“Coach Collis,” she said.

  He looked at her like she was gum on his shoe. “Can I help you, Detective?”

  “I’m going to need you to come down to the station, sir.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me.”

  “I have responsibilities to attend to. If you want to ask more questions, make an appointment.”

  “Sir, I don’t really want to make a scene, but if you force my hand, I will.”

  “I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do, and I’m prepared to arrest you in public, I assure you. It’s not you I’m thinking about.” She glanced around at the athletes and coaches in the room.

  “Let them leave,” he said. “Then we’ll sort this out.”

  “Of course. Perhaps we can stand over here?” Faust pointed him away from the door, I assumed, in case he got any bright ideas.

  Collis told his swimmer to go on without him. Greg Baxter and his buddies left as a group, laughing and oblivious. Faust stepped over to me.

  “I’m letting Baxter walk out of here?”

  “Why not? You know Collis did it.”

  “I’m talking about Omaha. Are you saying he didn’t, you know”—she whispered the rest—“murder Deena Senza?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “All right, you’ve seen his face now. Are you gonna tell me who murdered Deena?”

  “No one.”

  “What? No one?”

  I shook my head.

  “Explain.”

  “I will.”

  The room had cleared out fast. People had better places to be. A couple of events remained, to be run the following day—women’s fifty freestyle and men’s fifteen hundred—and I wondered how badly it stunk to have to swim those events, because everyone else was headed for a good time.

  Kellie Almonde had her arms around two women with wet hair as they strode out of the room. She shot me a look full of questions.

  Once all the athletes and coaches had left, Faust approached Collis, whose jaw was firmly set.

  “Rick Collis, I am placing you under arrest for the murder of Forrest Simpson.”

  He looked more disgusted than shocked. “This is ridiculous. I wasn’t here. I left with my athletes.” He turned to me. “Greg told you that we left together. I have an alibi.”

  Faust frowned at me. She had enough physical evidence to put the guy away, but she was likely thinking about Schultz in Omaha. He thought he had plenty, too, but he could never refute the alibi.

  “You played that card already, Coach,” I said. “But this one falls apart a bit faster than the other one.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I wasn’t told Greg left with you—I was told he walked out with you. Detective Faust was told that, too. The words were deliberate. You walked the athletes out to the minivans. They collected people on the arena side of security and drove through the gate. You got everyone else in the van, and then, instead of getting in front, you had the strength coach hop in. He’s got a similar build, also with a shaved head. You knew the athletes in the back would be chatting and carrying on. The chances of all of them noticing you weren’t there were small.”

  “Coach Brett would have noticed,” he said.

  “Not if you said you were jumping into the next van. He told investigators he saw you getting into a van. No one thought that they were two different minivans or that you never got into either of them.”

  I moved around Danielle at the corner of the pool, closer to Collis. “But someone who was in Greg’s minivan noticed. We nearly didn’t think to check it. But you’d done it before, right? Like a magic trick. If we pay attention to this hand, we don’t see the other hand. Concentrate on this answer, we don’t ask the other question.”

  “What are you talking about?” Collis spat.

  “I’m interested in that too, Jones,” said Faust.

  “He walked out but didn’t leave. As everyone else drove away, he walked back inside to the warm-up pool, where he’d left Forrest Simpson.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Collis.

  “Are you denying you separated Forrest from Greg after the altercation?”

  “No, of course I did. I told him to go take a shower. And I didn’t see him again.”

  “We all know that’s not true. You sent him to the locker room, and then, when everyone else was warming down in the pool, you went in there and told him to go outside. You said that you would talk to him about his situation in private after everyone was gone.”

  “What situation?”

  “Not making the team. He threatened Greg in front of other people, and you heard it. So you decided to silence him.”

  “You better have more than that, pal. I’ll sue you.”

  “I don’t think so. See, I’m not sure you were going to kill him at that point, but you were well-versed in blackmail and trading secrets. I suspect you were going to come up with a plan to get him what he wanted in return for shutting up about Greg. So after you came back in, you retrieved Forrest from outside. You told him he needed to cool down, and you got him into an ice bath in one of the recycling cans and started discussing the options.”

  I began pacing. I was on a roll.

  “But it went wrong, didn’t it? He was convinced Greg had killed Deena. But you had heard the threat he made against Greg, and you couldn’t let that get repeated. But it wasn’t just the rest of the world you were worried about. It was Greg.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Some days, but not this one. See, Greg told me what Forrest said. It wasn’t just that Greg had killed Deena. Greg had an alibi for that, so that was just bad-mouthing. But he told Greg why he thought that. Because Deena was going to leave Greg, and he loved her.”

  “You think he was worried about a repeat of Rio?” asked Faust.

  “I do, at one level,” I said. “But there was another level. Because you knew that Deena was going to leave Greg.”

  “He knew?” said Danielle.

  “I didn’t know that,” said Collis.

  “Sure you did. She was going to wait until after the Games to dump him. And you knew that because the other man was you.”

  “She was leaving him for this clown?” said Faust.

