the bath.”

  “Right. He posited that the upward buoyant force on a body immersed in fluid was equal to the weight of the fluid that had been displaced.”

  “Meaning?”

  “The physics implications were many. But in your case, it’s just the fact that a body displaces fluid. So if the water was already near the top, a body going into it would drive the water up to the level where it would spill, if the body was big enough. And if the water was spilling out the top, there’s no breathing space, is there?”

  After thinking about it for a moment, I shook my head. It still felt like a horrible way to go.

  “You didn’t go to college,” I said to him.

  “Nup.”

  “So, how do you know this stuff?”

  “I spent some time with a Russian mathematician once.”

  “And he brought up Archimedes in casual conversation?”

  “It was a she, and yes she did.” He smiled like there was more to the story but didn’t have any intention of telling it.

  I sipped my beer. “Well, it seems like it had to happen in the area of this warm-up pool. But the cleaners swept through there straight after the final swimmers had cooled down. Then everyone leaves. Then this guy—this kid, really—gets dumped in the pool. But there’s security that checks everyone out, and there’s no record of anyone else leaving.”

  Lucas pursed his lips and paused, apparently thinking. He sipped his beer, then pointed the bottle at me.

  “You got two options then. One, your killer didn’t leave. Everybody came back the next day, right? They could have just melted back into the crowd.”

  “I didn’t think of that.”

  “It’s hard, though. To sit tight while every fiber of your being says run away.”

  “Plus everyone had credentials scanned at security to get in. If the person was already there, the next day it wouldn’t show them arriving.”

  “Have you gone through the logs?”

  “No.”

  “Well, maybe they’re not there. Maybe they made a mistake.”

  I made a mental note to mention that to Detective Faust.

  “But assuming they didn’t do that, here’s option two: the reverse Trojan.”

  “More philosophy?”

  “This would be history.”

  “You spend time with a Russian history professor?”

  “Greek, but that’s by the by. Lenny and I used this one more than once. It also takes a fair bit of bottle, but I reckon less than holding tight. You remember the Trojan Horse story, right?”

  “Soldiers hid in a giant wooden horse to enter the city of Troy.”

  “Right. So this is the opposite: hide in the horse inside the joint until they send it back out.”

  “But no one leaves.”

  “The crowd left.”

  “Before the crime was committed. Or at least before he was put in the pool.”

  “And then no one?”

  “The cleaners.”

  “They walk out on foot? Your killer could have dressed like one of them.”

  “No, they had a van, I think.”

  “A van. Handy.”

  “Could you hide in a van? Wouldn’t the cleaners see you?”

  “Maybe your person is a cleaner.”

  “Cops checked them out. They couldn’t find a connection.”

  “Then I’d check the van. You’d be surprised how small a person can make themselves and how inattentive people are. Especially tired people after a long shift.”

  It was possible. Hell, more than possible. It was even likely.

  “You might have something. Thanks.”

  Lucas held up his beer in salute, then resumed watching the breeze blow across the rows of headstones.

  We chatted a while until we finished our beers, then we said goodbye to Lenny and walked back out to the car.

  “You need a ride home?”

  “Nah, I’m going to drop in on someone. I’ll find my way back. Good to see you, mate.”

  “You, too, Lucas. Look after yourself.”

  “Seems like the less I do that, the longer I keep going.” He smiled and walked away with his cooler in hand.

  I climbed into the car and headed back to the arena, thinking about Trojan horses and mysterious Russian mathematicians.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Waiting at a red light, I texted Faust and got a message back saying she was about to leave for the arena.

  When I arrived I didn’t see Devon, so I passed through security without a word. A group of athletes spilled out of a minivan and scanned their credentials to get in. They headed for the athlete’s entrance on the lower level while I climbed the steps.

  I was about to text Faust again when her SUV rolled silently into the lot. She didn’t have arena credentials and didn’t take out her badge, so I assumed the security guy was familiar with her. I waited at the top of the steps and was sweating by the time she arrived.

  “Hell of a day,” she said.

  “What’s up?”

