One Night. No Alibis

Chapter five: Fractures

Thursday morning, before Ava could get to the detective's office, Zach called and told her not to go. Not yet. He said they needed to talk first. She pushed back. He said please, in a voice that was stripped of its usual edges. She went.

They met in the parking lot of the library, which was open but not busy at eight-thirty in the morning. Logan was already there. Riley arrived a few minutes after Ava. Caleb came last, hands in his jacket pockets, looking at the asphalt.

'There's information on that phone that doesn't just implicate whoever threatened her,' Logan said. 'It implicates some of us. I don't know exactly what's on it, but I know Sienna. She saved everything. She never threw anything away that could be used later.'

'So you want to look through it before we hand it over,' Ava said.

'I want us to understand what we're handing over.'

'That's tampering with evidence in a murder investigation.'

'We don't know it's murder yet,' Caleb said quietly.

'The messages alone make it murder,' Ava said.

The argument that followed was not clean or directed. It spread into accusations that hadn't been explicitly stated before. Zach said Logan was only worried about protecting himself. Logan said Zach had been defensive since day one and everyone had noticed. Riley told them both to stop. Caleb said almost nothing but his hands kept moving in his pockets, and once he started to say something and stopped himself, and Ava watched the shape of that stopped sentence.

'Why are you so quiet, Caleb?' she asked, during a brief lull.

He looked at her. 'I'm listening.'

'You've been listening since Saturday night. You haven't said anything that costs you anything.'

Something shifted in his face, very briefly. 'I don't have anything to hide, Ava.'

'Neither do I,' Zach said immediately, which was the kind of thing you said when you did.

Riley was crying quietly by this point, not dramatically, just steadily, the kind of crying that had been building for days. 'She was our friend,' she said. 'She was our friend and we're standing in a parking lot arguing about what to hand over to the police. Does that seem right to anyone?'

The question had no good answer.

They went back and forth for another twenty minutes. In the end Ava said she was going to the detective that morning with the phone, exactly as they had agreed, and whoever wanted to object could come with her and object in person. Nobody followed her. Nobody stopped her either.

What she noticed, in the rearview mirror as she pulled out of the parking lot, was that Zach had his phone out and was moving through it quickly, with the specific purposeful speed of someone deleting rather than scrolling. It was a small thing. It might have meant nothing. Phones held a thousand things that had nothing to do with Sienna Cross.

She filed it anyway.