Choose Me

by Tess Gerritsen

  It was a fifteen-minute walk to Emilio’s, and the whole time she thought about where they must be in their meal. By now the bread and appetizers would have been cleared away, and they’d be on the main course. She imagined the woman twirling pasta on her fork, Liam slicing into his forty-two-dollar veal entrée. That was what he’d go for, the priciest item on the menu, if only to impress his date. She picked up her pace, her boots pounding the sidewalk in determined march tempo. She could not let them slip away from the restaurant before she confronted them. This must happen tonight, now. Her hands were clenched in fists, ready for battle. This was battle, and she thought of Achilles and Aeneas, Sparta and Troy. That war had been fought over a woman. This war would be fought between women. By the time she stepped into Emilio’s, she was flushed and sweating in her down jacket. Inside, over the background music of soft jazz, she heard the clink of chinaware and the happy buzz of conversation. In the bar, a cappuccino machine roared, frothing milk.

  “Can I help you?” the hostess asked.

  Taryn pushed right past her into the dining room and spotted Liam at a table near the window. The chair across from him was empty, but there was a woman’s sweater and a purse draped over the back. She’d gone to the restroom, and Liam was too busy scrolling through his smartphone to notice Taryn until she was standing at his table. His chin snapped up, and he stared at her in disbelief.

  “Taryn? What are you—”

  “Why are you here with her?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I saw you two at the museum. And now you’ve brought her here.”

  “You’ve been spying on us?”

  “Just tell me why you’re with her.”

  “This is none of your business.”

  “It fucking well is my business.”

  “Okay, you have to leave. Now.” He glanced around, scanning the dining room for help. The hostess was already walking toward them, high heels clacking across the wood floor.

  “Is this woman disturbing you?” she asked Liam.

  “Yes, she is. Maybe you could show her out.”

  “Not till you tell me why the fuck you’re here with her!” Taryn screamed.

  Everyone was staring, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care that her hair was a wild tangle and her face was wind chapped and her voice was shaking. All she cared about was that Liam’s shame was now out in the open for the world to see.

  “That’s enough.” Liam rose to his feet and said to the other diners: “I’m sorry about this, folks. This woman is crazy.”

  “I’m calling the police,” said the hostess, already pulling out a cell phone.

  “Liam, what’s going on?” a new voice said.

  Taryn turned to see the Bitch, who had returned from the restroom and was frowning at her. She was doe eyed and so very pretty.

  “Why are you seeing my boyfriend?” Taryn demanded.

  “I’m going to walk her outside,” Liam said to the girl. “I’ll be right back.”

  “But Liam—”

  “Just wait here, okay, Libby?”

  Liam hauled Taryn across the dining room and out the door to the sidewalk. An icy wind was blowing, and he was only in shirtsleeves, but he was so fueled by rage he seemed impervious to the cold.

  “Taryn, you are going to leave me alone. Do you understand?”

  “So you’ve been cheating on me.”

  “Cheating? On you?” His laugh was like a slap in the face. “Do you think you and I are still together? It’s over. It’s been over for months, and there’s nothing between us, okay? I told you that. I’ve been telling you since Christmas, but you’re like a psycho with all your phone calls and emails and texts. Do you get it now? I’m done with you. So leave me the fuck alone.”

  “Liam,” she said softly. Then again, “Liam.”

  “Go home.” He turned back to the restaurant.

  “You love me. You told me so. Don’t you remember?”

  “Things change.”

  “This doesn’t change! Not love!”

  “We were kids. We didn’t know any better.”

  “I knew. I’ve always known. The only reason I came to Boston was to be with you. You asked me to.”

  “But now it’s time for both of us to move on. We’re not the same people we were in high school, Taryn. I’m heading to law school, maybe in California. I need to be able to breathe.”

  “Is she going to let you breathe?”

  “At least she won’t smother me. She has plans of her own.”

  “Meaning you.”

  “No, meaning she’s going to do something with her life. She’s applying to grad school, thinking about a career.”

  “You two are going away to grad school together?”

  “Come on, Taryn. Don’t make this harder than it already is. It was never going to work out between us.”

  “Because I don’t have her ambition? Or is it because I’m just the girl from Mill Street and you’re the doctor’s kid?”

  “It has nothing to do with where you came from. It’s about where you’re going, and about where I want to go. It’s about having plans.”

  “But I had you.”

  He sighed. “I can’t be responsible for making you happy.”

  “All these years, you let me believe in us. You kept me around just so you could keep using me. Fucking me.” Her voice was rising, loud enough that people inside Emilio’s could hear her. Through the window she could see them staring. Let them. She hoped the Bitch was watching too. “I was just your whore, wasn’t I?”

  “Taryn.”

  “Just a whore you used and threw away. You bastard. You bastard.” She lunged toward him.

  He grabbed both her wrists. “You’re acting nuts! Stop it. Stop it.”

  She fought him, sobbing as she pushed and punched, but he was too strong. She wrenched away, and he released her so suddenly that she stumbled backward and fell on her butt. Sitting on the icy sidewalk, she could feel the appalled gazes of people staring at her through the restaurant window. They’d seen the whole thing. They knew she was the one who’d attacked first. There was no blaming this on Liam.

