She gripped her hands together to stop the shake. She waited for the release. Four more tablets were left in the bottle. She would take them all if it came to that. She couldn’t be like this right now. Wallowing in fear was a luxury she could not afford.
Andrew and Linda Tenant were not trashy poor Waleskis anymore. They had Tenant Auto Group fuck-you money. Reggie Paltz could probably be bought off with the promise of more work from Leigh’s firm, but he wasn’t the only private investigator in town. Andrew could hire an entire team of investigators who could start asking questions no one had bothered to ask twenty-three years ago, like—
If Callie was worried about Buddy, why hadn’t she called Linda? The woman’s number was taped to the wall by the kitchen phone.
If Andrew had in fact accidentally ripped the phone cord out of the wall, why couldn’t he remember doing it? And why was he so groggy the next day?
Why had Callie called Leigh to drive her home that night? She’d made the ten-minute walk hundreds of times before.
Why did the next-door neighbors say they’d heard Buddy’s Corvette stalling several times in the driveway? He knew how to drive a manual transmission.
What happened to the machete in the shed?
Why was the can of gasoline missing?
What about Callie’s broken nose and cuts and bruises?
And why did Leigh leave for college a month early when she had nowhere to stay and no money to waste?
$86,940.
The night that Buddy died, he had just been paid for a big job. His briefcase had been packed with fifty grand. They had found the rest hidden around the house.
Not for the first time, Callie and Leigh had argued about what to do with the money. Callie had insisted they leave something for Linda. Leigh had been equally insistent that leaving a dime would give them away. If Buddy Waleski was really skipping town, he would take all of the cash he could lay his hands on because he didn’t give a shit about anybody but himself.
Leigh could remember the exact words that had finally persuaded Callie: It’s not blood money if you pay for it with your own blood.
Another car horn beeped. Leigh startled again. The sweat had dried to a chill on her skin. She dialed back the air conditioner. She felt weepy, which helped nothing. She needed to summon her focus. In the courtroom, she had to be ten steps ahead of everybody else, but now she had to use all of her energy to figure out which first step would take her in the best direction.
She called up Andrew’s exact words, the taunting sneer on his lips.
It’s not like when we were kids. You could get away with cold-blooded murder back then.
What had Leigh and Callie missed? They hadn’t exactly been teenage gangsters, but they’d both spent time in juvie and they had both grown up in the ’hood. They intuitively knew how to cover their tracks. Their bloody clothes and shoes had gone into a burn barrel. The video camera was broken into pieces. The house was thoroughly cleaned. Buddy’s car was stripped and burned. His briefcase was destroyed. They’d even packed a suitcase full of his clothes and tossed in a pair of his shoes.
The knife was the only thing left.
Leigh had wanted to get rid of it but Callie had told her that Linda would notice it was missing from the set. In the end, Callie had washed off the thin line of blood in the sink. Then they had soaked the wooden handle in bleach. Callie had even used a toothpick to clean around the tang, a word Leigh only knew because she had marked every year since it happened by going over all the details of a possible case that could be built against them.
She did a quick review in her head, knocking down the long list of questions, which relied either on the memories of children or on a pair of elderly neighbors who had both died eighteen years ago.
There was no physical evidence. No body found. No murder weapon. No unexplained hair, teeth, blood, fingerprints, DNA. No child porn. The only men who knew that Buddy Waleski had been raping Callie were the same men who were incentivized to keep their disgusting pedophile mouths shut.
Dr. Patterson. Coach Holt. Mr. Humphrey. Mr. Ganza. Mr. Emmett.
Maddy. Walter. Callie.
Leigh had to keep her priorities front and center. The time for wallowing in fear was over. She checked the side-view mirror. She waited for the lane to clear, then pulled out onto the road.
As she drove, the Valium stretched into her bloodstream. She felt some of the edges smoothing out. Her shoulders relaxed against the seat. The yellow line on the road turned into the belt on a treadmill. Buildings and trees and signs and billboards blurred by—Colonnade Restaurant, Uptown Novelty, Mitigate! Vaccinate! Keep Atlanta Open for Business!