Bernard adjusted his glasses, bringing out his teacher voice. "You're wasting your time here, Agent Trent. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a class."
"Kayla was a good-looking girl," Will said. "I can see where it'd be hard to resist something like that."
"Please don't insult my intelligence," he said, picking up his briefcase off the floor. He started shoving in papers as he said, "I know my rights. I know I'm being recorded."
"Did you know you were being recorded two days ago when you left the school?"
For the first time, he looked nervous. "I'm allowed to leave campus during my off period."
"Where were you between the hours of eleven forty-five and one-thirty?"
"I drove around," he replied evenly. "It's the first few weeks of school. I had cabin fever. I just needed to get out."
"Get out where?"
"I drove into Virginia Highland," he said, referring to a local neighborhood with coffee shops and restaurants.
"Where did you go?"
"I don't remember."
"Where did you park?"
"I have no idea."
"Should I check for your red Volvo on the traffic cameras at Ponce de Leon and Briarcliff or Ponce and Highland?"
He didn't have an answer for that.
"Or did you cut through Emory? Should I check the traffic cameras there?" Will told him, "You might not have noticed, but the city has cameras at just about every major intersection in town."
"I was just driving around."
Will reached into his jacket pocket and took out a pad of paper and a pen that he had borrowed from the front office. "Write down your route, then I'll go check it out and we can talk this afternoon when school is over."
Bernard reached for the pen, then stopped himself.
Will asked, "Is there a problem? You said this was a misunderstanding, right? Just write out where you were. I'll have one of the patrolmen check it out, then we'll go over your story later."
The teacher took his own pen out of his jacket pocket and started to write. Will could see the nib of his fountain pen moving across the page in quick strokes. Bernard filled the first sheet, then turned to the next, writing more.
"That's enough," Will told him, taking back the tablet. He flipped from one page to the next, then back, before looking up at Bernard. "You teach normal kids, right? Not just the stupid ones."
He nodded, not correcting the gaffe.
Will pretended to read the pages, moving his eyes back and forth. "I just had a question for you, because I do this a lot. I ask people to write things down, and what I've found in the past is that the innocent people are usually so nervous that they forget things. They go back and forth and they scratch things out and they change words around. The guilty people just pick up the pen and start writing, and it's so easy for them because they're just making up shit as they go along."
Bernard put his pen back in his jacket pocket. "That's an interesting observation."
"Evan," Will said. "It's going to go a lot easier for you if we get Emma Campano back to her parents."
"I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm just as outraged as the next person that one of our students has been abducted from her home."
"Do you remember when you first started teaching?" Will asked. "The state did a background check on you, right? You had to go to the police station and give them your Social Security number and your address and then they took your fingerprints. Do you remember that?"
Bernard seemed to realize where this was going. His little game with the pen and wiping down the book had been for naught. "Vaguely."
"What's going to happen when the fingerprints from your card match the ones we found on the threatening letters you slid under Adam Humphrey's door?"
He seemed wholly unconcerned. "I imagine you'll be investigated for fabricating evidence."
"Even if Emma's dead, Evan, if you tell us where she is, a judge will look at that as a positive indication that you tried to do the right thing."
"That's your reality, not mine." He sat back in his chair, the smug look returning to his face.
"Kayla was a troublemaker. Everybody said that. Did she meet you outside of school? It wouldn't have been here, right? It would've been somewhere outside of school."
Bernard shook his head slowly from side to side, as if he felt sorry for Will.
"She's a good-looking girl. I mean, I know, man." Will felt his stomach clench like a fist. "I've been in this school ten minutes and I've already seen some girls..." He shrugged. "Different time, different place, I wouldn't say no."
Bernard took off his wire-rimmed glasses and used the tail of his shirt to clean the lenses. "Not that it's any of my business, but I'd be careful talking like that." He nodded toward the video camera in the corner. "People are watching."
"They were watching two days ago when you came running back to school, too."
He breathed on his glasses, as if there was a spot he needed to get. "I lost track of time. I was late for class."
"Really? I assumed it was because you had to change your pants."
He stopped, his shirttail still in his hand.
"Come stains are hard to wash out, aren't they?" Will smiled. He couldn't use the DNA from the rape kit, but it was perfectly legal for him to lie about finding another source. "Funny thing about come, Evan, it takes more than one washing to get it out."
"You're lying."
Will counted it off for him. "I've got a dead girl with your sperm inside of her and your bite marks on her breast. I've got video showing you changed your pants." Will didn't think about the risk he was taking as he lied. "The same pants we found with your DNA all over them."
"You can't go through my garbage without a search warrant and you have no—"
Will forced himself not to smile, though he ached to tell the man he'd fallen into a trap. "Once the city puts the trash in the truck, I can roll around naked in it if I want."
Bernard shrugged. "Kayla was seventeen. She consented. There's nothing illegal about two adults having sex."
Will chose his words carefully. "This wasn't a recent thing. You've been seeing her for a while."
"Are you asking that because Kayla's birthday was two months ago?" He shook his head, as if he was disappointed that the trap was so obvious. "Our first time having sexual intercourse was two days ago."
"She was a virgin?"
He gave a genuine laugh. "She was the sexual equivalent of McDonald's."
"We found your sperm in Kayla's car."
Again, he seemed unconcerned. "So we had sex in the car."
"Oral? Anal?"
He raised an eyebrow—another trap he saw coming from a mile away. "I watch the news, Mr. Trent. I know that Georgia's laws are very strict where sodomy is concerned."
The arrogant prick thought he had it all wrapped up. "You expect me to believe you just had sex with Kayla Alexander two days ago, but you had nothing to do with her murder?"