  “Go home, Taryn,” Liam said in disgust. “Go home before you embarrass yourself even more than you already have.” He walked back into Emilio’s, leaving her alone and shivering on the sidewalk.

  She could still feel all those eyes watching her as she slowly rose back to her feet. She couldn’t bear to look at the window, couldn’t bear to see them enjoying her humiliation. She just walked away, sore and limping from her fall on the pavement. She was so numb from cold and shock that she moved on automatic pilot. All she could hear were the same words echoing again and again in her head.

  I’m not good enough for him. Not good enough. Not good enough. Not good enough.

  Suddenly she glimpsed her reflection in a storefront window, and she halted, staring at her haunted eyes, her windblown hair. Was this what crazy looked like? Was this the moment she walked into traffic or threw herself off a building?

  She took a deep breath. Scraped the tangled hair off her face and stood up straight. Liam thought she wasn’t good enough.

  It was time to prove him wrong.

  AFTER

  CHAPTER 15

  FRANKIE

  Sometimes this job is just too easy, thinks Frankie. The murder weapon, almost certainly covered with the killer’s fingerprints, is already sealed in an evidence bag. The estranged husband now sits handcuffed in a patrol car outside. And his wife . . .

  Frankie looks down at the body on the bed. The woman is dressed in a blue cotton nightgown, the hem scalloped with white lace. She lies curled up on her right side, her face nestled on a pillow that is now embedded with bits of scalp and brain matter, blasted there by the force of the gunshot. Judging by the wife’s peaceful pose, she must have slept through the sound of the key turning in her front-door lock, which she had not yet changed. She slept through the footsteps treading up
the hall to her bedroom. And she was sleeping when the figure approached her bed, a figure that, after eight turbulent years of marriage, would have been chillingly familiar.

  “He won’t stop blabbing,” says Mac. “If only they were all like him.”

  Frankie looks up as her partner walks into the bedroom. His face is still florid from the wind, his rosacea inflamed worse than ever on this cold morning.

  “Then you and I would be out of a job,” she says and looks at the body again. Theresa Lutovic, age thirty-two. Maybe she was pretty once; it is now hard to tell.

  “Restraining order was filed just last week. New locks were supposed to be installed tomorrow.”

  “She did everything right,” says Frankie.

  “Except for marrying the guy.”

  “Do the neighbors have anything to add?” she asks.

  “Neighbors on the right didn’t wake up until they heard the sirens. Neighbor on the left heard a bang, doesn’t know what time it was, and went right back to sleep. If the asshole hadn’t called it in himself, it might’ve been a while before anyone found her.” Mac shakes his head in disgust. “No remorse, not one shred of it. In fact, he sounded like he’s fucking proud he did it.”

  Proud of asserting his God-given right of possession, Frankie thinks, looking down at what had once been that possession. Did this woman feel any inkling when she first met her husband that a blood-soaked bed was in her future? When they were dating, was there a hint—a glare, a sharp word—revealing the monster beneath his mask? Or did she ignore all the clues, lured in like so many women are by the promise of hearts and flowers and happily ever after?

  “At least there aren’t any children involved,” Frankie says.

  Mac grunts. “Thank God for small blessings.”

  Eddie Lutovic sits at the interview table with his head held high, his back as ramrod straight as a soldier’s. As Frankie settles into the chair across from him, he does not meet her gaze but looks right past her, as if some phantom authority stands behind her. As if this matronly woman with bifocals and a navy-blue pantsuit cannot possibly be that authority. Frankie lets him stew in silence for a moment as she takes her time studying him. He could be considered a good-looking man, muscular and trim at thirty-six, his brown hair clipped short, his eyes an unnerving crystalline blue. Yes, she can see that some women might be attracted, even reassured, by his confident bearing. They’d think: Here is a man who can take care of me, protect me.

  “Mr. Lutovic,” she says. “In case you’ve forgotten my name, I’m Detective Loomis. I need to ask you a few more—”

  “Yeah, you told me your name this morning,” he cuts in, still refusing to look at her.

  She lets his obvious disdain slide right past her. Calmly she says, “At five ten this morning, you called nine-one-one from your estranged wife’s residence.”

  “That’s my house. Not hers.”

  “Regardless of whose house it is, you called the emergency operator. Did you not?”

  “I did.”

  “You informed the operator that you’d just shot your wife.”

  He gives a dismissive wave. “Why am I talking to you? I should be talking to Detective MacClellan.”

  “Detective MacClellan is not the one sitting here. I am.”

  “Everything I need to say, I’ve already said to him.”

  “And now you’re going to say it to me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re not leaving this room until you do. So let’s just get on with it, shall we? Why did you shoot Theresa?”

  At last he looks at her. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  “You think I wanted to kill her?”

  “I think you must be angry that she was leaving you.”

  His glare could freeze water. “A man can only be pushed so far. That’s my house she was living in. You can’t kick a man out of his own fucking house!”

  “Tell me about the gun you used. The Glock.”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s not registered. And since Theresa had a restraining order against you, you were in illegal possession of that weapon.”

