Hawkins makes a show of it for his partner watching from the cruiser, writing things down in his notebook as he asks Jessup to walk him through everything that happened last night, football game through right this minute.
“You don’t leave anything out,” Hawkins says. “You want to make this all go away, it’s a lot easier if I don’t get any surprises. Good or bad, you tell me.”
“You can trust Paul,” David John says.
Jessup wants it to be true, but he can’t help but think about what it means that Hawkins hides himself behind a badge and a uniform. Lying in wait. He knows he can trust his stepfather, but this cop is different. Doesn’t matter what David John says.
He mostly tells it straight. Jessup tells him about Corson kicking out the taillight in the parking lot, dinner at Kirby’s, getting pulled over—though Hawkins obviously knows that part, doesn’t correct Jessup or remind him that last night he said he didn’t know what happened to the taillight—about Corson confronting him at the party.
“About when did this happen?”
“Eleven o’clock.” He pulls out his phone. Looks at his texts to and from Deanne. “I texted my girlfriend at ten fifty-five. This was, at most, five minutes after that. The whole thing with Corson only lasted a couple of minutes.”
Hawkins stops writing. Looks at Jessup. “Some girl at the party videoed most of it. Keep that in mind. When you talk about what happened, you stick to the truth.”
For a moment, Jessup thinks he’s going to be sick. He can picture the video in his head: the grainy darkness, the headlights of Corson’s car, the interior light with the door open, the sick thud of Corson against the truck, the shaky movements of a girl holding her cell phone watching him lift Corson’s body into the Mercedes. But that’s not what Hawkins is talking about. The video isn’t from what happened in the driveway. Nobody saw that.
Jessup tries to tell himself it’s as if it never happened.
Hawkins continues. “You come off looking pretty good. You can tell Corson is drunk, and even though he’s clearly trying to provoke you, you don’t say or do anything dumb. Stand your ground without aggression, and the girl keeps it rolling. Even if you’d gotten into a scrap, that would have been okay. Anyway, the video follows Corson walking out the door with his friends, keeps shooting it until Corson gets in his car. Harder to see once she goes outside, but you can tell it’s Corson getting in the car by himself, driving away. Time stamp runs it from ten fifty-nine to about eleven ten.” He’s got his pen back on the pad again, writing. “Then what?”
“I don’t know. I was embarrassed,” Jessup says. “Wanted to leave but thought that would look weak.” He tells Hawkins about the beers, sees David John scowl at the drinking, but that’s a conversation for another time. “Left about eleven forty-five.”
“If we ask around, people will confirm that time frame?”
“Yeah. They should. I mean, I don’t know how much kids were watching the clock.” The picture! He can hear how excited he sounds, almost pitiful, like a puppy looking for attention. “There’s a picture! Most of the guys from the team. Right before I left.” He scrolls through until he finds it on his phone. Hawkins and David John look at it. Jessup points at the time: 11:43 p.m.
“And then you came straight home? Because there’s some question that maybe Corson came back, looking to finish what he started, and it would be good if we knew where you are the rest of the night.”
David John starts to say something, but Jessup cuts him off with a quick “no.”
He knew what David John was going to say. His stepfather was about to vouch for him, to say that Jessup came in about midnight, that he remembers it was midnight because it was earlier than he expected, and he looked at the clock just as Jessup came through the door, and he’d be happy to get on a stand and swear the whole truth and nothing but the truth that Jessup came straight home from the party, no chance for anything to happen. Unbidden, the image of Ricky in the alley, the security camera filming at 7.5 frames per second, herky-jerky: David John looking at the camera, reaching into the truck, Holmes’s body turned over, and then, whatever it is that happens out of sight of the camera. Nothing David John would admit to, but the cops finding a knife in Holmes’s hand, only one set of prints, like it was wiped clean.
David John looks like he’s going to try to speak again, so Jessup is even more forceful. “No.” He hesitates. He doesn’t want to bring Deanne into this, but if he doesn’t . . . He can’t ask it of David John. He can’t do that to his mother, to Jewel. Not again. “I went right to my girlfriend’s.”
Hawkins clicks the ballpoint closed, open, closed, open. Writes something on the pad.
“Name?”
“She snuck out,” Jessup says, evading the question. “I don’t want her to get in trouble. But I texted her that I was already driving . . . uh, at . . . eleven fifty.”
Seven minutes, Jessup thinks. Seven minutes from when he took the photo in the living room of Victoria Wallace’s house until he texted Deanne back. And in that seven minutes it’s like a black hole opened and swallowed his whole world. He needs to get those seven minutes back. He needs to rescue himself.
“With the snow, I was going slow, but I drove straight from the party, picked her up at”—he looks at the texts again—here—“eleven fifty-nine p.m. A minute shy of midnight.” Shows Hawkins the phone.
“And then what?”
“We parked in the woods in the parking lot by the reservoir.”