“Quick question. Night one of the trials, how did you get home?”

  “There are minivans.”

  “Who was in yours?”

  “Hmm. The nights kind of blend together.”

  “Did Mikey Stokes put his seat back onto you?”

  “Oh, yeah. That happened. They have these seats that recline like way back. Who needs that in their car?”

  Alcoholics was the first target group I thought of, but I didn’t say so. “Do you remember anyone else?”

  “Okay, so yeah, that night. Mikey and Greg were in those middle seats. I was behind Mikey, obviously, and with me in the back . . . ”

  “I was in the back with you,” said the woman standing beside Missy. She had the same pom-poms and the same chlorine-bleached hair.

  “You are?” I asked.

  “Morgan Cross. You are?”

  “Miami Jones.”

  “Miami. That’s an awesome name.”

  “Back at ya. So you were both there in the back. Anyone else?”

  “Jen,” said Morgan.

  “Yeah,” said Missy. “Jen Chalmers. She’s about to race the fifty free.”

  “So three in the back, two in the middle. And in the front?”

  “The driver,” said Morgan.

  “Right. And in the passenger seat?”

  Missy tapped her pom-pom to her chin. “Coach Brett?” She looked at Morgan, who nodded.

  “Coach Brett?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh. Strength and conditioning, Team USA.”

  “You’re sure?” I looked at Morgan for confirmation.

  She nodded. “Totes. Coach Brett. That was night one.”

  “Why do you ask, Mr. Jones?” said Missy.

  “Just getting my ducks in a row.”

  Morgan frowned like I was talking Klingon.

  “Thanks, ladies. Enjoy the swimming. And Missy, good luck in Paris.”

  “Thanks. Morgs is going, too. Breaststroke.”

  “Congrats,” I said to Morgan. “I’ll be rooting for you both.”

  They turned back to the pool and waved their pom-poms like the Dallas Cowboys were about to run in, and I slinked back onto the concourse.

  I didn’t need to be there anymore.

  I knew who had killed Deena Senza. And it wasn’t Deena Senza.

  I knew who had killed Forrest Simpson. How and where and why.

  But I wasn’t going to tell anyone until the swimming was done. And until Detective Faust had some hard evidence. Which she would have soon.

  I was sure of it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  I spent the afternoon at Longboard Kelly’s, getting strange looks from Muriel and Mick. Muriel wore a smirk that suggested she was enjoying watching my cogs run so fast that the steam was coming out of my ears. Mick wore a frown bigger than usual at my choice of diet soda.

  “New you?” he asked in his chatty way.

  “It’s a temporary situation.”

  “Good.”

  He walked back into the kitchen to make me a grouper sandwich. The heat baked the patio behind me, but a fan on the other side of the bar kept my front cool under the palapa.

  I had called Detective Faust and told her that I knew. I didn’t tell her what I knew.

  “You don’t want to play games with me, Jones,” she said.

  That was exactly what I wanted to do, but the fear of a woman with a firearm prevented me from saying so.

  “Lorraine Catchitt will tell you half the story soon enough. I’ll tell you the other half once she does.”

  It wasn’t really fair. I wasn’t better at this than Faust was. That had been made blatantly obvious. Same for Detective Schultz in Omaha. He knew his stuff, but he didn’t know all of it.

  I was the only one who knew both sides of the story. Or at least I thought I did.

  I really hoped I did.

  Danielle joined me after work and, after spotting my drink, gave Muriel the wide eyes. Muriel shrugged like it was above her pay grade.

  “You okay?” asked Danielle.

  “Just want to stay sharp,” I said.

  She climbed onto the stool next to me. “You expecting a call from the Oakland A’s?”

  “The A’s aren’t in Oakland anymore.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Owners.” If only I had a nickel for every baseball player who had said that over the years.

  Muriel placed a vodka tonic on the bar in front of Danielle. She was taking a sip when someone called out across the courtyard from the parking lot entrance.

  “How did you know?”

