“HERE IT IS,” PIERSON said when he found the jacket in the hall closet of the house, connected to the rear of the hotel, where his family lived. He held out the jacket for the two police officers to see. “Why are you interested in it?” he asked in a monotone that suggested the question was posed automatically rather than out of any curiosity.
“Your wife was wearing the jacket when I saw her in the woods, the night she was killed,” Nathan told him. “It wasn’t included in the list of things found on or near the body, though. Given that it wasn’t very warm out there in the woods, I couldn’t imagine why your wife would have taken the jacket off. The absence suggested to me that she was killed somewhere other than where her body was found. It could have been that she was killed in another part
