Van Durbin frowned. “But did it seem to you…? This just might be me, understand. But it seemed to me that she left the ending open to interpretation. Did it seem that way to you?”
Rupe forced his expression to turn thoughtful for a moment, then shook his head. “No, I can’t say that it did.”
“Hmm.” Van Durbin skimmed over everything he’d written down before flipping the notepad closed. He replaced it along with the pencil in his shirt pocket and stood up. “Well, I guess that’s everything. I can’t thank you enough for giving me a few minutes of your valuable time.”
“You’re welcome. Although I don’t feel like I contributed much.” Smile in place, Rupe went to the door and pulled it open.
Van Durbin was almost across the threshold when he stopped, turned, and tapped Rupe’s silk necktie with his index finger. “If I were you, Rupe, you know what would eat at me?”
It took all Rupe’s self-control not to brush away that finger, with its loose cuticle and the fingernail chewed down to the quick. “What’s that?”
“It would eat at me that the murder weapon never turned up. You and Moody determined that she was choked to death with her underwear, right?”
Rupe gave a noncommital nod.
“But the panties never turned up, did they? And you looked every-damn-where for them.”
“Obviously the jury didn’t think having them in evidence was necessary to convict.”
“Obviously,” Van Durbin said, frowning. “But I hate loose ends like that, don’t you, Rupe?”
The topic of Susan’s underpants seemed to have raised the temperature in Bellamy’s kitchen. Introducing that vital element into their discussion of the crime had been inevitable, but now Dent wished he’d let Bellamy bring it up first.
Too ill at ease to sit any longer in a tense silence, he got up from the table and took another aimless tour of the kitchen until his attention was drawn to a ceramic jug on the counter that contained a variety of stainless-steel doodads.
Pulling one out, he held it up and twirled it between his fingers. “What does this do?”
“It cores apples.”
“You don’t just eat around the core?”
But, not to be distracted, she asked, “Was your house searched?”
He returned the apple corer to the jug. “If by searched you mean turned inside out, then yeah. It was searched. Moody and an army of cops showed up with a warrant to look specifically for a pair of Susan’s underwear.
“They ransacked the place. Even confiscated my motorcycle. They took it apart piece by piece. I had it reassembled, but it was never the same, and I wound up having to get rid of it.”
He looked over at Bellamy, who appeared to be hanging on every word, but she said nothing, so he continued.
“That pair of panties was the Holy Grail of Moody’s investigation. His thinking was that the man who was caught with them was the deviant who’d used them to strangle her.”
She stared thoughtfully into near space. “Of all the indignities, the cruelties, that Olivia and Daddy were subjected to over Susan’s death, I believe that aspect of it was the hardest for them. It was certainly the most embarrassing. It implied any variety of dreadful things. Either she’d been molested or…”
“Or,” he stressed, “she’d willingly let the man remove them. Or she had taken them off herself. Which I’m inclined to believe.”
“Why?”
He stopped pacing and gave her a meaningful look. “The first time we went out.” She dropped her gaze to the tabletop.
“Also, there wasn’t any other indication of sexual assault,” he continued. “She wasn’t bruised or torn down there. No bite marks. No semen. Whatever took place before she was killed was consensual. Even Moody thought so.”
“Nevertheless, the missing underpants added a salacious element to the crime and made it all the more horrible.”
“And yet…” Placing his hands flat on the table, he leaned down close to her and said in a whispery voice, “The girl in your novel is choked to death in the same manner.”
“Because that’s what happened.”
“But doesn’t it spice things up, which equates to selling more books?”