  We both glanced over our shoulders at Detective Faust, striding into Longboard Kelly’s in a white button-up shirt. Her sleeves were rolled up like she’d been burning the midnight oil, but it was only dinnertime.

  Faust kept coming. “How? Tell me now, Jones, or I’ll . . .”

  “Shoot me?”

  “I can concoct a story as good as the next girl.”

  “Detective Faust, meet Agent Castle, Florida Department of Law Enforcement.”

  The two women shook hands.

  “Annabelle.”

  “Danielle. I hear you’re doing some good work at Gun Club Road.”

  “I hear you’re married to this knucklehead.”

  Danielle looked at me. “I like her.”

  I had nothing to say to that.

  “Would you like a drink, Annabelle?” said Danielle.

  “Just a Diet Coke, thanks.”

  Muriel picked up the gun and sprayed the post-mix into a tall glass, then she held the gun up to me like I might want a refill. I did not.

  Danielle asked if Faust wanted a seat, but she declined.

  “Been sitting all day. Now come on, Jones. Fess up.”

  “Max Partensi solved it for me.”

  “You must be kidding me.”

  “Oh, he didn’t know he had. He just dropped in the missing piece. I actually thought it might have been him only a moment before.”

  “Why?”

  “His alibi for the night Deena died was paper thin.”

  “You thought he did it?”

  “I thought he might be the other guy. But I was wrong about that.”

  “So?”

  “So it wasn’t Max covering up a crime. But Forrest was a cover-up, plain and simple.”

  “I get that,” said Faust. “But run me through it.”

  “Forrest was a fringe swimmer and, to be honest, a fringe person. Never in the spotlight in any situation. Always in the outside lanes, in the pool, and in life. A lurker was how Max put it. But he was a swimmer, pure and simple. It defined him. He was put out about Greg getting the final swim in Rio, and he was angry about not getting to swim in Tokyo. But he was petrified of not going to Paris because swimming was his identity. More than one person described him that way. A swimmer.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” said Faust.

  “Give him a moment,” said Danielle. “It takes him a while to get to the point.”

  I gave my wife the dead eyes. She smiled and sipped her drink.

  “Okay, well, he wanted to be on the team and became desperate. He’d been watching the people around him for years, quietly compiling secrets. Some big, some small. Some would get him nothing, one would get him killed. But he decided to use them.”

  I sipped my soda, a concoction of artificial sweetener and battery acid.

  “He looked at his own coach, Kellie Almonde. She had a history of poaching swimmers from other programs. Forrest was one of them. He had learned she tried to get Deena. He thought there might be something underhanded going on.”

  “Coach egged me, as in poached,” said Faust.

  “Right. But it was a dead end. Yes, Coach Almonde got a few swimmers from other programs, but there was nothing wrong with it. All programs do it. College sports is a cutthroat business. But she didn’t bribe or pay anyone off.”

  “I know it wasn’t Kellie Almonde,” said Faust.

  “You asked me to lay it out. And you only know half the story. So, anyway, Forrest also knew that Max was microing. I asked Emelia Gurt about that. She confirmed that it was a reference to microdosing performance-enhancing drugs.”

  “Not knitting mittens?”

  “Sadly, no. At the time, Max was with Collis’s squad in DC. Forrest knew Collis was aware of it but did nothing. Max also knew about Alan Notley’s affair, right? In his diary, Forrest wonders why Collis does nothing about Max. Maybe Max knows something about Collis. But he didn’t. He knew about Notley. So they kept quiet about each other’s secret. I was told that Collis ran a clean program—he had even kicked out a swimmer for drug use—but he let Max’s drug use slide in return for learning about Notley’s affair, which I suspect he used to get the head coaching job.”

  “And Forrest knew that,” said Faust. “He wrote that Notley was having an affair and BT—Big Time, you say is Collis—had knowledge of it. And then he wrote This is why . . . Why he got the head coach job?”

  “That was Forrest’s assumption, but I think there might have been something to it. Except he had no proof, and he needed that to go after the head coach or the chairman. It was a very easy allegation to deny. Powerful people do it all the time.”

