Someone We Know: A Novel

by Shari Lapena

  “It’s true!” Larry says, almost violently. “Why don’t you check with the resort? I never left my room, I swear. They must have cameras on the parking lot. They can tell you that my car never left.”

  “Where did you park your car?” Webb already knows Larry didn’t park in the indoor parking lot at the resort; he’s had people watch all the tapes.

  “In the outdoor lot, to the right of the hotel.”

  “Right. We’ve checked, and there are no cameras there, apparently. Only in the indoor parking area.” He adds, “As I’m sure you know.”

  Larry looks frightened now. “I didn’t,” he protests. “How would I know that?”

  Webb says quickly, “Did you know that Amanda was pregnant?”

  He shakes his head, frowning, off balance. “No, I didn’t know, honest. I always used a condom. She insisted on it. She didn’t want to get pregnant.” He says angrily, “Why don’t you arrest her husband? If anyone killed her, it was him. She told me once that if he ever found out that she was cheating on him, he would kill her.” He adds, regretfully, “I didn’t believe her at the time. I should have.”

  Webb looks carefully at Larry and tries to tell if he’s lying. Webb thinks Robert Pierce is capable of murder, but he wonders if Larry is making this up.

  “Robert Pierce is a cold son of a bitch,” Larry says. “Amanda told me about him, how he treated her. She told me that she would leave him someday, so when she disappeared, I thought that’s what she’d done. If anyone killed her, it was her husband.”

  Webb stares him down. “There’s something else,” Larry says finally. “Robert Pierce—he knew about me and Amanda. And he knew she had a burner phone.”

  “How do you know that?” Webb asks, alert.

  “Because I got a call from her burner phone, and it was Robert on the other end. He said, ‘Hi, Larry, it’s her husband, Robert.’ I hung up.”

  “When was that?” Webb asks.

  “It was the day she disappeared. Friday, September twenty-ninth. Around ten in the morning.”

  Webb meets Moen’s eyes.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Becky Harris stares out the glass doors to the backyard. She’d wanted to accompany Larry to the police station when the detectives came to bring him in for questioning, but he insisted that she stay here. She could tell he was worried.

  They’re both plenty worried.

  When she’d returned from the police station and told Larry about the video surveillance of him at the Paradise Hotel, he’d looked so panicked that she didn’t even bother to say, What did I tell you, you idiot? Instead she said, “They’re going to bring you in for questioning.” She’d had to steel herself to stop her body trembling. “Larry,” she said, “tell me the truth. Did you kill her?”

  He looked back at her, an expression of shock on his exhausted face. “How can you even think—”

  “How can I think it?” she stormed at him. “The evidence, Larry! It’s piling up against you. You were having an affair with her—it’s on tape. You were in the area near the lake where her body was found and can’t account for your whereabouts. God help you if they find out you argued with her the day before she went missing. And then you go and throw your phone off the Skyway early Sunday evening on the way back from the resort, before anyone even knew she was missing. I don’t know, Larry, but you look guilty as hell!”

  “I didn’t know she was dead when I tossed the phone,” he protested. He grabbed her arms and said, “Becky, I had nothing to do with this. You have to believe me. I know how bad it looks. But I didn’t hurt her. It must have been Robert. He knew she was cheating on him. He found her burner phone. He called me from it, and I answered. He already knew about me and Amanda. He said ‘Hi, Larry’ before I even opened my mouth. He must have killed her.”

  So Robert did know. She nodded slowly. “He must have,” she agreed. She forced herself to take deep breaths. When she looked at her husband, she couldn’t believe, even in the face of all the circumstantial evidence, that he could actually have killed someone. That he could have beaten a woman to death.

  “When you talk to the police, you have to tell them all that,” she said at last. “But tell them you threw the phone into the river someplace from the shore, in case there are cameras on the bridge. They could check them and see when you did it. Tell them it was a few days after she disappeared, not the same weekend.”

  He nodded back at her, obviously terrified, relying on her now to help him. She was thinking more clearly than he was.

  “And whatever you do, don’t tell them you had an argument with Amanda the day before she went missing,” she said, “and that she’d broken it off with you.”

  Then the detectives had come to take him down to the station for questioning and she’d worked herself into this frenzy of doubt and fear.

  She doesn’t think Larry is capable of planning a cold-blooded murder. If he was, he wouldn’t be in this mess. But a moment of uncontrolled anger? Could he have struck Amanda in a rage, not meaning to kill her?

  She’s afraid that might be exactly what happened and that Larry is lying to her still and frightened for his life.

  Her mind strays uneasily to an incident that happened a couple of years ago. Their daughter Kristie was being harassed by a teenage boy whom she refused to date. He kept bothering her at school, and then he made the mistake of coming around the house, calling her names. Larry had charged out of the house and rammed the boy up against the wall so fast it had made Becky’s head spin. She still remembers the fear and shock on the boy’s face. And how Larry looked, his left hand grasping the boy’s shirt by the collar, his right hand drawn back as if he were about to punch the kid hard in the face. Kristie was crying behind her inside the house. But something stopped him. He shoved the boy down the driveway and told him to leave his daughter alone. Becky had worried that the kid might press charges, but they never heard from him again. Now, she forces herself to thrust the incident from her mind, returning to the present.

