Pieces of Her

by Karin Slaughter

First up, the police would have to ID Hoodie, aka Samuel Godfrey Beckett. Considering the guy’s vocation, he was more than likely in the system, so a fingerprint scan was all it would take to get his name. Once they had his name, they would find the truck registration, then they would put out an APB on the wire, which would create an alert that would show up on the screen of every squad car in the tri-state area.

  Of course, this assumed that what was supposed to happen was what actually happened. There were tons of APBs all the time. Even the high-priority ones were missed by a lot of the patrol officers, who had maybe a billion things to do on their shifts, including trying not to get shot, and stopping to read an alert was often not a high priority.

  That did not necessarily mean Andy was in the clear. If the cops didn’t find the truck, the librarians, or more likely the grumpy old guy with the political rants, would probably report the abandoned vehicle. Then the cops would roll up. The officer would run the plates and VIN, see there was an APB, notify Savannah, then the forensic techs would find Andy’s shoes and work shirt and her fingerprints and DNA all over the interior.

  Andy felt her stomach pitch.

  Her fingerprints on the frying pan could be explained away—Andy cooked eggs in her mother’s kitchen all of the time—but stealing the dead man’s truck and crossing state lines put her squarely in special circumstances territory, meaning if Palazzolo charged Andy with the murder of Hoodie, the prosecutor could seek the death penalty.

  The death penalty.

  She opened her mouth to breathe as a wave of dizziness took hold. Her hands were shaking again. Big, fat tears rolled down her face. The trees blurred outside the car windows. Andy should turn herself in. She shouldn’t be running away. She had dropped her mother in a pile of shit. It didn’t matter that Laura had told Andy to leave. She should’ve stayed. At least that way Andy wouldn’t be so alone right now.

  The truth brought a sob to her mouth.

  “Get it together,” she coaxed herself. “Stop this.”

  Andy gripped the steering wheel. She blinked away her tears. Laura had told her to go to Idaho. She needed to go to Idaho. Once Andy was there, once she crossed the state line, she could break down and cry every single day until the phone rang and Laura told her it was safe to come home. Following Laura’s orders was the only way she would get through this.

  Laura had also told her to unhook the Ford’s battery.

  “Fuck,” Andy muttered, then, channeling Gordon, Andy told herself, “What’s done is done.” The finality of the proclamation loosened the tight bands around Andy’s chest. There was also the benefit of it being true. Whether or not the Ford was found or what the cops did with it was completely out of Andy’s control.

  This was the question she needed to worry about: during her computer searches at the library, at what point exactly had she turned on the Google Incognito Mode? Because once the cops found the truck, they would talk to the librarians, and the librarians would tell them that Andy had used the computer. While she felt certain that the librarians would put up a fight—as a group, they were mostly First Amendment badasses—a warrant to search the computer would take maybe an hour and then a tech would need five seconds to find Andy’s search history.

  She was certain the Incognito Mode was on before she looked up Paula Kunde of Austin, Texas, but was it on before or after she searched for directions to Idaho?

  Andy could not recall.

  Second worrisome thing: what if it wasn’t the cops who asked the librarians these questions? What if Laura’s omniscient they found someone to look for Hoodie’s truck, and they talked to the librarians, and they searched the computer?

  Andy wiped her nose with her arm. She backed down on the speed because the Reliant started to shake like a bag of cat treats if she went over fifty-five.

  Had she put other people’s lives at risk by abandoning the truck? Had she put her own life at risk by looking up the directions to Idaho? Andy tried again to mentally walk through the morning. Entering the library. Pouring the coffee. Sitting down at the computer. She had looked up the Belle Isle Review first, right? And then clicked to private browsing?

  She was giving Google Incognito Mode a lot of credit. It seemed very unlikely that something so standard could fool a forensic computer whiz. Andy probably should’ve cleared out the cache and wiped the history and erased all the cookies the way she had learned to do after that horrible time Gordon had accidentally seen the loop of erotic Outlander scenes Andy had accessed from his laptop.

