Scheffel asked Sarah what Elisa had done with the refrigerator that had been in the garage of the Woodbridge house. Sarah said she didn’t know.

“I didn’t … I didn’t really go in the garage or anything,” Sarah said.

Scheffel accepted this and moved on. She asked Sarah what she knew about the discovery of Larry’s body. Sarah said she only knew what the police had told her. “They said he was found in a shallow grave,” she said.

Scheffel said that Larry’s body had been found in a grave less than fifteen minutes’ drive from the Woodbridge house and the Whalen Ranch.

“Of all the places,” Scheffel said. “I mean, the last place you saw him was where?”

“Down in L.A.,” Sarah said, starting to cry.

“How do you think Laurence McNabney got into that shallow grave?” Scheffel asked, “so close to the house in Woodbridge and so far from the place you last saw him alive?”

“I have no idea,” Sarah said.

“Okay,” Scheffel said. “You are the last person to have seen him alive. Do you understand what I’m saying? Let me tell you this, and you’re going to need to pay real close attention, okay? When we found him, he’d only been in the ground three to six weeks. Okay, now we found him on February the fifth, which means he was put there around the first of January. So the question is, where’s Larry been, from the last time you saw him? No one else has seen him either. Has he been held captive somewhere, tied up and fed?”

“Did someone kidnap him?” Sarah asked.

“But he was found fifteen minutes from his house in Woodbridge,” Scheffel reminded her. She added that only two sets of people knew how Larry had died—the killer or killers, and the police. But, said Scheffel, rumors were already rampant in the horse set that Larry had been killed with a horse tranquilizer. She told Sarah about the time that Elisa had asked Debbie Kail about “ace” two days before Larry disappeared.

“You’re kidding,” Sarah said.

“That brings me to how much loyalty you’re feeling for Elisa McNabney,” Scheffel told her. “Trust me, Sarah, we’re going to catch her. She is not going to be able to escape us. What do you think she’s going to tell us when we get her? Who do you think she’s going to blame this on when we catch up with her? Do you think she’s going to stand up and take responsibility for what she did, or do you think she’s gonna try and put this off on someone else? And who do you think, of all the people around you, around her, is the person that she could set up to take the responsibility for what happened to Larry McNabney?”

“My name’s on everything,” Sarah said.

This opened up another lane for Scheffel. She asked if Sarah had ever signed Larry’s name to anything—like checks.

Sarah admitted that she had. She’d done it because Elisa had told her to, and said it was all right. She said she and Haylei had practiced signing Larry’s name, and then burned the practice sheet. She’d only signed Larry’s name because she felt like she had to, Sarah said. It was the only way they could get paid. She’d also signed Larry’s name to the back of a settlement check.

This was a little progress, and it left Scheffel thinking that maybe Sarah was getting ready to tell what had actually happened to Larry. She steered the conversation back to the discrepancy between Larry’s disappearance and the fact that he’d only been buried three to six weeks. What would Sarah guess had happened?

“Don’t they keep, like, cadavers in cold places?” Sarah asked.

“Refrigeration?” Scheffel suggested.

“Are you trying to say he was in a refrigerator someplace?”

“No, I’m asking,” Scheffel said. “I’m asking you.”

“I have no idea,” Sarah said, “where he could have been, or under what circumstances.”

Scheffel showed Sarah a photograph of the folded-up body.

“Oh my God,” said Sarah. She looked away from the picture.

“That’s how we found him. See how curled up he is, Sarah?”

Sarah burst into tears. “I can’t see that, I’ll be sick.”

“Well, this is the reality of homicide, okay? And the last time you saw Laurence McNabney, he didn’t look like this, did he?”

Sarah shook her head. “I have a really weak stomach,” she said.

“This is the reality of what’s happened,” Scheffel said. “This is not a game. I don’t know—has Elisa threatened you, that if you tell on her, she’ll implicate you in some way? Does she have something on you?”

“No,” Sarah said.

“Okay, the way to deal with a terrorist who’s holding something over your head is to take that power away from them,” Scheffel said. “To tell the truth, to stand with us against them.”

“I can’t look at that,” Sarah said again, meaning the picture.

“Laurence McNabney, a viable, living human being with faults like all of us, did not deserve to end up where we found him, in the manner we found him. And I’m sorry to have to press you, Sarah, but I can’t be sure that Elisa McNabney isn’t holding something over your head, or threatening your family so that you will stay silent about anything that you know about her involvement in this. I can’t read your mind.”

“I swear, I don’t know.”

“I know what killed him, and I don’t think you’re the one who did it, but I do think there’s a possibility that you know more than what you’re saying. And that’s because you’re afraid to say. Has she got something on you? People who make threats like that, they’re counting on you remaining silent.”

All the evidence pointed toward her involvement in Larry’s death, Scheffel told Sarah.

“Sarah, I don’t think for a minute that you signed on for anything more than just a good time,” Scheffel said. “There’s a world of difference between being sucked in to making errors of judgment versus committing homicides. Even if you helped cover it up after the fact, that can be dealt with. But I can’t help you fix what’s wrong unless I know what happened, and there’s only two people who know that, and that’s you and Elisa. If all you did was get involved after the fact, that can be dealt with. I’m so afraid that you’ll make the wrong choice, that you’ll be too afraid to step forward and say what it is that you know, because you’re afraid that if you’ll implicate yourself you’ll be in serious trouble. Because I have no doubt that’s what Elisa told you.”

“What else do you want me to say?”

“I want you to say the truth, whatever it is … but if you make me come after you, too, trust me, the evidence that we’re compiling will implicate you right along with her, unless you set yourself apart and say, ‘No, I signed on for a good time, I did not sign on for murder.’”