Then No One Can Have Her by Caitlin Rother Page A

spare until he got back to town. He didn’t get a chance to put it in until 10 P.M .
    From there, Brown moved on to the details of Steve’s bike ride.
    â€œI don’t really mountain bike very often,” Steve said, adding that he’d been mostly trail running lately.
    But that night, Steve said, he drove to the top of a hill near Granite Mountain to ride on a trail off Love Lane, near where he and Carol had once owned property, off Rainmaker. He said he parked near there and rode down the hill to the trailhead. The trail is relatively flat, he said, which made it popular with mountain bikers and horse riders. However, he didn’t see anyone else on the trail that night, and he didn’t think anyone could prove where he was.
    He was right. As Mike Sechez, the prosecution investigator, said later, “We never found a single person who saw his car parked anywhere.” Sechez added that Steve also never gave the detectives a reason why he picked that particular trail other than he wanted some exercise.
    The trail area that Steve described was about a mile from Carol’s house, across Williamson Valley Road, about a twenty- or twenty-five-minute drive from Steve’s condo. Asked to draw a map on the dry-erase board and to show detectives where he’d parked his car and ridden his bike, Steve did so, indicating that the trail was on the south side of Love Lane.
    â€œDid you happen to get those scratches there?” Huante asked.
    â€œUp higher in the basin, where it starts to get—”
    â€œYou’ve got a lot of scratches. I was watching your legs—”
    â€œâ€”brushed by something on the left,” Steve finished, agreeing with Huante that the bushes can be thorny and scratchy if you ride too close to them.
    Steve said he started his ride around six-thirty, and thought he got back to the car around 9 P.M . He then had to break down the bike to get it to fit into his car. He’d driven back into town before he realized that he had a spare battery to put into his phone.
    Moving on to Steve’s relationship with Carol, Brown asked if she was a “confrontational person.”
    â€œShe’s not a diplomat. She doesn’t connect particularly well,” Steve replied. “She doesn’t have a lot of—she doesn’t socialize a lot. She can have some sort of rough edges.”
    â€œHas she ever been aggressive or violent toward you or her daughters?”
    â€œNot violent, but she was pretty inappropriate,” Steve said. “She got a little angry at Charlotte. She’s gotten really angry enough to be very dramatic with me during the worst of the divorce process.” But he added that he didn’t think Carol would ever get physical during a confrontation. “She just argues or, you know, gets verbal.”
    Asked if his daughters ever mentioned Jim Knapp and Carol arguing, Steve started yawning and apologized, which, looking back later, seemed like a telling response, as if he didn’t perceive Jim as posing any danger.
    â€œI’m really tired,” Steve said. “I’m really sorry.”
    At this point, when Steve said more forcefully that he wanted to leave, Brown said they weren’t finished asking questions. He then read Steve his Miranda rights, saying they still weren’t clear on some points and needed him to go over them again.
    Asked what he’d been wearing on his bike ride, Steve said he’d had on some gray Patagonia shorts, a white Lycra Nike top, ankle socks, a helmet and red Lake clip-in shoes. No gloves that day.
    â€œIs there any reason why your blood or anything would be at the residence?” Brown asked.
    â€œNo. I haven’t been at the house.”
    â€œOr DNA or your fingerprints?”
    â€œNo, okay, well, I mean, I don’t know how long fingerprints are around.”
    â€œAny reason why your bicycle tracks would be on the property?” Brown