“Okay, so we get the server.”
“You mean breaking and entering?” Leigh had to draw a hard line. “No, Walter. I’m not going to let you do that, and it solves nothing. Andrew still has the originals.”
“So help me think of another way.” He was clearly irritated by her logic . “Maddy needs her mother. All she did all day was cry and ask me where you were.”
The thought of Maddy calling her name, of Leigh not being there, was gut-wrenching.
She told Walter, “I’m sorry I’m such a shitty mother. And wife. And sister. You were right. I try to keep everything separate and all that ends up doing is punishing everyone else.”
Walter looked down at the ground. He didn’t disagree with her. “We steal the server, all right? And then we need to find the originals. Where would Andrew keep them? They won’t be in the same place as the server. Where does he live?”
Leigh pressed together her lips. He wasn’t thinking this through. Reggie’s office was probably closed at night. He had no visible security. The hasp lock on his closet would be easy to break. All it would take was a screwdriver to back out the screws.
Andrew’s house had cameras and a security system and it would more than likely have Andrew, who had already murdered one person and made it clear he was willing to hurt many more.
“Leigh?” Walter said. He was ready to do this. “Tell me about Andrew’s house. Where does he live?”
“We’re not Ocean’s Eleven, Walter. We don’t have a ninja and a safe-cracker.”
“Then we—”
“Blow up his car? Burn down his house?” Leigh could get just as crazy as he could. “Or maybe we could torture him until he tells us. Strip him down, chain him to a chair, rip out his fingernails, pull out his teeth. Is that what you were thinking?”
Walter rubbed his cheek. He was doing the same thing Leigh had done the first year she had moved to Chicago.
Dr. Patterson. Coach Holt. Mr. Humphrey. Mr. Ganza. Mr. Emmett.
Leigh had come up with thousands of gory fantasies where she ended their disgusting existence—burning them alive, cutting off their dicks, humiliating them, punishing them, destroying them—but then she had realized that her homicidal rage had died in the Waleskis’ dreary kitchen on Canyon Road.
“When I killed Buddy,” she told Walter. “I was in this—I think it was a fugue state. It was me. I did it. But it wasn’t me. It was the girl he ’d molested in the car. It was the girl whose sister he’d raped, the one who kept getting pushed around and touched and fondled and laughed at and called a liar and a bitch and a whore. Do you know what I’m saying?”
He nodded, but there was no way he truly got it. Walter had never kept his keys jutting between his fingers as he walked to his car. He had never darkly joked with himself about being raped in a garage because physical vulnerability was not in her husband’s range of emotions.
Leigh pressed her palm flat to Walter’s chest. His heart was pounding. “Sweetheart, I love you, but you’re not a murderer.”
“We can find another way.”
“There’s not—” She stopped, because Reggie Paltz had impeccable timing. He was hopping over the gate instead of walking around to the garage entrance. “He’s here. The investigator. Give me a minute to talk to him, okay?”
Walter looked behind him.
Then he looked again.
He asked, “That’s the guy? Reggie, the investigator?”
“Yes,” Leigh said. “I’m supposed to—”
Without any warning, Walter took off in a dead run.
Reggie was thirty feet away. He didn’t have time to respond. His mouth opened in protest, but Walter punched it closed with his fist.
“Walter!” Leigh yelled, running to stop him. “Walter!”
He was straddling Reggie, his fists windmilling. Blood splattered the concrete. She saw a piece of tooth, tendrils of bloody mucus. Bones cracked like kindling. Reggie’s nose flattened.
“Walter!” Leigh tried to grab his hand. He was going to kill Reggie if she didn’t stop him. “Walter, please!”
One final punch cracked Reggie’s mouth open. His jaw twisted sideways. His body went limp. Walter had knocked him out. Still, he raised his fist, ready to strike again.
“No!” She grabbed his hand, holding as tight as she could. His muscles were like cables. She had never seen him like this before. “Walter.”
He looked back at her, still furious. Rage distorted his features. His chest heaved with every breath. Blood whipped across his shirt, slashed along his face.