by Shari Lapena
“Who?” she demands.
“I don’t think it matters who, at this point,” Moen says.
She puts her head in her hands and whispers, “Oh, God.”
“Unfortunately,” Detective Webb says, “this is a murder investigation, and you’re collateral damage. The best thing you can do is cooperate with us fully.”
Becky nods wearily. She has no choice. But she feels like she is betraying Robert, when he had obviously tried to protect her. She feels warmly toward him for it, which makes what she has to do now all the more painful.
“Tell us about your relationship with Robert Pierce,” Moen says.
“There’s not that much to tell, really,” Becky begins wretchedly, looking down at the shredded tissue in her lap. “My husband is away on business a lot. My twins started college out of town last year and aren’t home much. I was lonely, at loose ends. I used to see Robert out in his yard. His wife was away sometimes. We struck up a few conversations, like I told you. But it grew from there. It was stupid, I know. He’s much younger than I am.” She flushes. “I could tell he was attracted to me—he made it rather obvious—and I couldn’t resist. I thought—I thought no one would be hurt. I thought no one would ever know.”
Webb listens to her, his expression neutral, but Moen nods at her sympathetically.
She continues. “There was a weekend in August—he said his wife had gone away for the weekend with a friend. He invited me over. No one was home at my house—Larry was traveling for work and my kids were away at friends’ places. That was the first time.” She hesitates—she doesn’t want to tell them the next part. “The second time was at the end of September, the weekend she went missing.”
“Yes,” Webb says, wanting her to continue.
Becky says unhappily, “You have no idea how hard this has been. And I couldn’t talk to anyone about it.” She looks back at the two detectives. “I know he couldn’t have done it. He told me Amanda was away for the weekend with her friend Caroline, and that she wouldn’t be back till Sunday night. I stayed there till very late on Saturday night, and went home around two in the morning.”
“How do you know he couldn’t have done it?” Webb asks.
“Trust me, there’s no way he killed his wife.” She shifts uneasily in her chair. “We had this unspoken routine—we only talked over the back fence, where no one would see us. I didn’t see him again until the following Tuesday. He told me then that Amanda hadn’t come home. That he’d reported her missing to the police.” She looks at them, anguished. “I was afraid that it might come out then, that we’d been together that weekend.”
“And since then, have you spoken to him?” Webb asks.
She shakes her head. “No. He’s avoided me. He never goes into the backyard anymore. And I guess I wanted to avoid him, too, after everything. Put it behind me.” She adds, “I’m sure he’s worried that it will make him look bad, that he slept with me, and his wife—being murdered. But I can tell you, he’s a good man. He wouldn’t hurt a woman. He’s just not the type.”
“Maybe he was different with you than he was with his wife,” Webb says.
“I don’t think so,” she says stubbornly.
“We’d like to get your fingerprints, if you don’t mind,” Detective Moen says.
“Why?” Becky asks, startled. She wonders again if she’s going to be charged with something.
“We found some unidentified fingerprints in the Pierces’ bedroom and en suite bathroom. We think they might be yours. If not, we need to know who else was in that bedroom.”
She feels herself start to tremble. She’s never been fingerprinted before. “Are you going to charge me with anything?” she manages to ask.
“No,” Detective Webb says, “not at this time.”
* * *
—
Becky returns directly home from the police station. She parks the car in the driveway and enters the house through the front door. Then she runs upstairs and throws herself down on her bed.
The kids will be home for Thanksgiving. What will she tell them? More immediately, what is she going to say to her husband when he gets home? Should she tell him everything, or say nothing and hope that it somehow never comes out?
She turns on her side and thinks anxiously about Robert. They can’t possibly think he killed his wife. It’s impossible. She thinks of his hands running up and down her body. He actually seemed to enjoy her—her company. She thinks of his lean, hard chest, his hair falling over his forehead, his smile that quirks up on one side.
How can she persuade the police that they should be looking elsewhere? Her protests this morning seemed to fall on deaf ears. Robert didn’t kill his wife. If they understood that the way she did, they wouldn’t be looking at him so closely, and they wouldn’t be looking at her. She wants to protect herself, to protect her secret. And she’d like to protect him.
She doesn’t want to admit it, but she’s a little bit in love with Robert Pierce.
She’s pretty sure the fingerprints in the bedroom are hers. When you fall headlong into a fantasy, and break your marriage vows and sleep with another man, you never, ever think that your fingerprints will end up in a murder investigation.
She wants to protect Robert. So she hasn’t told the detectives everything.
She hasn’t told them that Robert told her that night that he suspected Amanda was having an affair. She’s afraid if the police know, they will think he has a motive.
And she hadn’t told Robert, when she was lying in bed with him, that she knew who Amanda might be having an affair with.
She won’t tell the detectives what she saw. Not unless it becomes absolutely necessary. Because she knows who Amanda’s lover is. And there’s no way he killed her either.
TWELVE
When Detective Webb looks at Robert Pierce that afternoon, he sees a man who might be perfectly capable of killing his wife. Pierce is very good-looking, clever, a little egotistical, a bit prickly. He must have been quite different with his neighbor, Becky Harris, Webb thinks. We all wear masks. We all have something to hide at one point or another. He wants to know what Robert Pierce might be hiding.
