Each of his fingers tapped once on the table. “I should tell you that my monitor went off at 3:12 yesterday afternoon. I called my probation officer immediately. She arrived over three hours later to reset it. She interrupted the cocktail party before my wedding ceremony.”
Leigh hadn’t noticed the ring on his finger, but she saw him noting the lack of a ring on hers. She crossed her arms, asking, “You realize how this looks, right? You show up for jury selection on your rape trial with the kind of defensive wounds a man gets from a woman fighting him off, and then you add to that the documented fact that your ankle monitor was off for over three hours?”
“Is that bad?”
Leigh remembered their conversation yesterday morning. This was all part of his plan. Every step of the way, he made things harder for her. “Andrew, you’ve got four other documented occasions that your ankle monitor alarm went off. Each time, it took three to four hours for probation to respond. Did it ever occur to you that the prosecutor would argue that you were testing the system to see how long it takes for someone to come out?”
“That sounds very incriminating,” Andrew said. “Good thing my lawyer is highly motivated to argue my innocence.”
“There’s a huge difference between innocent and not guilty.”
His mouth twitched in a smile. “Nuance?”
Leigh felt the tingle of fear trace up her spine. He had seamlessly managed to reassert his dominance. He didn’t know that Leigh had revealed the truth to Walter, but Walter had never really been a weapon in Andrew’s arsenal. The videos were all he needed. Either by whim or through his fail-safe, he could end Leigh and Callie’s lives.
She opened her purse and found her make-up bag. “Come here.”
Andrew stayed seated. He wanted to remind her who was in charge.
Leigh unzipped her bag. She laid out primer, concealer, foundation, and powder. The asshole had gotten lucky again. All of the damage was on the left side of his face. The jury would be seated to his right.
She asked him, “Do you want this or not?”
He stood up, making his motions slow and deliberate, letting her know that he was still in charge.
Leigh felt the panic start to well inside of her chest as he sat down in front of her. He had the uncanny ability to turn his malevolence off or on. Being close to him, Leigh felt the revulsion roil her stomach. The tremble was back in her hands.
Andrew smiled, because this was what he wanted.
Leigh squeezed primer onto the back of her hand. She found a sponge in her bag. Andrew leaned closer. He smelled of musky cologne and the same mint that had been on his breath the day before. Leigh’s fingers felt awkward on the sponge as she dabbed at the bite marks on his neck. The bruises imprinted around the teeth marks were vivid blue, but they would probably turn black over the weekend, just in time for the trial.
Leigh said, “You’re going to need to hire a professional to do this Monday morning.”
Andrew winced when she moved up to the gash in his jaw. The skin was angry and red. Specks of fresh blood wept into the sponge. Leigh didn’t use a delicate hand. She loaded up a brush with concealer and jammed the bristles deep into the wound.
He hissed air between his teeth, but he didn’t pull away. “Do you like hurting me, Harleigh?”
She softened her touch, repulsed by the fact that he was right. “Turn your head.”
He kept his eyes on her as his chin moved to the right. “Did you learn how to do this when you were little?”
Leigh switched to a larger brush for the foundation. Her skin tone was darker than his. She would need to use more powder.
“I remember you and Callie used to show up with black eyes, cut lips.” Andrew gave another low hiss as she used her fingernail to scrape away a trickle of blood from his chin. “Mom would say, ‘Those poor girls and their crazy mother. I don’t know what to do.’”
Leigh felt a pain in her mouth from clenching her teeth. She had to get this over with. She found the powder, another brush. She caked it onto his wound, using her finger to feather out the edges.
“If only she had called the police, or children’s services,” Andrew said. “Think about how many lives she could’ve saved.”
“Jacob is my second chair,” Leigh said, because talking about work was the only way to keep herself from screaming. “He’s my associate. I mentioned him the other day at Bradley’s. Jacob will be handling the procedural side, but I’ll let him interview some of the prospective jurors if it seems like they’ll respond better to a man. You need to cut the bullshit around him. He’s young, but he’s not stupid. If he picks up on anything—”