“What was Peter’s reaction to the news?”
She shrugged. “He was already up at school for the Saturday performance.”
I went through the whole night with her again and her story didn’t waver. She was somber, dry-eyed, and pale, answering questions directly without fuss or too much explanation. Jake and I stepped out after another half hour.
“I don’t know, Del.” He wiped a hand over his mouth, avoiding the eyes of everyone else who’d come back to the station after the funeral. The phones were still ringing off the hooks.
I sighed. “We’ve got nothing to hold her with at the moment. Right now all we can prove is she supplied the murder weapon that we don’t have. We’ll have to wait until Lund’s DA shows up to get his story and go from there.”
I walked Mary Beth out myself to make sure the reporters kept their distance. Cameras flashed from the other side of the parking lot, but no one came up to harass her. They probably didn’t know she was our suspect’s wife.
“What’d you decide about the baby?” I asked as she opened her truck door.
She seemed distracted by the reporters, then shook herself and climbed up into the dusty cab. “Women use sperm donors all the time.”
“You know, Mary Beth, when your parents had you, it was like they’d gotten a second life.”
Her face seemed frozen, waiting.
I glanced at her stomach. “Maybe it’ll be the same for you.”
For the first time since she walked into the conference room she looked like she might cry. She closed her eyes and nodded and said she hoped so, before closing the door and driving away.
The DA, such as he was, arrived over an hour later. Jake had gone out to get Dairy Queen for everyone, but I couldn’t eat. I drank a quart of coffee and did some paperwork, warning Nancy not to disturb me until the lawyer showed up. When he did, looking about twelve years old and nervous as hell, Jake and I took him back to introduce him to his client. Then Lund cold-cocked us all with his announcement that he wanted to confess to murder.
Jake was excited, I could tell, but I couldn’t quite latch on to the feeling. Lund had gone from swearing up and down he hadn’t killed Hattie when we arrested him to coolly confessing that he had, less than two hours later. I pulled him and his lawyer into the conference room and grilled him on the details.
“How did you get the knife?”
“It was lying right outside the door.” He spoke quietly to the table, not looking at a single person.
“I was trying to leave after we had sex. I thought it was just one last time and that she would give me my money back like she promised, but she said she’d already spent it. Then she threatened me. She said she was going to tell the guidance counselor at school about us if I didn’t agree to go away with her. I saw the knife and picked it up.”
“And then what?”
He closed his eyes. Everyone inside the room was absolutely silent, even the lawyer.
“I was just going to scare her with it. I didn’t plan to hurt her, but she kept insisting that I leave Mary and go with her to New York. I just wanted her to go away. I wanted my life back, before any of this had happened. Before her. Before I moved to this godforsaken town. I backed her into the corner and pointed the knife at her, told her to leave me and my family alone. She . . . she started laughing and I just snapped. I stabbed her.”
“Where?”
It took him another minute to answer, but when he did his voice was the same. Soft. Emotionless.
“In the chest. She fell over.”
“And then what did you do?”
“I slashed her face. I didn’t want to see her dead face looking at me. I wanted to make it go away.”
That fit with the remorse bit the profiler talked about and was consistent with the wounds.
“What did you do with the knife?”
“I threw it in the lake along with her purse. Then I went home and burned my clothes and took a shower.”
“Where did you burn your clothes?”
“In the fire pit behind the garage. I used lighter fluid and made sure all the ashes had scattered.”
“Did your wife or your mother-in-law see you come home?”
“No.” He paused and swallowed. “I didn’t see anyone. I went straight to my room—the office, I mean—and stayed there for the rest of the night. I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking about . . . the future.”
I rubbed my chin and leaned back in the chair. Lund’s head hung from his body like some useless, dead weight and he sat absolutely still; I could barely tell he was breathing.
“Why her purse?”
He glanced up at that, for the first time in the interview, but his eyes skittered immediately away.
“Why’d you take her purse, Peter?” I asked again.
“I needed to get the key.”
Jake’s eyes flashed and I leaned back in.
“What key?”
“She had a key to a locker at the Rochester bus station. She’d said everything we needed to leave town was in there. She had a suitcase ready to go and two one-way tickets, in both of our names, to New York City.
“She held it up when I asked about the money and explained what it was. Then she put it back in her purse and started threatening me. Later—afterwards—I realized I needed to take the key; otherwise the whole affair would be discovered. I didn’t know then about the condom, that my DNA would be identified. So I took her purse and took the key out of it, then threw it in the lake, too.”