“Just like no one suspected that you were lying when you told Chief Taylor you’d seen Eric’s car heading out to the lake with Shannon in it?” Dorsey asked.

Kim stared at Dorsey.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said, a flush creeping from her chest to her face. “I would never have lied about such a thing.”

“Of course you would. You did. I read Shannon ’s diary, Kim. I know that you had a ‘powerful bad crush’ on Eric Beale,” Dorsey said calmly, her eyes never leaving Kim’s face. “That’s a quote from Shannon ’s diary. I believe she may have been quoting you.”

Kim’s face took on that deer-in-the-headlights look.

“You asked him to the winter formal and he turned you down,” Dorsey went on. “You were plenty pissed off when you heard that someone else had asked him a few days later and he’d said yes.”

Kim shrugged. “It was just a dance.”

“You were one angry little girl, according to Shannon ’s diary. ‘Kimmie says she’s going to show him.’ That’s what Shannon wrote, just a day or two before she disappeared.”

“That’s just something you say when you’re angry.” Kim dismissed it with a careless wave of her hand.

Dorsey leaned forward.

“Well, I guess you sure showed Eric, huh? Putting the police onto him, making him out to look like a liar to the cops sure did show him, didn’t it?”

“No, no, I…” Kim froze.

Dorsey stood, her hands in the pockets of her skirt. “ Shannon disappears, and you have the perfect opportunity to get even.”

“It wasn’t supposed to…I mean, he’d been with her that afternoon, he never denied that. And there was that shirt they found in his car, with her blood on it.”

“You put him in Chief Taylor’s head, Kim. If you hadn’t done that, they wouldn’t have suspected him of lying. They would have looked for other explanations for her disappearance.”

“That’s not how it was. They would have blamed him anyway. Everyone knew that he had a thing for her. Sooner or later, his name was going to come up. I never thought they were going to arrest him. I thought they’d just question him, scare him a little. Listen, it never occurred to me that Shannon wasn’t going to come back. I thought she’d show up and the whole thing would just go away. Until he said he knew she was dead and that Eric killed her.”

“Who do you mean, he?”

“Chief Taylor.” Kim’s eyes were welling and threatening to overflow.

“Chief Taylor told you that?” Dorsey fought to keep her voice even.

Kim nodded. “He said he knew Eric was lying. He said he knew Eric killed her, that Eric had to pay for it. He said if I was any kind of real friend, I’d-” She bit her bottom lip.

“You’d do what?”

“I’d help him get Eric to confess.”

“By lying about having seen Shannon in Eric’s car where and when you did?”

“I told Chief Taylor that I’d seen Shannon in Eric’s car that afternoon. And I did. I walked Carrie and Heather partway home, to Fifth Street, then I turned around and started walking home. That’s when I saw them. Eric and Shannon. They passed me out near where Fifth Street runs into the park.”

“And that’s what you told Chief Taylor?”

Kim nodded. “Yes, but he kept saying, ‘Well, they could have been going through the park to the lake, couldn’t they?’” She shrugged. “Sure, you can get to the lake by going through the park. So, I said, ‘Sure, I guess.’ Then the next thing I knew, he was saying that I saw them on the road that leads out to the lake. Which isn’t really what I said.”

“I’m confused. Tell me what the difference is?”

“The road you generally would take if you were going to the lake is Lakeview. It only goes to the lake. You can get to the lake by driving through the park, and that’s what I said. But that’s not what the chief ended up telling people. He was saying I saw them on Lakeview.” She began to cry. “Before I knew it, everyone was saying Eric took her out to the lake and killed her and hid her body somewhere out there. Everyone was making such a big deal out of it, that I was the one who saw them last. That I was going to be the one who helped the police get Shannon ’s killer.”

“You helped set him up, Kim.”

“For God’s sake, I was fourteen years old. I didn’t understand that it would make a difference. It was like, once Chief Taylor said that, it seemed like it could have been true.”

“And eight years later, when they were about to execute Eric? You were twenty-two.” Dorsey stared at her with contempt. “What was your excuse then?”

“It never occurred to me that it would make any difference. Everyone believed Eric had killed her. Everyone said it was true…” Kim’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Honest to God, I believed he killed her. Chief Taylor told me I had a chance to help catch her killer. Shannon was my friend, and I believed he’d killed her. I didn’t think it mattered.”

“The truth always matters,” Dorsey replied.

“What”-Kim licked her lips nervously-“what’s going to happen to me?”

“I’d like to see you prosecuted for perjury, but realistically-and unfortunately-something tells me that isn’t likely to happen after all these years. Though you never know what the D.A. is likely to do in an election year. This case being as big as it is, he might come after you to prove he’s really tough on crime, regardless of how old that crime might be. He might want to make an example out of you, Kimmie.” Dorsey started toward the door, then turned and asked, “Did you know what was going on between Jeff Feeney and the Beale brothers?”

“I know they hated each other, but I never knew what it was all about.” Kim’s bottom lip was trembling, her eyes brimming with tears again. “All I know is that Jeff gave them a hard time whenever he saw them.”

“Jeff gave them a hard time, not the other way around?”

Kim nodded her head. “I don’t know about Tim, but I always had the feeling Eric went out of his way to avoid Jeff, but I never knew why.”

“Thanks,” Dorsey said curtly as she turned the doorknob to leave.

“Agent Collins?” Kim still stood in the center of the room, crying softly. “I’m really, really sorry. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

“Tell that to Eric Beale’s family.”

Dorsey let herself out without looking back.

19

Dorsey did her best to hold fast to the reins of her temper. That Kim had been blithely getting on with her perfect life while Shannon had been working the streets and Eric lay dead stung her in the way that injustice always did. She would have loved to have been able to tell Kim she could expect the chief of police to show up any day to arrest her for perjury, but she knew that was unlikely. She’d be lucky if she could get Chief Bowden to go to the D.A., especially when Chief Taylor was long gone and the new version of Kim’s story could not be verified.

On her way back to the motel, she made one more swing past the Randalls’, but Andrew’s car still wasn’t there. Where the hell was he? His silence seemed like just one more good reason to be pissed off.

She wasn’t going to call him again. She’d left messages, he knew she needed to talk to him. She had Shannon ’s diary, and though it contained no smoking gun, it had put her on to Kimmie’s lie. And it could serve another purpose. No one knew what was in it, and if they let it be known it was in their possession, would someone step up to try to find out what was in it?

Right, that’ll happen, she snorted. Only on TV and in murder mysteries did the guilty party try to steal such potential evidence. In her experience, it just never happened the way it did on TV. Still, when it came to the Randall family, they might want to call her bluff. Who knew how they might react?

She pulled into the parking lot just as her phone began to ring.

Her father’s home number appeared in the caller ID, and she answered with a demanding, “Where the hell have you been, Pop?”