She looked up from the file. She silently debated how to proceed. The mother and son clearly thought that Leigh knew them. Leigh clearly did not. If Andrew Tenant wanted her to be his lawyer, lying to his face the first time they met was the very definition of operating in bad faith.
She took a breath, preparing to confess, but then Bradley cut her off.
“Remind me, Linda, how do you know Ms. Collier?”
Linda.
Something about the name itched at Leigh’s memory. She actually reached up to her scalp as if she could scratch it out. But it wasn’t the mother who was triggering her recollection. Leigh’s eyes skipped across the older woman and went to her son.
Andrew Tenant smiled at her. His lips curved up to the left. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”
“Decades,” Linda told Bradley. “Andrew knows the girls better than I do. I was still in nursing back then. I worked nights. Leigh and her sister were the only babysitters I trusted.”
Leigh’s stomach turned into a clenched fist that started slowly punching up into her throat.
Andrew asked her, “How’s Callie doing? What’s she up to?”
Callie.
“Leigh?” Andrew’s tone implied that she was not acting normal. “Where’s your sister these days?”
“She—” Leigh had broken out in a cold sweat. Her hands were shaking. She clutched them together under the table. “She’s living on a farm in Iowa. With kids. Her husband’s a cow farm—a dairy farmer.”
“That sounds about right,” Andrew said. “Callie loved animals. She got me interested in aquariums.”
He told this last part to Sidney, going into detail about his first saltwater tank.
“Right,” Sidney said. “She was the cheerleader.”
All Leigh could do was pretend to listen, her teeth clenched tight so that she didn’t start screaming. This couldn’t be right. None of this was right.
She looked down at the label on the file.
TENANT, ANDREW TREVOR.
The clenched fist kept moving up her throat, every horrific detail she had suppressed over the last twenty-three years threatening to choke her.
Callie’s terrifying phone call. Leigh’s frantic drive to reach her. The horrific scene in the kitchen. The familiar smell of the dank house, the cigars and Scotch and blood—so much blood.
Leigh had to know for sure. She needed to hear it said out loud. Her teenage voice came out of her mouth when she asked, “Trevor?”
The way Andrew’s lips curved up to the left was so chillingly familiar. Leigh felt a tingle of goose bumps prickle her skin. She had been his babysitter, and then, when she was old enough to find real work, she had passed the job on to her baby sister.
“I go by Andrew now,” he told her. “Tenant is Mom’s maiden name. We both thought it would be good to change things up after what happened with Dad.”
After what happened with Dad.
Buddy Waleski had disappeared. He’d abandoned his wife and son. No note. No apologies. That’s what Leigh and Callie had made it look like. That’s what they had told the police. Buddy had done a lot of bad things. He was in debt to a lot of bad people. It made sense. At the time, all of it had made sense.
Andrew seemed to feed off her dawning recognition. His smile softened, the upward curve of his lips slowly smoothing out.
He said, “It’s been a long time, Harleigh.”
Harleigh.
Only one person in her life still called her by that name.
Andrew said, “I thought you’d forgotten all about me.”
Leigh shook her head. She would never forget him. Trevor Waleski had been a sweet kid. A little awkward. A lot clingy. The last time Leigh had seen him, he was drugged into oblivion. She had watched her sister gently kiss the top of his head.
Then the two of them had gone back into the kitchen to finish murdering his father.
Monday
2
Leigh parked her Audi A4 outside the offices of Reginald Paltz and Associates, the private investigation firm handling Andrew Tenant’s case. The two-story building had been built for small offices, but made to look like a single colonial house. It had that too-new/too-old feel of the eighties. Gold fixtures. Plastic-trimmed windows. Thin brick fascia. Crumbling concrete stairs up to a set of glass doors. The vaulted lobby had a crooked gold chandelier hanging above a set of winding stairs.
The outdoor temperature was already climbing, expected to hit the mid seventies by the afternoon. She let the car idle so she could keep the air conditioning running. Leigh had gotten here early, allotting herself twenty minutes to get her shit together in the privacy of her car. The thing that had made her a good student, then a good lawyer, was that she could always tune out the bullshit and laser-focus on what was directly in front of her. You didn’t help chop up a two-hundred-fifty-pound man and still graduate at the top of your class without learning how to compartmentalize.