  Robert is the cold-blooded type. She thinks now that he might be quite capable—smart enough, calculating enough—to plan a murder and carry it out. And if he did, she’s pretty sure he would know how to do it so that he never got caught.

  She has to know who killed Amanda—was it Robert or her husband?

  Impulsively, she leaves her own house, crosses the lawn, and knocks on Robert’s front door. As she waits, she looks nervously over her shoulder, wondering if any of the neighbors are watching her. She knows he’s home. She’d seen him passing in front of the windows earlier, and his car is in the driveway.

  She’s about to turn away, defeated, but then the door opens. He stands there looking at her. His mouth doesn’t quirk up in that charming smile of his. They’re done with all that.

  “Can I come in?” she asks.

  “What for?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  He seems to consider it for a moment—what’s in it for him?—but she sees curiosity get the better of him. He steps back and pulls the door open. It’s only when he closes it behind her that she realizes that maybe she’s been stupid. She’s a little afraid of him. She doesn’t really think he’s going to harm her—he wouldn’t dare, under the circumstances. But what does she expect to learn? It’s not like he’s going to tell her the truth. All at once she’s tongue-tied; she doesn’t know how to start.

  “What did you want to talk about?” he says, folding his arms across his chest, looking down at her. He’s much taller than she is. They’re still standing in the front hall.

  “Larry’s at the police station,” she says. “They seem to think that he might have killed Amanda.” She’s tried to say it bluntly, but her voice has a quiver in it.

  “Because he was having an affair with her,” Robert says matter-of-factly.

  She stares back at him, nods slowly. “That’
s why you slept with me, isn’t it? You knew Larry was sleeping with Amanda all along, so you slept with me.”

  “Yes,” he says. He smiles.

  He seems to be enjoying himself. How could she have been so seduced by him? There’s no sign of that warmth and boyishness that charmed her anymore. But it doesn’t matter. She’s over that now.

  He doesn’t seem to care that she knows. If he killed his wife, he must be very sure now of not getting caught. “Larry’s going to tell the police,” she says, “that you knew about them. He told me about the burner phone, that you called him on it.”

  “I’m not worried,” Robert says. “He has no proof. It’s his word—and yours—against mine.”

  She looks up at him; he seems to tower over her now. She feels small; he could snap her neck with his hands if he wanted to. “Larry didn’t kill her,” she says.

  “You can’t possibly know that,” he says. “In fact, I think you’re worried that he did kill her.”

  “I think it was you,” she whispers, goaded into saying it.

  “You can think what you like,” Robert says, “and tell the police whatever you want, but they know you’d say anything to protect your husband.”

  “Do you have an alibi?” she asks desperately.

  “Not really,” he admits.

  “You killed her,” Becky says wildly, as if repeating it will make it true.

  Robert leans in close to her, so his face is just inches from hers. “Well, it was probably one of us,” he says icily, “and you don’t know which one. I guess you have a problem, don’t you?”

  Becky stares back at him for a moment in horror and then sweeps past him, yanks open the door, and flees back to her own house.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  When Olivia returns home from her drive to Margaret’s, she’s exhausted. The house is quiet.

  “Where have you been?” Paul asks. He’s sitting in the living room, a drink in his hand.

  She looks back at him warily, ignoring his question. “Where’s Raleigh?”

  “He’s in his room.”

  “What did the police want, Paul?” Olivia asks nervously.

  She sits down beside him while he tells her what happened at the police station.

  “Why do they want to see the cabin?” she asks in disbelief.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, they must have said something, given some reason.” She feels her anxiety skyrocket.

  When he answers, he sounds irritated. “Like I said, they asked me if I was familiar with the area where her body was found, and I had to tell them about our cabin. How would it look if I didn’t, and they found out afterward?” He looks at her steadily. “I have nothing to hide, Olivia.” He certainly doesn’t sound paranoid. He sounds like he thinks this is an inconvenience, an intrusion, nothing more.

  “No, of course not,” she says.

  “They said if I didn’t give consent, they would get a warrant.” Paul crosses his arms in front of him as he tells her, “It was like a threat. I should have said no, on principle. Let them get their fucking warrant.”

  “We have nothing to hide, Paul,” Olivia says uneasily. “We should just let them go ahead. They won’t find anything, and then they’ll leave us alone.”

  He glares at her. “You know how I feel about this sort of thing. It’s an outrage, it really is.”

  She slumps tiredly. She has no energy left. She doesn’t want him to be difficult about this. “But you told them yes, didn’t you?” she asks. If he makes a fuss about this, she might really have cause for alarm—she might think he’s actually hiding something. And they’ll get the warrant anyway.

  “Yes,” Paul says at last. “There’s nothing to find. It’s not like we’re hiding anything. But it’s ridiculous, and a waste of resources. It’s not a good thing that police can ask to search your home, knowing that they’ll just get a warrant anyway; it’s intimidation. It’s an erosion of privacy.”

