released from the hospital today. Otherwise, I assure you, I would have insisted on being present in the questioning of Mr. Swenson. And you better not ask him a single question until his lawyer gets here.”
“We won’t,” O’Donnell said. “I hope everything goes well with your wife.”
He didn’t deign to answer her, leaving without another word.
“That was interesting,” Tatum said. “At least we have something to start with.”
“Yup.” O’Donnell took out her phone and called Koch.
“Hey.” Koch picked up almost immediately.
“How’s it going with the warrant?”
“There’s some delay. It might take another hour before the judge reviews it.”
“Okay, listen, we have something else for you. Patrick Carpenter just told us that Swenson and Glover were friends.”
There was a pause. “Then we have enough for a warrant for sure,” Koch finally said.
“We have Swenson here, and we’ll do our best to keep him here, but we can’t arrest him, not yet.”
“I’ll try to get them to hurry.” Koch hung up.
O’Donnell slid the phone into her pocket and entered the interrogation room.
“Detective,” Swenson said, his voice tight. “I’ve been waiting for almost an hour. I want to be helpful, but it’s the weekend, and—”
“And we appreciate your help.” She sat down. “We just wanted to ask a few questions. We’ve been talking to congregation members all morning—perhaps Mr. Carpenter told you that when you called him.”
Swenson sat down, saying nothing. She noticed he had an ugly scratch on the lower side of his left cheek.
“How well did you know Catherine Lamb?” she asked, easing into it.
“I told the agent here I talked to her a few times. We ran a charity together once. That’s it.”
“What about Daniel Moore?”
“Just in passing. Again, I’ve already told—”
“Patrick Carpenter said that you and Moore are friends.”
His eyes wavered nervously. “I wouldn’t call us friends. I may have talked to him once or twice. He’s a friendly kind of guy.”
“When did you see him last?”
“I don’t remember. A while ago. I think he’s been gone for a few months.”
“Do you know where?”
“Not really. Like I said, we weren’t close.”
Time to tighten the screws. “How did you get that scratch?”
He touched his cheek. “I cut myself shaving.”
She thought of the specks of blood found on the keys. “That’s careless of you. You said that you talked to Catherine just a few times. But in her phone records, we have you calling her ten or twenty times.”
He tensed. “Like I said, we ran a charity together. We had to plan it out.”
“Was that charity five months ago?”
“Uh . . . yeah, I guess so.”
“We saw photographs from that event. Did you know you weren’t in any of the photos we initially got?”
“I was busy doing some administration. I guess I didn’t have time for a photo op. But I took some with my phone if you want proof—”
“Mr. Swenson, you misunderstood,” O’Donnell interrupted. “We initially didn’t get the photos. But when we asked the photographer, he told us you instructed him to delete all of the photos of you from the past two years. Luckily for us, he didn’t delete them. So we got to see all of them after all.”
She’d expected the widening in his eyes as he understood the implication. His gaze seemed to skitter around the room, as if searching for a way out. For a few seconds his body was frozen, tense.
And then a change came over him. His expression became blank, his posture lax. He leaned back and smiled, his teeth clenched tightly. “I think I’ll wait for my lawyer now.”
CHAPTER 61
One of O’Donnell’s earliest memories was watching the movie The NeverEnding Story. Her dad had brought the video home one day, telling her that it was a great movie, full of adventure. “You’ll love it,” he’d said, and she actually remembered the exact words and his smile, because it had turned out to be the first time she’d felt betrayed by her father.
It had started really well, with the strange creatures and the ominous dark Nothing. And her dad promised her that later there would be a beautiful furry dragon. She was excited to see the dragon and to find out more about the Nothing. But first Atreyu, and his white horse Artax, had to drudge through the Swamps of Sadness. The swamps inflicted deep sorrow on anyone who entered them. And halfway through, Atreyu’s horse suddenly stopped and let himself be swallowed by the swamp.
At first O’Donnell was tense, waiting to see how the horse would suddenly emerge, encouraged by his friend.