Schultz had asked Collis if he noticed the car was missing when he went for coffee. He said he hadn’t, not until the police arrived.

  There were several statements taken by phone.

  Forrest Simpson gave his from California after jumping on a morning flight back to San Francisco. He had left the party early by taxi. The taxi ride was confirmed in the case notes. He had not seen Greg and Deena arrive but had seen Greg doing shots in the kitchen. Forrest thought Greg was going to really feel the pain the next day because he was hitting the hard stuff rather than the beer.

  Kellie Almonde was also interviewed by phone after returning to the Bay Area on the same flight as Forrest. She had arrived at the party with Greg and Deena and said the mood was upbeat. She didn’t see Greg in the kitchen. She had seen Deena drink a couple beers but didn’t get the sense Deena was overdoing it. Like Forrest, Kellie left the party early.

  I read through all the statements, but they were largely facsimiles of each other. Saw them arrive, didn’t see them arrive. Saw them leave, didn’t see them leave. He was stumbling drunk; she had a few but wasn’t inebriated.

  The final statement was from Neil Bracken, who lived down the street from the rental townhouse. Mr. Bracken saw Rick Collis getting coffee just after 6 a.m. The neighbor knew this because his wife was ill and she had timed medications, some of which were administered minutes before he saw the man outside.

  Another folder had video files taken from a doorbell camera at the house. I watched videos marked as arrival and departure, with exact timestamps. They showed a front lawn and a low fence leading out to a dark street. Greg arrives with Deena and Kellie Almonde, walking from the street to the house. All three are smiling and laughing. In the other video, Deena and Greg are leaving. Greg’s arm is around Deena’s shoulders, and her arm is around his waist. It appears that she is holding him up, helping him walk, more than a romantic embrace. Deena half turns to someone unseen in the doorway and waves goodbye, and they stumble onto the street and out of frame.

  I then opened a file of scanned pages from what I assumed to be Schultz’s notebook. His handwriting was messy, perhaps writing while holding the notebook rather than on a desk. Some of the notes repeated the facts covered in documents and statements, others were his questions about the things that didn’t fit.

  Two stuck out. The first was related to Greg’s phone records. He had made a call to a number belonging to Coach Collis at 11:58 p.m., which Collis had failed to mention in his statement. On follow up, Collis confirmed that Deena had used Greg’s phone to let him know they were leaving the party and would be returning to the townhouse. This was why he was awake when Greg had staggered in and flopped onto the sofa. The second was Shultz’s question about Deena or Greg driving back to the townhouse. He had written the word inebriated? and underlined it.

  According to Schultz’s notes, the townhouse used by the Iowa team was about a mile from the party house. Greg and Deena could have walked it in under fifteen minutes on a good day, perhaps thirty with a few drinks under the belt. Schultz had wondered if Greg could make it at all in his state. But it seemed that she had driven back using Greg’s car. Had Deena dropped Greg off at the house and driven away? Or did they both go to the quarry while Collis slept? I scribbled down the address of the townhouse so I could place it on a map later.

  It was several hours before I stood again, and my back ached from hunching over the screen. I was reaching for the ceiling when Detective Schultz stepped back in.

  “Yoga?” he asked.

  “Pitcher’s back.”

  “So, what did you find?”

  “A pretty solid investigation.”

  “You don’t need to butter me up. I know how to do my job. Did you see anything I didn’t?”

  “Apart from Kellie Almonde not mentioning that Deena had told her she was going to leave Greg?”

  “That’s the trouble with chasing witnesses by phone. But that just confirms my thinking. Anything else?”

  “You made a note here. Inebriated? What did you mean?”

  “I was wondering just how drunk they were.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Was Baxter faking it? Pretending to be drunk to sell the alibi.”

  “The statements seemed pretty conclusive. People said he went at it pretty good.”

  “Which raised another question: why? For a guy who didn’t drink much, why hit it so hard?”

  “It was a release. He’d just made the team for Rio.”

  “I never answered that to my satisfaction.”

  “What about the call from Greg’s phone to Coach Collis?” I asked. “Why did Deena phone him?”

  “To tell him they were coming home.”

  “Why use his phone?”

  “I figured he had it on him. She didn’t have hers.”

  “But you found it in the car.”

  “Maybe she left it there.”

  “So they get back to the car, and she flops Greg inside. She could have called then.”

  “Like I said, his phone was handy.”

  “There’s something weird about that.”

  “What?”

  I sighed. “I wish I knew.”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty much where I ended up with the whole thing.”

  “Did you ever track down who leaked the info about what she was drinking?”

  “No, it wasn’t material to the case. You’ll find that beer in every liquor store in Omaha.”

  There was a lot of data bouncing in my brain, but, as Lenny used to say, information with context is knowledge; information without context is for lining bird cages.

  I didn’t see anything I hadn’t seen before, and I didn’t know much then. But I kept thinking about one note from Forrest’s notebook app. He believed there was a link between what was happening in West Palm and what had happened in Omaha. I suspected he might be right, but I was trying to find that link without acknowledging the obvious.