  Andy wiped her nose again. Her cheeks felt hot. She saw a road sign.

  FLORENCE 5 MI

  Andy guessed she was heading in the right direction, which was somewhere in the upper left corner of Alabama. She hadn’t stopped to buy a new map to plot the route to Idaho. Once she’d left the storage unit, her only goal was to get as far away from Carrollton as possible. She had her highway and interstate scribbles from the library, but she was mostly relying on the back of the Georgia map, which had ads for other maps. There was a small rendering of The Contiguous United States of America available for $5.99 plus postage and handling. Andy had grown up looking at similar maps, which was why she was in her twenties before she’d understood how Canada and New York State could share Niagara Falls.

  This was her plan: after Alabama, she’d cut through a corner of Tennessee, a corner of Arkansas, Missouri, a tiny piece of Kansas, left at Nebraska, then Wyoming, then she would literally fucking kill herself if she wasn’t in Idaho by then.

  Andy leaned forward, resting her chin on the shaky steering wheel. The vertebrae in her lower back had turned into prickly pears. The trees started to blur again. She wasn’t crying anymore, just exhausted. Her eyelids kept fluttering. She felt like they were weighted down with paste.

  She made herself sit up straight. She punched the thick white buttons on the radio. She twisted the dial back and forth. All she found were sermons and farm reports and country music, but not the good kind; the kind that made you want to stab a pencil into your ear.

  Andy opened her mouth and screamed as loud as she could.

  It felt good, but she couldn’t scream for the rest of her life.

  At some point, she would have to get some sleep. The five-and-a-half-hour drive from Belle Isle had been draining enough. So far, the drive from Carrollton had added another four and a half hours because of traffic, which Andy seemed pre-ordained to find no matter which route she took. It was almost three p.m. Except for zonking out for a few hours in her apartment and the catnap in the Walmart parking lot, she hadn’t really slept since she got up for her dispatch shift two days ago. During that time, Andy had survived a shooting, watched her mother get injured, agonized outside of the surgical suite, freaked out over a police interrogation and killed a man, so as these things went, it was no wonder that she felt like she wanted to vomit and yell and cry at the same time.

  Not to mention that her bladder was a hot-water bottle sitting inside of her body. She had stopped only once since leaving the storage unit, pulling onto the shoulder of the highway, hiding between the open front and back car doors, waiting for traffic to clear, then squatting down to relieve herself in the grass because she was terrified to leave the Reliant unattended.

  $240,000

  Andy couldn’t leave that kind of cash in the car while she ran into Burger King, and taking the suitcase inside would be like carrying a neon sign for somebody to rob her. What the hell was Laura doing with that kind of cash? How long had it taken for her to save it?

  Was she a bank robber?

  The question was only a little crazy. Being a bank robber would explain the money, and it jibed with the D.B. Cooper joke on the Canada ID and maybe even the gun in the glove box.

  Andy’s heart pinged at the thought of the gun.

  Here was the problem: bank robbers seldom got away with their crimes. It was a very high risk for a very low reward, because the FBI was in charge of all investigations that had to do with federally insure
d funds. Andy thought the law’s origins had something to do with Bonnie and Clyde or John Dillinger or the government just basically making sure that people knew their money was safe.

  Anyway, she couldn’t see her mother pulling on a ski mask and robbing a bank.

  Then again, before the shooting at the diner, she couldn’t see her mom knifing a kid in the neck.

  Then again—again—Andy could not see her reliable, sensible mother doing a lot of the crazy shit that Laura had done in the last thirty-six hours. The hidden make-up bag, the key behind the photograph, the storage unit, the Thom McAn box.

  Which brought Andy to the photo of toddler Andy in the snow.

  Here was the Lifetime Movie question: Had Andy been kidnapped as a child? Had Laura seen a baby left alone in a shopping cart or unattended on a playground and decided to take her home?

  Andy glanced in the rearview mirror. The shape of her eyes, the same shape as Laura’s, told her that Laura was her mother.