Pierce is in the chair across the interview table, in complete control of himself. He sits comfortably, leaning back in the chair. But his eyes are sharp, missing nothing.
“So, I’m the obvious suspect, is that it?” Pierce says.
“You’re not a suspect at this time,” Webb replies. “And you’re not in custody—you’re free to go, if you like.” Pierce stays put. Webb studies him carefully and begins. “You say you arrived home right after work about five o’clock Friday, the twenty-ninth. Anybody see you?”
“I don’t know. That’s your job, isn’t it? Isn’t that what you’ve been asking the neighbors?”
Unfortunately for the detectives, the door-to-door had been frustrating. With the exception of Becky Harris, no one seemed to know the Pierces. They kept to themselves. No one remembered seeing Robert Pierce coming or going from his house that weekend. He had a habit of keeping his car in the garage, with the doors closed, so it was hard to say if he was home. Except for Jeannette Bauroth, no one had noticed anyone else going in or out either. There was no one to vouch for him, but he may well have been home Friday and Saturday. Or he might not have been. Records show that his cell phone was at home; that doesn’t necessarily mean he was. “What did you do then?” Webb asks.
“Like I told you before, I watched some TV, went to bed early. I’m usually zonked by the end of the week.”
“Alone?”
“Yes, alone.”
“What about Saturday?”
“I slept in late. Hung around the house. Caught up on some work. Cleaned up a bit.”
“Nobody can account for you?”
“No, I guess not.”
“What about in the evening?�
��
He shifts in his chair, folds his arms across his chest, and looks Webb right in the eye. “Look, I wasn’t completely honest with you before. In the evening, I had a woman friend in. She spent most of the night.”
Webb allows a long pause before he says, “Who was that?”
“My next-door neighbor, Becky Harris. I believe you spoke to her yesterday. I saw you, on her doorstep.”
“We have spoken to her.”
“I don’t know what she’s told you. I didn’t tell you before because I was trying to protect her. She obviously doesn’t want anyone knowing about it. She’s married. It was a harmless fling. I’m not proud of it. I shouldn’t have cheated on my wife. But I was lonely, and she was there, so—” He shrugs. “It didn’t happen again.”
Webb studies him through narrowed eyes. “But it happened before, didn’t it?”
Pierce looks at him in surprise. “So she told you. You already know all about it.” He adds, “Yeah, we slept together one other time, in August. No biggie. Just letting off steam, for both of us.”
“So why did you lie to us, Robert?” Moen asks. “You told us you never cheated on your wife.”
“Why do you think? It makes me look like a bad husband, and that’s what you want, isn’t it? And maybe I was. But it doesn’t mean I killed my wife.” He leans forward and says, “I want you to stop dicking around with me and find out who killed Amanda. I want you to find the bastard who did this.”
Webb says, “Oh, we will.”
Moen says, “And Sunday?”
Pierce settles back into his chair again. “Sunday I went golfing with some friends all day. I had no idea Amanda wouldn’t be coming back that night. All their names and phone numbers must be in the file. They’ll confirm it. We had dinner at the clubhouse, and then I went home to wait for Amanda.”
“Any idea who those fingerprints in your house belong to?”
“I imagine some of them are Becky’s.”
“What about the other set?”
He shrugs. “No idea.”
“Have you been withholding anything else from us, Pierce?”
He looks back at Webb, his eyes insolent. “Like what?”
“Your wife. Was she having an affair?”
Pierce chews his lip. “I don’t know.”
“Really?” Webb says conversationally. “Maybe she was having an affair and you found out about it. Maybe you knew it wasn’t her friend Caroline who she was going away with that weekend. Maybe you knew and you killed her.” Robert doesn’t even blink. “Or maybe you just made that up, that she said she was going away with Caroline. Maybe you arranged to meet your wife somewhere, and she had no idea what you had planned for her.”
“No,” Robert says, shaking his head. “You’re way off base. I didn’t think Amanda was having an affair then. The idea never even crossed my mind until I spoke to Caroline that Sunday and realized that Amanda had lied to me.”
Webb doesn’t believe him. “Did you know your wife was pregnant?”
“Yes. She planned to terminate it. We didn’t want children.” Pierce looks at them as if expecting them to have a problem with that. “Are we done here?” he says.
Pierce is rattled, but doing a good job of trying not to show it, Webb thinks. “Yes, don’t let us keep you,” he says, and watches as Pierce pushes the chair back loudly and walks out.
“He hasn’t got a solid alibi,” Moen says, once Robert Pierce has left. “He could have gone anywhere that Friday and Saturday. Left his cell phone at home so it wouldn’t give him away.”
Webb says, “The more I see him, the more I don’t like him. Smug bastard.”
“He doesn’t seem to be particularly sad about his wife,” Moen observes.
“No,” Webb agrees. “If Amanda was having an affair, then who was she having an affair with?”
“If we knew that, we’d be getting somewhere,” Moen mutters.
