“I won’t use her name if you don’t want me to, but why not?”

“I think it would make her look bad, right now. She’s in medical school.”

Christine swallowed hard. So Zachary’s girlfriend was in med school. It was uncomfortably close to Donor 3319, who should have been in med school. She hoped it was a coincidence. “Why don’t you tell me her name, but I promise not to print it?”

“Still, no. She’d hate that. She was just here, she broke up with me.” Zachary flushed again, frowning. “I don’t blame her, she has to distance herself, with all this. Her family, her career, anyway, we were in trouble for a long time.”

“Oh, my. Sorry.” Christine remembered the corrections officer upstairs, telling her that the girlfriend had been here today. She tried to think of more questions, so she could see if his background matched Donor 3319. “Can I ask, does she go to med school in Pennsylvania?”

“Yes, Temple.”

Christine made a note, Temple Med. “Do you live together?”

“No. She lives in town, in Philly, and I live in Phoenixville. I travel for days at a time, to my accounts.” Zachary paused, hesitating. “Do we have to talk about her? If this is about me, we should talk about me.”

Christine nodded, trying to get on track. She was running out of time. “Okay, first, how old are you?”

“Twenty-four, and I didn’t even know Gail Robinbrecht, not really. I met her randomly and asked her out. I’d been with her the night before she was killed, and I was going to meet her again, but when I went to her house, like I say, she was dead. The police came and saw me there, and they thought I had done it.”

“Do you have any idea who would kill her?”

“No, I don’t even know her, it was a hookup. That’s it. I didn’t do it.”

Christine tried to get to the point. “Why don’t you tell me a little about yourself? Not about the murder, about you.”

“Okay, if you want.” Zachary frowned. “I’m an only child, and my parents have passed. My father was a pastor, and my mother worked however she could. Pastors, obviously, make no money. Her last job was in a high-school cafeteria.”

Christine knew it matched the profile, in that Donor 3319’s parents were religious. She remembered him writing that they would not approve of his donation, which was why he was requesting anonymity. “And where did you grow up, if I may ask?”

“We moved around because my father changed churches. We were Baptist and we went where the powers-that-be sent us. By the time I was fifteen, I had lived in twelve different states.”

“Oh my. Could you name a few of them?” Christine was wondering if one was Nevada. Donor 3319 had said that he was from Nevada, but he hadn’t mentioned anything about moving around.

“Let me see. New Mexico, Arizona, California for a lot of the time, then Colorado.”

“That’s a lot of moving around for a young child,” Christine said, relieved not to hear Nevada, but the list was incomplete. “Did you have a happy childhood?”

“No,” Zachary answered, without self-pity. “It wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t great. My parents were very strict. It wasn’t a happy household. It was disciplined. They had high goals for me. High expectations.”

“That must’ve been difficult,” Christine heard herself say, the words coming oddly naturally. Years of teaching had trained her to be empathetic, and she couldn’t untrain herself in a day.

“In a way it was, but I understand the way my parents were. They weren’t always that way.”

“You mean they changed?”

“Um, yes.” Zachary hesitated again. “Do you need to put this in the story? Like, is this for your story?”

Christine smiled at him, trying to put him at ease. “No, I won’t print it if you don’t want to. It’s off the record. I’m just trying to understand your background.”

“Well, okay, my parents changed after my baby sister died.”

Christine blinked. None of this had been on the online profile of Donor 3319. “I thought you said you were an only child.”

“I wasn’t always, I had a little sister. Her name was Bella. She passed away when she was four, in an accident. It was awful.” Zachary sighed, pursing his lips. “There was a development we lived in, like a townhouse development in Denver, that had a retaining wall at the back. After a really bad rain, water would fill up there.”

Christine tensed, guessing where the story was going. Still, it wasn’t on the online profile, so she was hoping that it proved Jeffcoat wasn’t Donor 3319.

“Anyway, my mother was working two jobs then. She had the day job at the cafeteria, and at night she worked in a hospital, working for a janitorial company.”

Christine made a note to stay on track. Mother worked in hospital.

“My mom had worked the night before and she was really tired, and she was playing with Bella and reading to her out back on the blanket, like they always used to do. I remember, I used to go with them.” Zachary swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple traveling visibly up and down. “Anyway, my mother fell asleep, she dozed off on the blanket. She had worked so late, she had only gotten two hours’ sleep. Bella must have walked to the water and fallen off the retaining wall, and she drowned.”

“I’m so sorry,” Christine said, surprised to find herself meaning it. The story had an emotional power she couldn’t deny, and it threw her off from making her mental note of comparisons with Donor 3319.

Lauren shook her head. “That must’ve been awful, I’m so sorry.”

“Thanks. I came home with my dad, and I found them. My mom was asleep, and I’m the one who found Bella. I jumped in but I couldn’t save her. It was horrible. For Bella, for my mother.” Zachary shook his head, stricken, and Christine could see grief etching lines into his handsome face, which made it hard to believe he was a sociopathic serial killer.

Zachary continued, his tone quieter, “We were never the same after that, as a family. We fell apart. My dad tried to understand it, make sense of it in God’s plan, all that. My mother was a woman of faith, too, and she prayed and prayed for forgiveness.” Zachary’s blue eyes glistened, but he blinked them clear. “She blamed herself for falling asleep, for letting it happen, for being careless. But she wasn’t careless, it could have happened to anyone. It was a mistake. She was only human, overworked, underpaid, doing it all. She became very depressed. They died two years ago, they were hit by a drunk driver.”