  The Polaroids showed Laura so badly beaten that her bottom lip was split open. Maybe Jerry Randall was an awful man. Maybe back in 1989, he was beating Laura, and she snapped and took Andy on the run with her, and Jerry had been looking for them ever since.

  Which was a Julia Roberts movie. Or a Jennifer Lopez movie. Or Kathy Bates. Or Ashley Judd, Keri Russell, Ellen Page . . .

  Andy snorted.

  There were a lot of movies about women getting pissed off about men beating the shit out of them.

  But the Polaroids showed that her mother had in fact had the shit beaten out of her, so maybe that wasn’t so far off base.

  Andy found herself shaking her head.

  Laura hadn’t said he can trace you. She’d said they.

  Going by the movies, they generally meant evil corporations, corrupt presidents or power-hungry tech billionaires with unlimited funds. Andy tried to play out each scenario with her mother at the center of some vast conspiracy. And then she decided she should probably stop using Netflix as a crime sourcebook.

  The Florence exit was up. Andy couldn’t squat on the highway again. She hadn’t had lunch because she couldn’t bear to eat another hamburger in another car. The part of her brain that was still capable of thinking told her that she could not make the thirty-hour drive straight through to Idaho without sleep. Eventually, she would have to stop at a hotel.

  Which meant that, eventually, she would have to figure out what to do with the money.

  Her hand had pushed down the blinker before she could stop it. She glided off the Florence exit. Adrenaline had kept Andy going for so long that there was hardly anything left to move her. There were signs off the exit for six different hotels. She took a right at the light because it was easier. She coasted to the first motel because it was the first motel. Worrying about safety and cleanliness were luxuries from her former life.

  Still, her heart started pounding as she got out of the Reliant. The motel was two stories, a squat, concrete design from the seventies with an ornate balcony railing around the top floor. Andy had backed crookedly into the parking space so that the rear of the station wagon never left her sight. She clutched the make-up bag in her hand as she walked into the lobby. She checked the flip phone. Laura had not called. Andy had depleted the battery by half from constantly checking the screen.

  There was an older woman at the front desk. High hair. Tight perm. She smiled at Andy. Andy glanced back at the car. There were huge windows all around the lobby. The Reliant was where she had left it, unmolested. She didn’t know if she looked weird or normal swiveling her head back and forth, but at this point, Andy didn’t care about anything but falling into a bed.

  “Hey there,” the woman said. “We got some rooms on the top floor if you want.”

  Andy felt the vestiges of her waking brain start to slip away. She’d heard what the woman had said, but there was no sense in it.

  “Unless you want something on the bottom floor?” The woman sounded dubious.

  Andy was incapable of making a decision. “Uh—” Her throat was so dry that she could barely speak. “Okay.”

  The woman took a key from a hook on the wall. She told Andy, “Forty bucks for two hours. Sixty for the night.”

  Andy reached into the make-up bag. She peeled off a few twenties.

  “Overnight, then.” The woman handed back one of the bills. She slid the guestbook across the counter. “Name, license plate, make and model.” She was looking over Andy’s shoulder at the car. “Boy, haven’t seen one of those in a long time. They make those new in Canada? Looks like you just drove it off the lot.”

  Andy wrote down the car’s information. She had to look at the license plate three times before she got the correct combination of numbers and letters.

  “You okay, sweetheart?”

  Andy smelled French fries. Her stomach grumbled. There was a diner connected to the motel. Red vinyl booths, lots of chrome. Her stomach grumbled again.

  What was more important, eating or sleeping?

  “Hon?”

  Andy turned back around. She was clearly expected to say something.

  The woman leaned across the counter. “You okay, sugar?”

  Andy struggled to swallow. She couldn’t be weird right now. She didn’t need to make herself memorable. “Thank you,” was the first thing that came out. “Just tired. I came from . . .” She tried to think of a place that was far from Belle Isle. She settled on, “I’ve been driving all day. To visit my parents. In I-Iowa.”

  She laughed. “Honey, I think you overshot Iowa by about six hundred miles.”