  “Men,” said Danielle.

  “Tell me about it,” said Faust.

  I felt like I was being ganged up on, and I wished Ron were here until I realized that he would probably agree with them.

  “So without proof, the head coach angle was a nonstarter. And Forrest’s focus was always Greg. He was jealous of Greg from day one. He had the talent, the girl, the spotlight. Forrest was infatuated with Deena and blamed Greg for her death. He was convinced Deena didn’t kill herself. After Collis got the head coach job, Kellie Almonde vented poolside at Stanford, mentioning how it would have been different if Deena had come to California. Like maybe that was an option. Without Greg. Forrest jumped on that. He knew Greg didn’t drink, so he didn’t believe he got drunk at the party. He thought it might be a ruse to create his alibi. But he was wrong about that, too. Every other witness statement confirms that Greg went too hard, too fast—the classic mistake of a person who didn’t usually drink. He was out of it before he knew what was happening because he drank liquor instead of beer. But he hates beer. I offered him one the night I met him at The Breakers.”

  “I remember,” said Danielle. “He said he’d also leave the champagne until after he’d won.”

  “Exactly.”

  “That’s what he meant when he wrote hod stupp,” said Faust. “I looked at more of his writing. He looped his Fs so they looked like Ps. He was writing GB drank hard stuff. As in liquor.”

  “Bourbon,” I said. “The detectives smelled it on him the following day.”

  “You could pour it on your clothes to complete the illusion,” said Danielle.

  “True. So Forrest couldn’t know either way. But he didn’t need so much proof with Greg. They were teammates. And he probably hated Greg at this point. Convinced that Greg had killed the girl he was infatuated with. He wrote that GB killed DS. He was convinced of it.”

  “So he confronted him after he came in sixth in the one hundred freestyle,” Faust said.

  “He’d soon be off the team, so he threw a Hail Mary. He told Greg that he knew that Deena was going to leave him and that he had killed her. Greg flipped out, and there was a scuffle.”

  “Which was broken up,” said Faust. “And Forrest was sent into the showers.”

  “Right. Except he didn’t go for a shower, did he? The others warmed down, and he was stewing. You can imagine. Your career is done, your identity as a swimmer is over, and your blackmail has failed. We know he went outside, out the back of the shower room, into the space behind the warm-up pool.”

  “How do you know that?” asked Danielle.

  “Because there was nowhere else to go. Other swimmers went into the shower room, but no one saw Forrest again. He was outside.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Writing in his diary,” said Faust. “And questioning everything.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Detective Faust discovered that he had made changes in his diary after the swim. While everyone else was cooling off. He’d grabbed his bag in the locker room and went outside.”

  “Or he was sent outside,” said Faust.

  “That’s probably more accurate. But he’s out there, and everyone else showers and leaves. Then, and only then, does he get called back in. He’s still in his swimsuit. It’s okay—he’s been sitting outside on a steamy Florida night. He’s probably hotter than when he got out of the pool. So he’s told to get into an ice bath. And he does.”

  “Why do that?” asked Danielle.

  “Because he’s asked to by his coach.”

  “Kellie Almonde?”

  “Coach Collis,” said Faust. “His national team coach. The last hope he has of squirming his way onto the squad. He’s hot and still in his swimsuit, so he does as he’s told.”

  “Nothing unusual,” I said. “I’ve been told a hundred times by a coach to get in an ice bath. I always did it, even when all I wanted was to go for a beer. Sometimes, I killed two birds with one stone.”

  “Point being, he’s in the recycling can full of ice water,” said Faust. “But why kill him?”

  “Because they talked about Omaha. Forrest wasn’t letting it go. And Rick Collis couldn’t have him talking. Not this close to the brass ring. The Games are six weeks away. So he slammed the lid shut and lay all over it to hold the guy down in the water until he was dead.”

  “Coach Collis killed Forrest?” said Muriel.

  Faust’s eyes went wide. “We shouldn’t be having this conversation here.”

