Callie thought about her own medical charts scattered across so many different rehab centers and psych units. Had Reggie looked for those, too? She had never said anything about the murder, but there were things in those notes that she wouldn’t want anyone reading.
Especially her sister.
Leigh said, “He’s looking for a moment, like in a movie, where Tammy breaks down and—I don’t know—gives up? It’s like he wants to watch her being assaulted again.”
Callie didn’t ask Leigh whether or not she was capable of making this moment happen. She could tell by her sister’s demeanor that her legal brain had already developed a blueprint. “What’s in her medical chart?”
Leigh pressed together her lips. “Tammy was raped in high school. She got pregnant, got an abortion. She never told anybody but, after, she became isolated. She lost her friends. She started cutting herself. Then drinking to excess. Then she developed an eating disorder.”
“Did no one tell her about heroin?”
Leigh shook her head. She wasn’t in the mood for dark humor. “A professor noticed some of the warning signs. He sent Tammy to student mental health. She got therapy, and it really turned her life around . You can see it in the chart. She was a total mess, but then, slowly, she started to get better. She took control of her life. She graduated with honors. She has—had—a good life. She made that for herself. She crawled out of that pit and made it.”
Callie wondered if Leigh was asking why Callie hadn’t been able to pull herself out of a similar tailspin. There were too many if onlys behind that question—If only the social workers had taken them away from Phil. If only Linda had been their mother. If only Leigh had known that Buddy was a pedophile. If only Callie hadn’t broken her neck and ended up a stupid fucking junkie.
“I—” Leigh looked up at the sky. She had started crying. “My clients are never good people, but I usually like them. Even the assholes. Especially the assholes. I understand how you can make bad choices. How you can get angry and do bad things. Terrible things.”
Callie didn’t need clarification on the terrible things.
“Andrew’s not afraid of being convicted,” Leigh said. “He’s never been scared, not since the moment I met him. Which means he’s got a way out of this.”
Callie knew the best way out for Tammy. She had considered the option for herself often enough.
Leigh said, “It was one thing when I felt like it was just me who could get in trouble. I did a bad thing. I should’ve gone to prison. That’s fair. But Tammy is innocent.”
Callie watched her kick at the dirt. This defeated woman was not the sister she had grown up with. Leigh never gave up on anything. If you came at her with a knife, she came back at you with a bazooka. “So what’s next?”
“What’s next is this is getting too dangerous. I want you to get your things, pack up your cat, and I’ll drive you somewhere safe.” Leigh caught her eye. “Andrew already has me under his thumb. It’s just a matter of time before he comes after you.”
This would’ve been a really good time to tell Leigh about the man in the boarded-up house, but Callie needed her sister to focus, not spin off into a paranoid vortex.
She said, “If you want to measure the height of a mountain, the hardest part isn’t finding the peak, it’s figuring out where the bottom starts.”
Leigh gave her a confused look. “Did you get that off a fortune cookie?”
Callie was fairly certain she had stolen it from an eel historian. “What’s the rock-bottom question about Andrew that we can’t answer?”
“Oh,” Leigh seemed to understand. “I thought of it as the Andrew Hypothesis, but I couldn’t figure out the B that connects the A and the C.”
“I think we should spend the next two hours pinning down the correct terminology.”
Leigh groaned, but she clearly needed this. “It’s a two-part question. First part: what does Andrew know? Second part: how does he know it?”
“So, to find the what and the how, begin at the beginning.” Callie rubbed her numb hand, pressing blood into the fingers. She had worked so hard to forget everything about Buddy’s murder, but now she didn’t have a choice but to confront it head-on. “Did I check on Andrew after the fight with Buddy? I mean, before I called you?”
“Yes,” Leigh said. “That was the first thing I asked you about when I got there, because I was worried there was a witness. You told me that you left Buddy in the kitchen, you went into Andrew’s room and kissed his head, then you called me from the master bedroom. You told me he was completely out of it.”