  “Not the first time a coach and an athlete got it on. But if Forrest kept saying there was someone else, eventually Greg was going to start asking who it might be. And likely he’d be dumbfounded, because she was always at the pool. With Coach Collis. No one else. No time for it. And then maybe, he’d figure it out.”

  “That she was going to leave him,” said Faust.

  “That, too.”

  “What else?”

  “That the whole story of Omaha was a lie.”

  “I’m done with this,” said Collis. “You have no proof of anything. What happened in Omaha was fully investigated.”

  “I’m not worried about Omaha,” said Faust. “I’m worried about West Palm Beach, and I have plenty of evidence to place you and Forrest at the scene of the murder. Now it seems you don’t even have Greg to back your alibi.”

  Faust’s eyes nearly popped out of her head as she snapped my way. “No.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not who’s albi.”

  “No. Whose alibi.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Danielle.

  I went on: “While Forrest was waiting outside for Collis, he grabbed his bag and made some notes on his iPad. See, he was a habitual notetaker. It’s hard to keep all that information straight when you’ve got dirt on everyone. And Forrest did. He had written lots of notes about everybody, especially Greg. But while he was outside, he made his last entries using a digital pen with a different thickness. He put a question mark next to GB kill DS because suddenly he wasn’t sure if it was true. He even wrote GB believes because he’d seen Greg’s face in the warm-up area when he’d made his threat. He saw the look of a man who had lost his one true love. And the idea that Greg hadn’t done it made him wonder who did. He never bought the suicide story. This was a woman he idolized. He followed her every move. He even knew her stroke intimately. He knew she wasn’t depressed. So now his anger was cooling, and he was asking questions. And it hit. Whose alibi? He started asking himself if the alibi that saved Greg from prosecution was actually designed to work the other way around. To provide Coach Collis with an alibi.”

  “Are you insane? I was at home,” said Collis.

  “Says who? No one, actually. Greg was asleep, close to comatose.”

  “And I was checking on him, you moron.”

  “Again, says who? Just you.”

  “Why didn’t the detective on the case figure all this out?” asked Danielle.

  “He lacked some crucial information. A matter of chance, really, plus the benefit of time. See, they looked at the boyfriend because you always do, right?”

  “Absolutely,” said Faust.

  “So they were a little tainted by that, but not much. They couldn’t disprove the alibi, and they had no motive. Schultz had plenty of theories about that, but nothing panned out. And some doubt at the crime scene. Conflicting messages. So he had to let it go. But part of his problem was California.”

  “California?” asked Danielle.

  “They concentrated on the party the night before, and they interviewed everyone they could track down who was there. But the California contingent had all flown out early the next morning, so they were reached by phone. Not in person. You both do this for a living. Is that as effective?”

  “No,” said Danielle.

  “Never,” said Faust.

  “Right. And if Kellie Almonde had been in the room when they asked her about Deena at the party, they might have seen, like I did, that she had something more to say on it. But they didn’t get that cue. Kellie’s statement was that Deena was happy, and very little else was said. That was true. But what she didn’t say would have given Schultz his motive: Deena was leaving Greg. With that, he would have kept digging, and the ME might have deferred the decision to call it suicide. Because knowing that little tidbit, you ask who the other guy was. Maybe that thread leads to Coach Collis here. Maybe he stands up and does the right thing. Maybe he lets Greg hang by changing his story. We’ll never know.”

  I looked at Collis. He wasn’t beaten, but his chin had dropped a touch.

  “If they had a motive and a reason to look at the other man, they might have figured out that the alibi wasn’t for Greg at all. He was exactly what he appeared to be: an athlete who didn’t drink much, sleeping off a stupor that would haunt him forever. While Coach’s alibi fell apart.”

  “I was seen by a witness,” said Collis.

  “Yes, Neil Bracken. Nice guy. He remembers that day well. He was up early with his wife. They sat in the window with herbal tea and watched the sunrise. Every morning. You’re right, they did see you. Coming back from the coffee shop. But they had been there for an hour, and you know what they didn’t report seeing? You leaving the house to go get the coffee. They didn’t see you because you never walked to the coffee shop. You were coming from the quarry.”

  “Wait,” said Faust. “You just told me he didn’t kill Deena.”

  “Got you on a technicality there, Detective, because he was responsible for her death. He was the other man. He was sleeping with his number one male swimmer’s girlfriend. They were planning a life together. Kellie Almonde tried to recruit Deena, but she wasn’t interested. I made the mistake of thinking she didn’t want to leave Iowa because she had met someone in college. That’s what Kellie thought, too. But it wasn’t what Deena said. She had said she wouldn’t leave Coach Collis. It was specifically him. And she even suggested that Kellie recruit Greg, probably because she suspected he wouldn’t want to stay after he learned his girlfriend and coach were an item behind his back.”

  Collis had fallen silent. He was staring into the turquoise water of the pool.

  “Okay,” said Faust. “Means and opportunity. What’s the motive?”

  “There isn’t one,” I said.

  “What?”

  I looked at Collis. “Do you want to tell her?”

  “You’re on a roll,” he said, without conviction.