  “The crazies always come out in the humidity.”

  It was a truth universal.

  We walked into the semi-cool arena, and she asked what I’d been up to.

  “I spoke to an old teammate of Forrest’s from Stanford.”

  “Who?”

  “A guy called Hayden Malkovich. He’s now a coach down at the University of Miami.”

  “What did he have to say?”

  “Not a lot we haven’t heard already, but he did clarify a couple things in Forrest’s diary.”

  We stopped near a closed concession stand. Faust took her tablet from her bag and pushed a huge ketchup container to the side so she could use the counter. She put the tablet down and found the page.

  “So?” she asked.

  “This egged thing. I think I cracked it.”

  “That’s a terrible pun.”

  “It’s a pun? So it is.”

  “And you think it means poached,” she said.

  My jaw dropped. “How did you know that?”

  “I worked the clues. She poached Forrest from Cal and tried it with Deena. I don’t know about HM.” Her eyes went wide. “Hayden Malkovich.”

  “Right. And he confirmed that we’re technically right. It’s poaching, but there doesn’t seem to be any foul play there. We knew she approached Deena, but nothing came of it, and Hayden says he was recruited as a transfer student from a two-year school, all above board.”

  “And I spoke to the Cal guy,” she said. “Mike Tomkiss? He said he was sad to lose a decent swimmer, but he agreed that a change was probably good for Forrest. No animosity toward Kellie Almonde at all.”

  “So Forrest might have been looking for things that weren’t there.”

  “At least in that case. Anything else?”

  I tapped the screen where it read BT knows. “Hayden referred to Coach Collis as Big Time.”

  “BT. What does Big Time mean?”

  “He told me it was common belief around the pool that Collis was a good but not extraordinary coach who was riding Greg’s coattails into the big time.”

  “Is that illegal?”

  “Nope. You can make a case that it’s even his job.”

  “But if he’s BT, what does he know? That MP is microing? Do we agree that MP is Max Partensi?”

  “I like the odds.”

  “So Forrest is saying that Collis knows something about Max. But he doesn’t do anything about it because Max also knows something.”

  “It seems right.”

  “But what Max knows—does it relate to Collis or Greg?”

  “Does it matter? They’re kind of one and the same, careerwise. If you believe the big-time coattail-riding theory.”

  “Still a lot of assumptions and not many solid answers. You have anything else?”

  “I have a theory on how the killer exited the facility,” I said.

  “Go on.”

  “You’ve heard of the Trojan horse?”

  “Do I look like I didn’t finish middle school?”

  “Fair enough. What if they hid somewhere and someone else took them out.”

  “Like who?”

  “The cleaners.”

  She nodded. “The vans. But the perp would have to sneak through the facility to get to the vans. They’re parked out front.”

  “I’m wondering if, at some point, they got access wherever the trash is taken out.”

  “I don’t know the answer to that.”

  “Plus, I think I can confirm how you could drown someone in a recycling can. Have you heard of Archimedes?”

  “Will you stop with the damn history lessons? You can safely assume that if something passed through your head in school that it passed through mine.”

  She had no idea where my head went while I was in high school.

  “But it doesn’t matter,” she said. “He didn’t drown in one of the recycling cans.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The lab finished their tests. There’s nothing on the cans. No scratches, no dents. No fingerprints, no DNA.”

  “Wiped down?”

  “Why would you wipe them all down? And even if you did, there’d be smudges, traces of something—nothing usable in court but something. And DNA’s hard to wipe away. But these cans, they’re brand-new. Never used. Never spoiled by a human body. Amanda Swaggert confirmed the arena bought them, and the sanitation department delivered them fresh for the purpose.”

  “But the delivery guys? They’d leave prints.”

  “They’re sanitation workers. They wear gloves for protection.”

  I couldn’t believe it. It was more than a theory. It worked. It fit. Now I was going to have to think about Lucas and killing someone in a shower, and I did not want to go there.

  Faust continued. “The thing is, the lab says it’s the right plastic under Simpson’s fingernails. It’s the exact same plastic.”

