Reggie’s head moved in a quick nod.
“And he paid you cash, right? So there are no invoices.”
He didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to.
Leigh knew Reggie hadn’t considered the worst of it. She laid out the rest of Andrew’s plan. “What about the other nights, the three women who were raped near Andrew’s regular haunts. Where were you?”
“Working,” Reggie said. “Following exes.”
Leigh remembered the names of the two new witnesses on Dante’s list. “Lynne Wilkerson and Fabienne Godard?”
Reggie let out a low, distressed sigh.
“Jesus,” Leigh said, because everything was lining up. “What about your car’s GPS?”
His eye had closed. Blood seeped from the corner. “Turned it off.”
Leigh watched him silently making the connections. Reggie did not have an alibi for any of the rapes. He had no alibi for Ruby Heyer’s murder. He hadn’t logged his notes into his computer. There were no invoices itemizing his activities. There was no phone or camera or memory card that would pinpoint his location while the attacks were occurring. An argument could be made that he’d turned off the tracking in his car to avoid incrimination.
This was why Andrew had never been afraid. He had set up Reggie to take the fall.
“Fucker,” Reggie said, because he knew it, too.
“Walter,” Leigh said. “Take the servers. I’ll get the laptop.”
Leigh jammed his laptop into her purse. She waited for Walter to pull all of the wires and plugs out of the metal boxes. Instead of leaving, she returned to the filing cabinet. She found the files for Lynne Wilkerson and Fabienne Godard. She stacked them with the others on the desk so that Reggie could see. “I’m keeping all of these. They’re your only alibi, so fuck with me and I’ll fuck you into the ground. Do you understand?”
He nodded, but she could tell he wasn’t worried about the files. He was worried about Andrew.
Leigh found the scissors where she’d dumped them out of the desk drawer. She told Reggie, “If I were you, I’d get myself to the hospital and then find a damn good lawyer.”
Reggie watched her cut through the tape around his wrists.
That was all the help she was going to give him. She left the scissors in his hand.
She gathered up the stolen items, telling Walter, “Let’s go.”
Leigh waited for him to leave the room first. She still didn’t trust Walter to not go after Reggie again. Her husband was quiet as he carried the servers down the stairs. Through the lobby. Out the door. She threw everything into the trunk. Walter did the same with the two servers.
He had driven them here, but Leigh got behind the wheel of her car. She reversed out of the space. Her lights flashed along the front of the building. She saw the shadow of Reggie Paltz standing at his office window.
Walter said, “He’ll go to the police.”
“He’ll get himself cleaned up, and then he’ll catch the first flight to Vanuatu, Indonesia, or the Maldives,” Leigh said, listing a few of the preferred nations that did not extradite to the United States. “We need to find Callie’s videos on his server and destroy them. We have to keep the rest for insurance.”
“For what?” Walter asked. “Andrew’s still got the originals. We’re still trapped. He’s got us in the same damn place as before.”
“We’re not,” Leigh said. “He hasn’t.”
“He paid that cocksucker to follow Maddy. He knows where she was, where she’s going. He took photographs. I saw your face when you saw them. You were terrified.”
Leigh wasn’t going to argue with him because he was right.
“And what he did to Ruby. Jesus Christ, she was mutilated. He didn’t just kill her. He tortured her and—” Walter’s throat gave out a strangled sound of grief. He put his head in his hands. “What are we going to do? Maddy will never be safe. We’ll never get away from him.”
Leigh pulled over to the side of the road. She wasn’t that far from the same spot she’d pulled over to after the first meeting in Reggie Paltz’s office. Then, she had been sick with panic. Now, her steely resolve took over.
She held on to Walter’s hands. She waited for him to look at her, but he didn’t.
“I understand,” he said. “I get why you did it.”
Leigh shook her head. “Did what?”
“Callie’s always been more like your daughter. She’s always been your responsibility.” Walter finally looked up at her. He had cried more in the last twenty minutes than she had seen him cry in nearly twenty years. “When you told me that you killed him, I—I don’t know. It was too much to take in. I couldn’t understand. There’s right and wrong and—what you did …”