Callie stood at the window watching her mother storm toward the boarded-up house.
“Cocksucker!” Phil bellowed, bolting up the front walk. “Did you shit on my sidewalk?”
“Damn,” Callie mumbled as Phil pounded the thin plywood covering the door. She hoped like hell nobody was stupid enough to call the police.
“Come out!” Phil turned the Louisville Slugger into a battering ram. “You fucking shitter!”
Callie cringed at the crack of wood against wood. This was the problem with weaponizing Phil. You couldn’t control the explosion.
“Get the fuck out of there!” Phil rammed the bat again. This time, the plywood splintered. She yanked back the bat, and the rotted wood came off with it. “Gotcha!”
Callie didn’t know exactly what Phil had caught. The flash of light could’ve been just that—a flash of light. Maybe the methadone had hit Callie the wrong way. Maybe she’d shot up too much or too little. Maybe she should stop Phil from attacking some poor houseless man whose only crime was seeking shelter.
Too late. She saw her mother disappear into the house.
Callie’s hand went to her mouth. There was another flash. Not light this time, but motion. It came from the side of the house. A piece of plywood bent up from one of the windows like a mouth opening. A man was disgorged into the tall grass. Seconds later, he was on his feet, shoulders hunched as he made his way across the yard. He climbed over a rusted chain-link fence. He was gripping a professional-looking camera around the telescoping lens like he was strangling it by the neck.
“Motherfucker!” Phil bellowed from inside.
Callie’s eyes followed the camera until it disappeared into another yard. What would be on the memory card? How close had the man gotten to her window? Had he taken photographs of her sleeping in bed? Had he managed to capture Callie sitting in front of the mirror sticking a needle into her leg?
Her hand cupped her neck. Beneath her fingers and thumb, the blood pulsed in her jugulars. She could feel the gorilla’s claws digging into her skin. The rake of the telephone cord gouging her back. His hot breath in her ear. The pressure of him fingering up her spine. Callie closed her eyes, thought about falling back into the gorilla, surrendering to the inevitable.
Instead, she found her backpack and left her mother’s house through the kitchen door.
7
Leigh hadn’t fallen asleep until two this morning, then her alarm had gone off at four. She was punch-drunk from yesterday’s Valium spree and the enormous stress that had caused her to break down and take it. Several cups of coffee had ramped up her jitters and done nothing for her clarity. It was almost noon and her brain felt like a Jell-O mold packed with buckshot.
Somehow, through it all, she had managed to come up with a working Andrew Hypothesis:
He knew about Buddy’s camera behind the bar because, even as a kid, he’d been a nosey shit who sneaked through your things. He knew about the femoral artery because he’d seen Callie worrying over the anatomical drawing in the textbook. Like Leigh, her sister leaned toward the obsessive compulsive. She could easily imagine Callie sitting at the kitchen table tracing the artery until her finger rubbed a blister. Andrew would’ve been sitting beside her because Andrew was always where you didn’t want him to be. He’d stored both facts into his sick, twisted brain and then somehow, years later, he’d put it all together.
That was the only explanation that made sense. If Andrew really knew what had happened that night, he would know that the knife hadn’t actually killed his father.
Leigh had.
What she needed to do right now was find a way to throw Andrew Tenant’s case while Cole Bradley was looking over her shoulder. Leigh had barely made a dent in the volumes of paperwork attached to the looming trial. Andrew’s files were splayed across her desk, overflowing from boxes couriered over by Octavia Bacca. Two associates were in the process of compiling an index, cross-referencing Octavia’s work with the mountains of horseshit that the prosecutor had provided during discovery. Liz, Leigh’s assistant, had taken over a conference room to spread out everything on the floor so she could develop a timeline that backed up the footage that Reggie Paltz had spliced together on his laptop.
And still, there was always more work to be done. Even though Cole Bradley had cleared the decks so Leigh could focus on Andrew’s case, that didn’t mean her calendar was completely open. She had to finish filing motions and compose interrogatories, review documents for discovery, call clients, schedule depositions, push back Zoom and court appearances, research case law and, on top of everything else, she had to worry about her sister dangling herself as bait in front of a psychopath with a well-documented history of violently assaulting women.