The narrator will not describe the precise method by which Richard used those borrowed belongings to lay a false trail, because it is not a thing that anyone needs explained, and because the how of framing an innocent person is not knowledge worth passing on.

It is enough to say that he used Elena’s own clothing to place her, falsely, at a scene she had never entered, and that he did it methodically, and that when he was finished he disposed of the weapon where it would be found and traced back to her.

Five years of physical evidence, the fingerprints, the blood, the fibers, all the overwhelming proof that had buried Elena Cole, had not been the residue of her guilt at all.

It had been manufactured, piece by piece, by the man now sitting in a lakeside cabin raising her child.