  That Greg Baxter was the link.

  I didn’t say that to Detective Schultz. I thanked him for his time and for allowing me to look at the files. I told him I would discuss what we had with Faust and we would come back to him with anything relevant.

  I left the compound and drove back toward the road we had taken south to the quarry, but I turned north. Within a minute, I hit the interchange with I-80, a decent-sized cloverleaf with gas stations on every quarter. The biggest of them was a Love’s truck stop. I pulled in but didn’t get gas. There was a diner, too, and I had blown right through lunchtime. But I kept thinking about Deena Senza going off that cliff, and it ripped the hunger from me. I got out and stood in the sunshine.

  Taking out my phone, I checked the map. From where I stood, the quarry was eight miles south, just short of the river. The arena was about fourteen miles northeast. The rental house was closer, in Westbrook, south of downtown. Still a long walk but maybe a fifteen-minute drive.

  I tried to imagine the place at night. Dark, wide-open spaces—lots of flat nothing. But the roads were straight and easy to navigate, at least to this point. How did someone like Greg find his way out to a quarry in the middle of nowhere and then get back? There were map apps, of course, but it just seemed so calculated. Did he do an internet search for quarries? If he intended to kill Deena, surely there were easier places to execute it. The flip side was that the location only served to help his alibi.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  I drove to Westbrook, telling myself it was on the way to the airport. I checked my notes and cruised by the house where the post-trials party had taken place. It was off 60th Street, a mile or so south of the University of Nebraska Omaha campus. There was nothing remarkable about it. Aluminum siding and a driveway that cut underneath the left side of the house. Perhaps the home was split level. The lawn needed a trim, but it looked like it was tended to regularly.

  It only took two minutes to get to the Iowa team’s rental. A long driveway bisected the property with a line of four townhouses along either side. Each was two stories with a garage beside the front door. They were vinyl-sided and painted a sickly beige. I only had the street address, so I didn’t know which unit had been the Iowa team’s, but it made no difference. I imagined a living room at the front and a kitchen at the rear, some bedrooms upstairs.

  I made a U-turn and headed back toward the main road but slowed as I reached the address of the neighbor who had seen Coach Collis going to get coffee the morning Deena died. The house was clad in wood siding and had the familiar split layout with a garage down underneath on the right, with a lush lawn above on the left. Few of the homes had porches, but this one had a long wide patio with an iron balustrade running around it.

  A man sat on the porch in an Adirondack chair. I had a plane to catch but an itch to scratch, so I pulled over. It wasn’t until I started up the path to the front door that the man looked my way, and I wondered if his eyesight was poor.

  “Neil Bracken?”

  “What are you selling?” he asked and broke into a wide smile. He was balding with gray on the side and a little sag in his jowls that made him look like an old man. But as I reached the steps to the porch, I realized he hadn’t been on the planet any longer than I had.

  “Not selling,” I said. “My name is Miami Jones.”

  Before I could get into why I was there, he gestured for me to take a seat in the second Adirondack. I stepped onto the flagstone patio and sat next to him. The wood seat was deep and comfortable and not designed to get out of quickly.

  “What can I do for you, sir?” he said.

  “Mr. Bracken⁠—”

  “Neil.”

  “Neil. I’m an investigator. I’m looking into events surrounding the death of Deena Senza eight years ago. I believe the police interviewed you.”

  “Sarpy County Sheriff, actually.”

  Nothing wrong with his memory.

  “Right. I⁠—”

  He put his hand up to silence me, then he froze in place. I did the same, though I wasn’t sure why. He seemed to be staring at a bird feeder that hung from a cantilevered contraption designed to deter squirrels. The birds had scattered upon my approach, but it took only a minute for the first of them to return. There was still plenty of daylight left, but shadows from the tall conifers to the side of the house were shading the porch, giving a false sense that twilight was upon us.

  A blue jay swept in and pecked at the container full of seed. Neil Bracken watched it through child’s eyes, a sense of awe across his face. The bird was halfway through its snack when something spooked it, and it flew into a nearby tree. It was replaced quickly, as if there was a nightclub lineup waiting their turn to get in. A cardinal landed on top of the feeder. Its red plumage, as bright as a crayon, glistened in the sunlight not yet taken by the shadows.

  When the cardinal flew away, Neil leaned my way. “I remember the investigation. I don’t get interviewed by detectives very often.”

  “I’m sure.” We were whispering, and I wondered if he didn’t want to spook the birds. “You told the detective that you saw a man walking up from the main road.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you remember the man?”

  “They showed me some photographs. I remembered him clearly. Not so much now.”

  “You gave quite a specific time when you saw him.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re normally up before six?”

  “Oh yes, every day. My wife had cancer. She didn’t sleep well, so neither did I. It became our process to start our day early. We have chairs set up in front of the living room window right behind us. We would sit and watch the morning wake. There’s quite the hierarchy out here, you know.”

  He turned to the flagstones under the bird feeder. With different varieties and sizes, it was a mess of discarded seeds.

