Chapter 50

IN THE DAYS that followed Slade’s arrest, the news reported that the police had found traces of Katherine’s blood on the floor mat in Slade’s pickup. They’d also determined that the downward angle of the stab wounds on her body meant that Katherine’s killer was likely to be taller than she was and right-handed. And probably not a short lefty, like me. Finally, they’d found evidence, Slade’s DNA, under Katherine’s fingernails.

Dakota had convinced Slade to hide near the dugout with latex gloves and a stocking over his head. Before the kegger, Dakota went to Katherine’s house, pretending she wanted to make up after their most recent fight. While she was there, she took one of the kitchen knives. At the kegger she met Slade by the dugout and gave him the knife. Later she told Katherine she wanted to speak to her in private about everything that had happened between them and suggested that Katherine go to the dugout and wait for her.

Katherine went to the dugout, where Slade was hiding and drinking. He heard her coming and stepped out in his disguise with the knife. But Katherine recognized him. Assuming that he was only trying to scare her, and that this was his revenge for her getting me to break up with him, she laughed and taunted him, saying that if he was stupid enough to do something like this, then she was glad she’d gotten me to break up with him, because he really didn’t deserve me.

Until that moment, Slade had believed Dakota’s lie—that I’d broken up with him because of another guy. But now he learned that it was Katherine who’d engineered the breakup. And he lost it. There was no other way to explain it. When he thought of all the pain she had randomly caused him, all the hope she had so easily and callously destroyed, he just plain freaked out.

There was a slight struggle, just enough for Katherine to get some traces of his skin under her nails. Then he stabbed her.

He ran across the ball field to his truck and left. Then he stopped and called Dakota to tell her what had happened and say that he was going to turn himself in to the police. But Dakota’s initial reaction was that she was almost as much to blame for the murder as he was, and she convinced him not to do it. She promised him she would take care of it.

She had connections.

Dakota took care of it by sending me to the dugout to look for Katherine, then following with a crowd of kids. She took the photo of me beside Katherine’s body, then posted it on the Internet.

So why were the police looking for me even though they suspected that a tall righty had committed the murder? Because they had the bloody murder weapon with my fingerprints. Because they had the photo of me beside Katherine’s body with the knife in my hand. Because I ran away from the murder scene. And because it was just possible, though unlikely, that I was ambidextrous and had knocked Katherine to the ground before stabbing her with the knife in my right hand.

Finally, there was the possibility that the killer and I had acted together. That we’d planned it, and that even though someone else had been the one who’d stabbed her, I’d been an accomplice in the crime.