  “The Second Amendment says I have a right to own a gun.”

  “The State of Massachusetts doesn’t agree.”

  “Fuck the State of Massachusetts.”

  “And the State of Massachusetts will happily return the sentiment,” she says and smiles. As they regard each other across the table, the gravity of his situation at last seems to sink in. Suddenly the breath goes out of him, and his shoulders sag.

  “It didn’t have to be this way,” he says.

  “But it is. Why?”

  “You don’t know how hard she made it for me. It was like she wanted to piss me off. Like she did things on purpose, to get me to react.”

  “What things?”

  “The way she looked at other guys. The way she talked back if I called her on it.”

  “She asked for it, did she?”

  He hears the disgust in her voice and raises his head to glare at her. “I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

  Oh, but Frankie does understand. She’s heard this excuse, or variations of it, too many times before. Not my fault. The victim made me do it. She could show him the list of calls his wife made to 911. She could show him the record of her last ER visit and the photo of her bruised face, and his answer would be the same: Not my fault.

  It never is.

  She sinks back, suddenly weary of her role in these three-act tragedies. Frankie is the character who invariably walks onstage too late, in the third act, after the damage is done. After the corpse is zipped into the body bag. If only she could have entered this drama earlier, when there was still time to warn the future Mrs. Lutovic: Turn back now, before you fall in love with this man. Before you say I do. Before the beatings and the restraining orders and the ER visits. Before the zipper of a body bag closes over you.

  But women in love are seldom dissuaded by the voice of experience. She thinks of her own impulsive daughters and all the nights she lies awake, waiting to hear the reassuring sound of their key in the door. How many hours of sleep has she lost as she watched the hours tick by, afraid to think of all the terrible possibilities?

  She knows all too well what can go wrong. She saw it today, in the bedroom of a dead woman.

  An officer escorts Lutovic out of the room, but Frankie remains in her chair, jotting down notes from the interview. It has all been recorded on video, but she is old fashioned enough to prefer the touch and permanence of paper. Words written in ink don’t vanish into the ether or get accidentally deleted, and the act of writing them down helps sear the interview into her memory. Her phone dings with a text message, but she keeps writing, in a rush to record her impressions before they fade. But what will never fade is her disgust toward Eddie Lutovic. She is so focused on her notes that she scarcely notices when Mac walks into the room. Only when she hears him sneeze does she look up.

  “ME’s office just called. They want to know if we’re coming,” he says.

  “To what?”

  “The autopsy on Taryn Moore.”

  She looks down at her angry scribbles. Thinks of Eddie’s leering face and his wife’s blood splattered on the pillow. She shuts her notebook.

  “It’s not like we have to go,” says Mac. “It’s just a suicide.”

  “Are you absolutely sure about that?”

  Mac gives a resigned sigh. “I’ll drive.”

  CHAPTER 16

  FRANKIE

  In Frankie’s experience, autopsies seldom reveal surprises of any significance. Occasionally the ME might turn up an extra bullet wound or an occult tumor or, in the case of one deranged senior citizen who’d shot up his neighborhood, a whopping case of brain rot known as Pick’s disease. But most of the time, Frankie has already deduced the cause and manner of death even before the pathologist makes his first cut. Postmortems are often merely formalities, and Frankie is no
t required to attend them.

  This one, she wishes she had skipped.

  When she sees Taryn Moore’s body laid out on the table, it is far too easy for her to imagine it belonging to one of her own daughters. Daughters she nursed and bathed, whose diapers she changed; daughters she watched blossom from plump toddlers into slim-hipped teenagers into beautiful young women. Now here is another mother’s daughter, once equally beautiful, and the thought of that mother’s loss is so painful she wants to walk out of the room. Instead she stoically ties on a paper mask and joins Mac at the autopsy table.

  “Didn’t know if you two were coming, so I got started without you,” says Dr. Fleer, the pathologist. If she didn’t know he was a fanatically health-conscious vegan and marathon runner, she would think he was seriously ill because he is cadaverically thin, his blue eyes staring from a disturbingly skull-like head. “I’m just about to open the thorax.”

  Frankie forces herself to focus on the torso as Fleer cuts through the exposed ribs with pruning shears. Standing beside her, Mac gives an explosive sneeze behind his paper mask, but it is the crack-crack of snapping bone that makes her wince.

  “Sounds like you should go home, Detective MacClellan,” Fleer says. “Before you infect us with whatever virus you’re incubating.”

  “Why are you worried about a little virus?” Mac snorts. “I thought you vegans were invincible.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt you to try going vegan for once. A few months into it, you won’t even miss those animal fats.”

  “When they make broccoli taste like steak, I may give it a try.”

  “You don’t have a fever, do you? Myalgias?”

  “It’s just a head cold. This damp weather is hell on my sinuses. Anyway, I’m wearing a mask, aren’t I?”

  “Paper masks are not airtight, and you were already sneezing when you walked in. By now, your viral spray has been broadcast all over this room.”

  “Excuse me for breathing.”

  Fleer cuts through the last rib and lifts off the shield of breastbone, revealing the heart and lungs. He peers into the chest cavity. “Interesting.”