with shallow, square leather seating and surprisingly dated honey-stained wood wall panels. I lower myself onto a vacant couch and wait for Cataldo to collect me.
She appears not even five minutes later, perfectly prompt and looking distinctly uncomfortable. Her mouth is turned down at the corners, and she tugs at the edge of her persimmon boatneck blouse, as if it’s a bad fit. It’s strange to see her in a black pencil skirt. She wore black trousers, sometimes khaki, and a rotation of sweaters and turtlenecks on campus. This must be her guest-at-the-FBI-field-office look.
Suddenly I feel underdressed in jeans.
“Olivia, good morning.” She flashes me a tight smile and leads me to a bank of elevators, where she uses a key card to get us up to the fifth floor. We pass a sea of cubicles and wind our way to the back of the floor, past the bathrooms and into a clearly disused cluster of offices. She makes small talk as we go, asking how my Christmas was, remarking on the windchill. I’m perfunctory with my answers. I’ll be doing more than enough talking over the next few hours, I know.
She leads me to a small office devoid of personality. Standard-issue furniture, no photographs or personal items other than a purple lattice-patterned Kleenex box.
“My temporary home,” Cataldo says with a grand gesture as she takes a seat behind the desk. I settle down in a cushioned black metal chair across from her. I’m slightly disappointed it’s not an interrogation room.
“Thank you for coming all the way up here to talk with me again.” She starts an ancient-looking digital recorder and rattles off the details of the interview. “As I mentioned on the phone, our techs have been unable to recover data on Emma’s iPhone, and seeing as it was her burner, we don’t have information on whatever second Apple account she created for it. If Tipton helped her set it up, he’s not saying, for obvious reasons.”
“It’s the only proof they were together, isn’t it?” I say. My stomach turns over. This means he could walk. Cataldo hums.
“Absent any forensics on the body—which, having been submerged in water, is not looking great—indeed we’ll be needing to corroborate his relationship with Emma via witness statements.”
“Do you know how he killed her?”
I remember that last time I asked the detective how Emma died, she wouldn’t tell me. This time, she considers me. I’m no longer a suspect. She turns off the recorder.
“Emma was strangled. That is confidential information, and you mustn’t repeat it.” She starts the recording again.
“Mr. Tipton does concede to being in the boathouse that night,” Cataldo continues. “However, he swears he did not see Emma. He would have had no reason to go into the rowing room, and so he didn’t find the body.”
“He’s lying,” I say. “He has to be. He did it.”
Cataldo inclines her head. “We are pressing him on that point. Your tip about Emma’s earring ended up bearing fruit. We found the other stud in Tipton’s office.”
I barely suppress a whoop of triumph. “Then that’s it. You have him!”
“Not quite. That’s why you’re here. Let’s dive right in.”
We spend the better part of the next hour going over all of “Beau’s” texts with Emma. I try to remember as many of them verbatim as I can. Cataldo writes everything down. Then she pulls out a cream-colored folder, flips it open, taps her pen on the papers inside. It’s upside down, but I can see it’s a timeline. “What I’m stuck on is Emma’s sweater in your room. How heavy of a sleeper are you usually?”
“Uh, it usually takes me a while to fall asleep, but once I’m really under, I sleep like the dead. And I was, uh…”
“You were drinking that night,” she finishes. “So it stands to reason that from eleven-thirty to midnight or shortly thereafter, you probably would have woken up if Emma had returned.”
I think about it. “Yeah, that makes sense.”
“But if someone were in your room closer to two? Could that have woken you up?”
“I had a nightmare,” I say. “That’s what woke me up.” Wasn’t it?
“It’s just…” Cataldo taps her pen some more. “According to Miss Montfort, they met in that secret room in the boathouse at midnight and were there until approximately one-thirty. Things were tense, and Emma left before they did, alive, according to them.”
Avery explained this to me, too. She and the other girls had invited Emma to party with them in the boathouse,