THIRTEEN
Olivia searched through the newspaper and the online news on Wednesday for any new information on the murder of Amanda Pierce. It’s odd how wrapped up in it she’s become, so quickly. But there was nothing new, and little in the way of hard facts. It was all simply a rehash of what had been said already. Investigations are continuing.
She’d tried to talk to Paul about it the night before in bed. “What do you think happened to her?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Paul mumbled, trying to read his book.
“She must have been having an affair,” Olivia said. “Why else would she lie to her husband about who she was with?”
“It’s none of our business, Olivia,” Paul said.
“I know,” she replied, a little surprised at his tone. “But aren’t you curious?”
“No, I’m not,” he said.
She didn’t believe him. And then she’d broached the subject of taking Raleigh to see someone. She didn’t expect him to like the idea, but she was unprepared for his reaction.
“Paul,” she said. “I’m worried about Raleigh.”
“I know.”
“I just—I think maybe we should send him to a therapist.”
Here he put down his book and glared at her. “A therapist.”
“Yes.”
“Why the hell would we do that?”
“Because maybe—maybe it would help him to talk to someone.”
“Olivia, he does not need a therapist. He needs a good kick in the ass.”
She glared back at him, annoyed.
Then Paul added, “Don’t you think you’re overreacting?”
“No, I don’t. This is serious, Paul.”
“Serious, yes. But he’s not mentally ill, Olivia.”
“You don’t have to be mentally ill to see a therapist,” she said in exasperation. Why did he have to be so backward about these things?
“It’s just a phase. We’ll deal with it. He doesn’t need a therapist.”
“How do you know? What makes you the expert?”
“I’m not going to discuss it, Olivia,” he’d said sharply, and turned out his bedside table light and turned on his side away from her to go to sleep.
She’d lain in bed beside him, fuming, long after he’d begun to snore.
Now, as she drinks an afternoon cup of coffee, she recalls that she’d seen Paul reading the article about Amanda Pierce in the paper last night. He is curious. Of course he is. He just doesn’t want to admit it. Paul always could be a little sanctimonious.
* * *
—
The preliminary forensics on the car and Amanda’s belongings reveal frustratingly little.
“Sorry to disappoint you,” Sandra Fisher, a forensic pathologist at the ME’s office, says, “but we didn’t get much.”
Webb nods; he hadn’t expected much, with the car having been in the water, but you always hope.
She says, “We didn’t find any blood, skin, or hair except for the victim’s. Nothing to get a DNA profile from. And we haven’t been able to get anything else—no prints, no fibers.”
“Anything from the purse or luggage?” Webb asks. They’ve already looked into her cell phone records and they haven’t revealed anything; certainly no sign of any man on the side.
She shakes her head. “Sorry.”
Webb nods and glances at Moen. Whoever killed Amanda and pushed the car into the lake didn’t leave any trace behind.
Fisher says, “As you know, there was nothing where the car was found to indicate that that was where she was killed. There would have been a lot of blood. Most likely she was murdered somewhere else and the killer drove her car to that spot to sink it.”
Webb says, “He probably knew the area, knew that would be a good spot to get rid of a car. Deserted, no guardrail, a decent slope, and the water gets deep quickly.”
Moen nods in agreement. “He took a risk that someone might see him, no matter how deserted the road,” she says.
“Find anything else in the car? Anything in the glove box?” Webb asks.
“The owner’s manual and the service record. A first-aid kit. A tissue packet. She was very tidy.” Fisher snorts in apparent disbelief. “You should see the shit in my car.”
Webb swallows his disappointment. He’d been hoping for something.
“The fingerprints in the Pierce bedroom are a match for Becky Harris,” Fisher says. “But we don’t know who the other set belongs to. Not coming up anywhere. Whoever it was, was in the office and all through the desk, too.”
* * *
—
Robert Pierce has taken the week off work. It’s only Wednesday. They’ve told him to take whatever time he needs. He has no interest in returning to the office. He wonders if his fellow attorneys in the small, five-lawyer firm think he’s a murderer. They probably do. He wanders around his house and thinks about his interview with the detectives earlier that afternoon, replaying it over and over again in his mind.
He wonders what Becky is doing. He knows she’s home. Her car is in the driveway. He’s been avoiding her. He used her, rather shamelessly. It doesn’t bother him that much. She was awfully easy to seduce. But he’s worried about what else she might tell the detectives, now that the cat’s out of the bag. She told them that they’d slept together. Did she also tell them that he thought Amanda was having an affair? Will she? He would like to know.
He finds himself in the kitchen, looking out the sliding-glass doors to the patio. It’s a mild afternoon, with a tang of fall in the air. He decides to grab a beer and go outside for a bit. Maybe she’ll come out, maybe she won’t.
Robert saunters toward the back of the yard. If she’s watching from inside the house, she will be able to see him there; she can’t see him on the patio unless she’s outside in her own backyard.
He hears the unmistakable sound behind him of the door sliding open next door, and stops. He knows that no one from the street can see them here; they have all the privacy they need. He turns around and lifts his eyes over the fence at Becky’s house. She’s standing there, in the doorway, staring at him. He walks slowly back along the fence toward her.