  Suddenly, I had a thought. I had been in this arena before for another case. I had seen front-end loaders come into the facility to clear out ice. They drove in through large doors at the rear, near a loading dock. There were rooms that held air-conditioning equipment and water pipes and all sorts of things, including dumpsters.

  “What?” she said. “You look like you just had a eureka moment.”

  “Maybe I did.”

  “That was Archimedes, by the way.”

  I smiled as I pulled out my phone and made a call.

  “You busy right now?” I asked. “Good. Can you meet us at the trash room?”

  I hung up and told Faust to follow me. She swept up her iPad and dropped in beside me as we headed for the elevator.

  “What?” she said again.

  “If you used a trash can to murder someone, how would you cover up that fact?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How do murderers usually cover up what they used?”

  “The weapon? It’s usually a gun, a knife, or a blunt instrument used to bludgeon. Sometimes, they toss them at the scene and run.”

  “They didn’t do that. None of the cans in the warm-up pool were used.”

  “So you take it away. You throw a knife into a park trash can or a gun into a lake. Something like that.”

  “But you can’t take it away. It isn’t portable like a gun, and there’s a lot of security.”

  “You think they used the cleaners’ vans?” she asked.

  “They’re like delivery vans. They’d notice a huge recycling can with wheels when they put their stuff away. Let’s go back to your analogy. Say I hit someone with a pipe wrench. But I can’t take it, and I can’t destroy it.”

  The elevator opened on the maintenance concourse, and I took off toward the rear of the facility.

  “A wrench? Maybe I’d wipe it down and put it back in the tool bag.”

  “Right.”

  “But that rarely works,” she said. “Chances are there are DNA traces on the wrench, maybe flakes of steel on the body that match.”

  “Exactly, but I’m not thinking about that, or maybe I just don’t know. I’m panicking, or at best, I feel pressured to get things squared away because I’ve just killed someone. I wipe it down and hide it in plain sight.”

  “But I’m telling you, we checked the cans that were left in plain sight. They weren’t used.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe what you checked were the rest of the tools on the workbench.”

  “What the hell are you talking about now? This analogy is getting out of hand.”

  “No, it’s got steam.”

  We reached a roller door that was closed. I pulled it up high enough to walk under, then we stepped out onto a loading dock. A set of doors to my right had a sign that read Refuse. I pulled on a handle, but the doors were locked.

  I moved to the left side of the dock, strode down some steps to the ground, and walked out of the shade. This was the working part of the arena, where I had seen front-end loaders roll in. Farther around there were large doors that could accommodate the huge vehicles, but I wasn’t interested in that. I went the other way.

  The space was wide enough for a garbage truck to turn around. At the back was a fence topped with razor wire, behind which lay the train tracks that dropped people at Mangonia Park Station.

  I moved along the tarmac, following the outside of the building. The arena was a circular structure, so as I walked between the fence and the arena, it got bigger, until the building curved away far enough for me to see the back side of the temporary shed that housed the warm-up pool, and then the makeshift corridor from the main arena.

  Faust stopped beside me. “Where are you going with this?”

  “See that? It’s a maintenance door out the back of the men’s locker room in the warm-up pool.”

  “Okay.”

  “So there’s direct access from the warm-up pool to the arena that’s out of sight to the fans and athletes and front-of-house security.”

  “True. But the person still has to get out the front. Unless you’re suggesting they made a break over that barbed wire?”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “But right now, I’m not thinking about the getaway. I’m thinking about the murder weapon.”

  “It wasn’t a wrench.”

  “Nope. It was a recycling can.”

  “Didn’t we go over this?”

  “Hiding in plain sight.”

  “We tested them all.”

  “Did you?”

  She frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “If you used a wrench, you could leave it on the workbench with all the other tools, or you could put it back in the toolbox it came from.”

  “I told you, I’m done with this analogy. Speak English, or I will shoot you.”

  “Okay. Sometimes, plain sight can be kind of hidden. In this case, it’s putting the can back in the row with its buddies in the locker room.”