  “I know how you like your privacy,” Olivia says, a hint of acid in her voice.

  He turns on her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It just means I don’t see why you have to be difficult about this! I want this to end, Paul.”

  “I’m not being difficult,” Paul says tersely. “They’re meeting me out there tomorrow morning. I’m taking the day off work.”

  She feels her body sag. She just wants to be done with this. And she’s not going to tell Paul about her visit to his aunt Margaret.

  * * *

  —

  Raleigh can hear raised voices on the floor below; it sounds like his parents are arguing, but the voices quickly recede. He couldn’t make out what they were saying. It’s not like his parents to argue, but lately, the house has been tense. He blames some of it on himself. He knows his parents are fighting partly because of what he’s done. He doesn’t dare tell them about what happened this afternoon at the coffee shop—how that horrible woman tracked him down, tricked him, and accused him. It took him ages to stop shaking afterward.

  If he told his parents, his mother would probably have a breakdown. But what if that woman shows up at the house and confronts his mother again, and tells her about the meeting in the coffee shop? What if she decides to go to the police? He feels trapped, and he doesn’t know what to do. The only people he would feel comfortable going to for help or advice for anything are his parents, and he can’t go to them with this. Not now. Not with everything else they’re dealing with.

  And they all continue to pretend that everything is just fine.

  * * *

  —

  Becky bolts inside her house and locks the door behind her. Now that she’s away from him, she begins to shake. Only a psychopath would toy with her the way Robert just did. It was probably one of us and you don’t know which one. I guess you have a problem, don’t you? What kind of person would say something like that? When it’s his own wife who’s dead? He’s sick.

  She realizes, with a hideous feeling, that Robert wants Larry to be charged with the murder of his wife. After all, Larry was the one sleeping with her. Perhaps he’s set the whole thing up somehow. He doesn’t miss Amanda at all. He put on a good show of grief in the beginning, but he’s not bothering to pretend for her anymore. He’s let her see who he really is. He’s dropped the mask. She paces the living room anxiously, picking relentlessly at her cuticles.

  She hears a key in the lock. Larry comes in and looks at her.

  “Why do you have the door locked?” he asks, his face gray.

  He looks shattered. She doesn’t answer. Instead, she says, “Well?” She doesn’t even wait for him to take his jacket off.

  “I told them what you said.”

  “Did they believe you?”

  “I think so.”

  “You think so?” She can’t keep the edge of hysteria out of her voice.

  “Christ, I don’t know!” he almost shouts back at her. “I don’t know what they think!” He lowers his voice again. “But Becky, there’s another problem.”

  “What problem?” How much worse can it get?

  He tells her, haltingly. “At the resort, I parked in the outdoor parking lot, not the indoor lot. Apparently there’s no camera on the outdoor parking lot—so I can’t prove I never left.”

  She stares at him for a long moment.

  “But they can’t prove I did either,” he says.

  “Maybe it’s time we got you a lawyer,” she says dully.

  “What does that mean?” he says. “Don’t you believe me?”

  “Yes,” she says automatically, even though she doesn’t know if she believes him or not.

  He strides into the living room to the bar cart. “I need a drink.”

  “I went over to see Robert Pierce while you were out,” Becky says, her voice a hoarse whisper, as she w
atches him pour himself a stiff whiskey.

  He whirls around to look at her, the bottle in his hand. “What? What the hell did you do that for? He probably murdered his wife!”

  She’s staring into space. Now that it’s over, she can hardly believe she did it. She must have been out of her mind. “I told him that the police think you might have killed Amanda.”

  “Jesus, Becky! That’s insane! What did you tell him that for?”

  She focuses on him now; he seems to have gone a shade paler. “I wanted to see what he’d say.”

  “And?”

  “He said it was probably either you or him who killed her.”

  Larry looks horrified. “Becky—he’s dangerous. Promise me you won’t go near him anymore. Promise.”

  She nods. She doesn’t want to go near Robert Pierce ever again.

  * * *

  —

  Detective Webb drives across the Aylesford Bridge spanning the Hudson, and turns north on the highway, Moen beside him in the passenger seat. It’s early Monday morning, exactly a week since they found Amanda Pierce’s abandoned car, her violently beaten body shoved into the trunk.

  It’s a cold, crisp day, but the sun is out, and it’s a pleasant drive. At first the river is on their right. Soon they turn west, deeper into the Catskills, in the direction of the small town of Springhill. The wilderness stretches out all around them as the road curves and winds through the mountains. Eventually they turn off the highway and take a series of smaller, winding roads. The drive to the Sharpes’ cabin takes them right past the spot where Amanda’s body was found. Paul Sharpe must know this stretch of road well.

  At last they turn down a gravel road and finally stop at a classic wood cabin that looks weathered, nestled in among the trees.

  Webb sees a car parked in front. Paul Sharpe is here ahead of them. No surprise there.

  They climb out of the car. The air is fresher here, and smells of earth, wet leaves, and pine needles. Breezes rustle through the remaining leaves on the trees overhead. They can see a small lake farther down, a dock jutting out into the water.