Chapter 61

61

Two days later, Jenna sits in the now-familiar interview room, her lawyer straight-backed and alert beside her. She’s not going to say anything. She has no intention of confessing. She doesn’t feel guilty. They had it coming.

Detective Reyes is staring at her as if he knows everything, as if he can get right inside her head and read her thoughts. Good luck to him. It’s dark in here, inside her head. But she knows they don’t have any physical evidence, despite what they’ve said. They can’t have found the bloodied disposable suit and gloves and everything else. She knows they haven’t. They’re bluffing.

“Have you ever driven Irena’s car before?” Reyes asks.

So they know about the car. She figured that’s why they arrested Irena. But why have they let her go? Irena doesn’t have an alibi for that night. Jenna knows that. She was going to go home after Easter dinner at the Mertons’ and go to bed with a good book. That’s what she said.

Have they figured out that somebody else might have used her car? Irena would have told them about the spare keys, trying to save herself. But they all knew that Irena kept a spare set of keys in the backyard.

“Have you ever driven Irena’s car before?” Reyes repeats.

Her lawyer has told her to deny everything. “No.”

“That’s interesting,” Reyes says, “because we have DNA evidence putting you in the driver’s seat of her car. We found a hair from your head.”

“That’s impossible,” Jenna says quickly, thinking so that’s what they found, that’s their physical evidence. She’s fucked up, she realizes now, her heart pounding, saying she’d never been in Irena’s car. It’s hard to think clearly, in this small, hot room, with everyone staring at her. She can feel herself starting to perspire and she brushes her hair back nervously.

“What is the relevance of this?” the attorney asks.

Reyes answers. “We have a witness who saw Irena’s car—he remembered her vanity plate—parked at the end of the Mertons’ driveway on the night of the murders.”

Now the attorney gives her a quick glance and looks away. “We’re done, no more questions,” the attorney says. “Unless you have something else?”

Reyes shakes his head. The lawyer rises. “Come on, Jenna, we can go.”

But Jenna takes her time, her confidence rebounding. She says, “It’s perfectly understandable how a hair from me got in Irena’s car. I always hug her when I see her, and usually she gets into her car right afterward. That must be how the hair got there.” She rises to her feet to leave.

“The thing is,” Reyes says, his frustration showing, “we know Irena was at home that night. She was on the phone, talking to a friend, at the relevant time. We know someone else must have used her car that night. And we haven’t found DNA from anybody else in her car, just yours. And we know you found out earlier that night that your father was going to change his will.”

“That’s never going to be enough, and you know it,” the attorney says. “As my client has pointed out, that hair could have been a transfer from a hug.”

Jenna smirks at the detective and follows her attorney out of the room without another word.