He was shutting them out again, refusing to talk to them, refusing to give them anything that might actually help. Paige had to hold back her frustration. It seemed, though, that Christopher wasn’t going to do that much.
“Listen to me,” he said. “If you don’t start talking, then I have to assume that you have something to hide. Your lawyer got you out, but it’s on probation, right? Forget the murder, just the fact that you brandished a weapon at two FBI agents and ran will be enough to revoke that.”
“You wouldn’t,” Zane said, but Paige could hear the fear there in his voice.
“Not if you start talking. Where were you last night? Around midnight.”
Zane glared back at Christopher, still looking like he might not say anything out of sheer spite. He looked over at his lawyer, who nodded to him, obviously encouraging him. The moment he did that, Paige felt a hint of worry. If the lawyer was that confident, what did that mean?
“I was at a showcase!” Zane said it as if it were the most demeaning thing he could have been doing. As if it were almost worse than the possibility of him being a killer. “Up on stage at the Blue Zephyr, not getting paid, and getting told that my act wasn’t ‘edgy’ enough. They kept me waiting around for two hours, and barely gave me five minutes on stage. They mostly just wanted me there so that they could try to get me designing effects for one of their young guys.”
Meaning that he had an alibi with plenty of people. People had been staring at him on stage. He simply couldn’t have been there to kill Clarissa Bale.
“You really think this could be me?” he said. “You think I have time to do anything like this? I work for a living. I’m too busy producing effects for people, working on my act, trying to get noticed after fifteen years away!”
There was a force there that made Paige recoil. The words also devastated her, shredding her last hope that Zane might be the killer.
At the same time though, there was something about Zane’s words that Paige latched onto. Zane said he didn’t have the time to commit murder? So, who did?