  Shit.

  Andy tried again. “It’s my grandmother’s car.” She searched her brain for a compelling lie. “I mean, I was at the beach. The Alabama beach. Gulf. In a town called Mystic Falls.” Christ, she was crazy-sounding. Mystic Falls was from the Vampire Diaries. She said, “My grandmother’s a snowbird. You know, people who—”

  “I know what a snowbird is.” She glanced down at the name Andy had written in the guestbook. “Daniela Cooper. That’s pretty.”

  Andy stared, unblinking. Why had she written down that name?

  “Sweetheart, maybe you should get some rest.” She pushed the key across the counter. “Top floor, corner. I think you’ll feel safer there.”

  “Thank you,” Andy managed. She was in tears again by the time she climbed behind the wheel of the Reliant. The diner was so close. She should get something to eat. Her stomach was doing that thing where it hurt so bad she couldn’t tell if it was from being hungry or being sick.

  Andy got back out of the car. She held the make-up bag in both hands as she walked the twenty feet to the diner. The sun beat down on the top of her head. The heat brought out a thick layer of sweat. She stopped at the door. She looked back at her car. Should she get the suitcase? How would that look? She could take it to her room, but then how could she leave the suitcase in her room when—

  The diner was empty when she walked in, a lone waitress reading a newspaper at the bar. Andy went to the ladies room first because her bladder gave her no other choice. She was in such a hurry that she didn’t wash her hands. The car was still there when she came out of the bathroom. No one in a blue baseball cap and blue jeans was peering into the windows. No one was running away with a 1989 Samsonite suitcase in their hand.

  She found a booth by the window overlooking the parking lot. She kept the make-up bag between her legs. The menu was giant, filled with everything from tacos to fried chicken. Her eyes saw the words but by the time they made it into her consciousness, she was stymied. She would never be able to make a choice. She could order a bunch of things, but that would only draw even more attention. She should probably leave, drive up another few exits and find a different motel where she didn’t act like an idiot. Or she could just put her head in her hands and stay here, in the air-conditioning, for a few minutes while she tried to get her thoughts in order.

  “Honey?”

  Andy jerked up from the table, disorient
ed.

  “You’re beat, ain’t you?” the woman from the motel said. “Poor thing. I told them to let you sleep.”

  Andy felt her stomach drop. She had fallen asleep again. In public—again. She looked down. The make-up bag was still between her legs. There was drool on the table. She used a napkin to wipe it up. She used her hand to wipe her mouth. Everything was vibrating. Her brain felt like it was being squished onto the point of a juice grinder.

  “Hon?” the woman said. “You should probably go to your room now. It’s getting a little busy in here.”

  The restaurant had been empty when Andy walked in, but now it was filling with people.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “It’s all right.” The woman patted Andy’s shoulder. “I asked Darla to put a plate aside for you. You want it here or do you wanna take it to your room?”

  Andy stared at her.

  “Take it to your room,” the woman said. “That way you can go right back to sleep when you’re finished.”

  Andy nodded, grateful that someone was telling her what to do.

  Then she remembered the money.

  Her neck strained as she turned to look for the car. The blue Reliant was still parked in front of the motel office. Had someone opened the trunk? Was the suitcase still there?

  “Your car is fine.” The woman handed her a Styrofoam box. “Take your food. Your room’s the last one on the top floor. I don’t like to put young women on the ground floor. Old gals like me, we’d welcome a strange man knocking at our door, but you . . .” She gave a husky chuckle. “Just keep to yourself and you’ll be fine.”

  Andy took the box, which weighed the equivalent of a cement block. She put the make-up bag on top. Her legs were wobbly when she stood. Her stomach rumbled. She ignored the people staring at her as she walked back into the parking lot. She fumbled with the keys to open the hatch. She couldn’t decide what to take inside, so she loaded herself up like a pack mule, slinging the tote bag over her shoulder, tucking the sleeping bag into her armpit, grabbing the handle of the suitcase and balancing the make-up bag/take-out Jenga with her free hand.