  “I am. See, the whole quarry thing was planned. Like two high students with nowhere to go except their parents’ houses, they wanted to get away. Coach told Greg to cut loose after the finals. Blow off some steam. So he did. But Coach knew that his guy didn’t drink beer. He hated it. Still does. Wouldn’t take a free one at The Breakers, and seriously, at their prices, you take anything that’s free. So Greg hit the liquor and paid the price. As soon as he was drunk, which wasn’t long, Deena took him home like the dutiful girlfriend. She’d stuck to only a couple beers. The plan was for her to call Coach here and have him come get her, but she’d left her phone in the car. So she had to call him using Greg’s phone.”

  I stepped over to Faust. “Remember, the story was a little muddled, and the statements were, too. Who drove from the pool to the party house? Where was the car? The statements said that Greg drove—it was his car—and took it to the party. But Kellie Almonde was the only other person in the car, and she claimed Coach Collis drove and dropped them off. An inconsequential fact, if Detective Schultz had even learned it, which he didn’t. Again, another officer doing a quick statement on the phone. But it changes everything. Deena didn’t drive home and help Greg stumble onto the sofa. Coach came and got them. They drove back and dropped Greg off, as was the plan. They then went off to be alone together.”

  “At a quarry?” asked Danielle.

  “Yeah, it’s a strange one,” I said. “But Detective Shultz told me it used to be a popular parking place for those very students who wanted to go off together. There aren’t a lot of hills in Omaha, let alone romantic vistas. Schultz said it was quite the place back in the day. Didn’t even have a fence around it until after the turn of the century. It wasn’t until today that it clicked, but I learned from Hayden Malkovich at UM that Coach Collis swam for Creighton University back in the late eighties. Creighton dropped their swimming program in 1990. And where is Creighton?”

  “I feel like you want us to say Omaha,” said Danielle.

  “I do. It is. I was at their ballpark a couple nights ago. Coach was there when the quarry was a popular parking spot. So he knew how to get out there, in the middle of nowhere. A private place to watch the stars with his girl.”

  “And kill her,” said Faust.

  “You want to tell her?” I asked Collis.

  He shook his head.

  “Okay. They went to park. Coach had packed a cooler with some beers. They sat overlooking the quarry. There’s nothing out there, so I imagine it’s pitch-black in the wee small hours. Great for stargazing. So they sat on the hood of the car, backs against the windshield, staring at eternity and talking about what? The Games, the future. Whatever.”

  “And then?” asked Faust.

  “They have a few beers. Coach goes to get one more. Leaves Deena reclining on the hood. He grabs the beers, and I figured at that point, it’s the slam of the trunk that does it. Maybe he just leaned on the car a bit. Not sure. Maybe he’ll tell us, maybe he won’t. But the thing is, Coach had forgotten to put the handbrake on, and he left the transmission in Neutral. You might say a rookie mistake. In San Francisco, you’d be right—they drum that stuff into you there. They have lots of hills. But in Omaha, where he went to school, or Iowa City, where he lived? Not so many hills. Easy to forget to engage the brake and slip the gear into Park. People do it in Florida every day. Their cars don’t go anywhere.”

  I turned to Collis, his chin now resting on his chest.

  “But at the quarry, there’s a slight decline at the edge. What happened, Coach? You closed the trunk and it started rolling. Got some steam up before you realized. Then you grabbed the back of the car. There were marks in the dirt, like someone had pushed it, but I think you were pulling and you fell, spraying dirt around like you had been pushing.”

  Danielle’s mouth dropped. “Are you saying . . .”

  “It rolled off the edge with Deena on the hood.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Why didn’t she jump off?”

  “Her top,” said Faust. “It got caught, didn’t it? Schultz found fabric torn from her top under the windshield wiper.”

  “No,” said Danielle from under the hand covering her mouth.

  “It was an accident?” said Faust. She turned to Collis. “You seriously went through all that for an accident? You should have just come clean.”

  Collis started to tremble.

  “So what, you cleaned up the scene, took the bottles, and ran? How did you even know she was dead? She might just have been hurt.”

  Collis shook his head.

  Faust turned to me. “How does he get back to the house?”

  “I drove it,” I said. “It’s about two hours or so walk to the interstate, then there’s a whole heap of truck stops. Dumped the bottles, hitched a ride into town. Went back to the townhouse.”

  “And stopped for coffee?” Faust asked. “It might not have been murder, but that’s cold.” She grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the door.

  “I loved her,” he said. And then he started crying like a toddler.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The late afternoon sun played on the back of my shirt, the green one with palm trees all over. I wore shorts, and I had dropped my flip flops to the ground. Danielle was beside me in a yellow dress with blue hummingbirds on it. Hummingbirds were attractive enough, but they had no idea.

  We both had tonics with lime wedges, nothing more. Mick was getting worried. I was getting antsy. Danielle was smiling at Ron, who looked as happy as ever. It was hot as hell and as humid as a jockstrap. Ron was bright red and, knowing him, loving every minute of it. It’s hard for that kind of enthusiasm for life not to rub off, even if you’re thinking of a girl who fell off a cliff and a boy who should have stayed in his lane.