  A squirrel dashed in along the top of the balustrade. Run, pause. Run, pause. It seemed to consider the logistics of climbing the bird feeder, then swiveled its head toward the stuff on the ground. The creature climbed down and picked up a large seed that might have come from a sunflower. It then stood on its rear legs, balancing with its tail, and munched the seed like it was a hot dog at the ballpark.

  I glanced at Neil Bracken. The reverent smile had returned, like he had never seen such a thing. He continued at a whisper, not taking his eyes off the squirrel.

  “Yes, I remember the time well. I had set my wife up in her seat and made her a drink. She couldn’t stomach coffee at that point, so we did herbal tea. Then we’d just sit. Sometimes, it might be an hour before dawn, so there was nothing to see, but it was always peaceful.”

  “The man with the coffee, he came after sunrise?”

  “Yes. It was just after I did my wife’s morning medications.”

  “He was coming from the coffee shop?”

  “Yes. He came from that way”—he gestured slowly toward the main road—“and walked over there, toward the townhouses. The detective said he was staying down there.”

  “He was. How did he seem?”

  “He walked like he was tired. And he sipped his coffee, although I can’t say for sure it was coffee. It might have been tea. But I figured at that hour a tired man would need the pick-me-up.”

  “Do you get many people walking the streets at that hour?”

  “Very few. It’s a quiet neighborhood.”

  “If nothing much goes on, why do you sit at the window?”

  He turned to me. “To watch the animals. My wife loved to see the animals. And the sunrise, I suppose. There’s a lot of peace to be had in a sunrise.”

  The squirrel ran away, and another little critter dashed in.

  “Chipmunk?” I said.

  “That’s a thirteen-lined ground squirrel,” said Neil.

  “It’s a very specific name.”

  Bracken smiled. The squirrel tested a selection of seeds before picking up something dark, about half the size of a pumpkin seed. It didn’t hang around to eat, preferring to stuff the seed in its mouth and flee.

  “You said you were up early that morning?” I asked.

  “Every morning.”

  “What time would you say?”

  “Probably between four thirty and five o’clock. I think I gave a more exact time to the detective, but I can’t remember exactly now.”

  “I understand. Did you see anyone else?”

  “Not a soul.”

  I was about to speak when he smiled again and directed my attention toward another critter scurrying along the patio.

  “That’s a chipmunk,” he whispered. “Don’t get too many around Omaha. My wife loved the chipmunks.” The cute little rodent zigzagged into the pile of seed, stuffed its cheeks, then ran away.

  “That’s your hierarchy right there. The birds eat from the feeder, but they drop as much as they eat. The eastern squirrels like the sunflower seeds, and the lined squirrels like safflower, and the chipmunks clean up the millet. It’s like they had a meeting to arrange it.”

  I sat for a while longer and watched the birds return, then I shifted forward in my seat. “I should get going. Thank you for your time.”

  “Glad for the chat. Don’t get too many visitors these days.”

  “Is it just you now?”

  He nodded. “Just me. My wife passed when the cancer came back, two years ago now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He grinned again. “I’m not. Best twenty years of my life. She sure did love watching these little critters. I guess that’s why I still do it.”

  He struggled to lever himself out of the chair. He seemed old before his time but comfortable with it. Perhaps that was stoicism in the face of no other option. Then I tried to stand and remembered that getting out of those Adirondacks was no easy feat.

  “Best be getting dinner started,” he said. “There’s a Royals game on. Do you follow the baseball?”

  “I do.”

  “You’re welcome to stay and watch.”

  “I’d love to, but I have somewhere to be.”

  “Of course. Well, drop by anytime. I enjoyed our chat.”

  He moved toward the door, and I headed down the path to the street. I replayed the conversation in my head. We talked about his dead wife and the case of a dead swimmer. It didn’t seem like that great of a chat. I wondered when his last conversation had been and if he had children out in the world somewhere. I wondered if they ever called.

  I turned to wave goodbye, but he was gone, and the squirrels and chipmunks were back. I climbed into the truck and drove away.

  I reached the airport in twenty minutes and was at the gate in thirty. I bought a deluxe sandwich that held nothing but a lump of turkey—deluxe in price only. Then, I flew to Atlanta before switching planes.

  I got back home just after 1 a.m. I turned the key quietly, but Danielle was standing at the kitchen counter, eating peanut butter from the jar.

  “You’re up late,” I said.

  “Back at ya.”

  “Did you talk to Orna?”

  “Yeah. She’s gonna drop by again tomorrow night. You’re not going to Albuquerque or anywhere, are you?”

  I stepped into the kitchen and put my arms around her. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “What’s brought this on?”

  “I can’t hug you?”

  “Whenever you want, but this is something else.”

  I let her go and leaned my butt against the counter. She handed me a spoon, and I scooped out some peanut butter.

  “What did you learn?” she asked.

  “The detective is convinced Greg did it.”

  “Really? Is he any good?”

  “The investigation was solid, but so was the alibi.”

  “You’ve got to be able to prove it in a court of law.”