  “She’s part of the team,” I said. “Muriel actually figured out that Forrest’s egged meant poaching players.”

  Muriel crossed her arms with a very satisfied smile.

  Faust did the one-shoulder-at-a-time shrug. “All right, yes, Rick Collis killed Forrest. We have prints from the Omaha investigation, and he matched to a partial on the lid. Lorraine Catchitt says there’s plenty of DNA on top from one person. We’ll match that when we arrest him.”

  “And underneath?” I felt my entire body tense.

  “Yes. The DNA matched Forrest Simpson. He was drowned in there, then wheeled out to the pool. Collis dumped him out and tied a kettlebell to him from the gym to make it look like suicide.”

  “How did he think he would get away with it?” said Danielle.

  Faust looked at her blank-faced.

  “You’re right,” said Danielle. “He wasn’t thinking.”

  “Too clever by half.” Faust glanced at her watch. “Time to go do the deed.”

  “Can you wait?” I asked.

  “For what?”

  “The finals to finish. All those swimmers, they don’t deserve to miss their chance. They had nothing to do with this, and Collis isn’t going anywhere. He’s the head coach.”

  “Fair point. But I’m heading there to keep an eye on him anyway. I’ll sit in the stands.”

  “I’m coming,” said Danielle.

  Faust dropped the eyebrow. I could see a jurisdictional turf war about to start.

  “I have to see how you guys finish this,” said Danielle, slipping down from her stool. She thanked Muriel and strode toward the parking lot.

  “Come on, MJ,” she said. “You’re driving.”

  Faust looked at me. “I like her.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  We watched the final night’s races from the suite for which I still had the key card. There was no beverage service, but I did manage to snag three hot dogs—including a vegetarian version for Faust made out of some kind of soy— from the concourse below. Greg won the 200-meter butterfly, completing a sweep. I wondered how that was going to play out, especially since we were only halfway done. From behind the glass sliders, Faust didn’t take her eyes off Rick Collis down in the stands.

  “You gonna make me beg?” she asked without looking at me.

  “I would never do that, Annabelle.”

  “Detective Faust,” she said.

  I saw the little smile break on Danielle’s face.

  “I just wanna see the look in his eyes first,” I said. “I don’t like being played.”

  The last event was the women’s 800-meter freestyle. Faust stood and tossed her hot dog foil in the trash.

  “I want to be there when they get in.”

  We followed Faust out of the suite and down to the warm-up pool. There was still activity. Athletes who had just swum were warming down in the pool. Some were coming out of the showers. Most were in the stands, and we stood to the side as the final event finished and the women came in after their race. They all hit the water and swam some laps to warm down while others started messing around like they were at the Y.

  The mood felt relaxed, as if the humidity had lifted. It hadn’t. The AC was struggling to keep the steam at bay, but there were smiles and hugs and a few tears. Some people had made it, some hadn’t. Those who had lost stuck out as melancholy among the joyous majority.

  Kellie Almonde came in with Missy Callahan and Morgan Cross, who both still had their pom-poms. Coach Almonde didn’t look my way. She was focused on her team, and they gathered around her like moths to a flame.

  No one gathered around Rick Collis. He walked into the room with sweat glistening on his shaven head. He stood, stern-faced, and crossed his arms as if people enjoying themselves was out of order.

  Greg Baxter strode in with a couple of other swimmers I didn’t know. He didn’t seem to notice his coach, but he was busy congratulating some of his new teammates. I heard arrangements being made for parties and bars. I thought about the divide Max Partensi had noted between those of age and those not.

  The warm-up pool began to clear out. Those who hadn’t competed or were already dressed started to drift away. Those in the water got out and showered. I wondered if there were new recycling cans for ice baths. I couldn’t imagine anyone taking one tonight. You might do an ice bath after the first six games in a World Series, but you sure as hell didn’t do one after game seven.

  Coach Collis saw one of the swimmers come out of the men’s locker room, and he slapped the young man on the back and eased him toward the door. Detective Faust stepped in between them.