“Harleigh,” Callie said. “What’s going on? Why are you here?”
Leigh didn’t answer. She turned to check on Walter. His shadow was unmoving in the passenger seat of her Audi. He was looking down at his hands. She had watched him flex his fingers for almost a full hour before she’d made him stop. And then he had picked at the open wounds on his knuckles until blood had roped down his hands and onto the seat. It was like he wanted a permanent reminder of the violence he had visited upon Reggie Paltz. Leigh kept trying to get him to talk about it, but Walter wouldn’t talk. For the first time in their marriage, he was unreadable to her. Another life she had destroyed.
Leigh turned away, telling Callie, “Let’s go to the back.”
Callie didn’t ask why they couldn’t sit in waiting room chairs. Instead, she led Leigh down the hallway to Dr. Jerry’s office. Like the other spaces, nothing had changed. The funny light with a tubby chihuahua as the base. The faded watercolors on the wall showing animals wearing Regency clothing. Even the old green and white tartan couch was the same. The only difference was Callie. She looked haggard. It was as if life had finally caught up with her.
Leigh knew that she was going to make it worse.
“Okay.” Callie leaned against the desk. “Tell me.”
For once, Leigh didn’t censor the thoughts running through her head. “Walter and I kidnapped Andrew’s investigator, Reggie Paltz.”
“Huh,” was all that Callie offered.
“He had the fail-safe,” Leigh continued. “But I’m still going to turn myself in, and I felt I owed it to you to tell you first because you’re on those tapes, too.”
Callie tucked her hands into her jacket pockets. “I have questions.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ve made up my mind. This is what I have to do to keep Maddy safe. To keep other people safe, because I don’t know what else he’s going to do.” Leigh had to stop to swallow down the panic bubbling up her throat. “I should’ve done this the moment Andrew and Linda showed up in Bradley’s office. I should’ve confessed to all of them, then Ruby would still be alive and Maddy wouldn’t be on the lam and—”
“Harleigh, slow your roll,” Callie said. “The last time we talked, I was having a panic attack in an attic, and now you’re telling me there’s a fail-safe and you’re turning yourself in and somebody named Ruby is dead and something’s wrong with Maddy?”
Leigh realized she was worse than her daughter trying to rush out a story. “I’m sorry. Maddy is fine. She’s safe. Walter just talked to her on the phone.”
“Why did Walter talk to her? Why didn’t you?”
“Because …” Leigh struggled to organize her thoughts. The decision to turn herself in had brought a certain level of peace. But now that she was standing in front of her sister, now that the time had finally come to tell Callie everything, Leigh kept finding reasons not to.
She explained, “Ruby Heyer is—was—a mom-friend of mine. She was murdered Wednesday night. I don’t know if Andrew killed her himself or if he had someone else do it, but I know without a doubt that he was involved.”
Callie didn’t react to the information. Instead, she asked, “And the fail-safe?”
“Reggie had two servers in his office. Andrew asked him to store backups of Buddy’s video tapes as a fail-safe. If anything happened to Andrew, Reggie was supposed to release them. Walter and I stole the servers. His laptop had the encryption key to get them open. We found fourteen video files, plus the murder video.”
All of the color drained from Callie’s face. This was her nightmare come to life. “Did you watch them? Did Walter—”
“No,” Leigh lied. She had made Walter leave the room because she needed to know what they were dealing with. The brief glimpses of the Callie videos were enough to make her physically ill. “The file names gave us what we needed—your name, then a number, one to fourteen. The murder video had your name and mine. It was easy to figure out. We didn’t have to watch them to know.”
Callie chewed her lip. She was as unreadable as Walter. “What else?”
“Andrew hired Reggie to watch you,” Leigh said. “He followed you on the bus to the library, to Phil’s, to here. I saw his logs, his photos. He knew everything that you were doing, and he told Andrew.”
Callie didn’t seem surprised, but a bead of sweat rolled down the side of her face. The room was too hot for the jacket. She had buttoned it up to her neck.