Pieces of Her

by Karin Slaughter

  “Juneau and Maplecroft in the front parlor,” Nick bellowed, choosing this moment to make his appearance. “Good God, they sound like characters from the Canadian version of Clue. Which one had the candlestick?”

  Everyone had turned to look at Nick standing in the entryway. He had somehow managed to take all of the air out of the room. Jane had seen him do this countless times before. He could bring the tone up or down like a deejay turning the knob on a record player.

  “Mr. Harp,” Barlow said. “Nice that you can join us.”

  “My pleasure.” Nick walked into the room with a self-satisfied grin on his face. Jane kept her eyes on Barlow, who was taking in Nick’s fine features. The agent’s expression was neutral, but she could feel his distaste. Nick’s good looks and charm either worked for him or against him. There was never any in between.

  “Now, gentlemen.” Nick put a proprietary arm behind Jane as he wedged himself between Jane and Andrew on the couch. “I’m assuming you’ve already been told that none of us knew either Maplecroft or Juneau before Martin was murdered?” His fingers combed through the back of Jane’s hair. “Poor girl has been broken up about it. I don’t see how anyone could have that many tears inside of them.”

  Barlow held Nick’s gaze for just a moment before turning to Andrew, asking, “Why weren’t you and Mr. Harp on the same flight out of San Francisco?”

  “Nick left a day ahead of me.” Andrew took out his handkerchief and wiped his nose. “He had business in New York, I believe.”

  “What kind of business?”

  Andrew looked puzzled, because Barlow wasn’t asking Nick these questions.

  “Major Queller.” Barlow made a point of turning his head toward Jasper. “How is it that your family knows Mr. Harp?”

  “Nick’s been with us for years.” Jasper’s tone was even, which was surprising because he had never cared for Nick. “We’ve taken him on vacations, spent holidays together. That sort of thing.”

  Andrew added, “His family lives on the East Coast. Nick was sort of orphaned out here. Mother and Father welcomed him as one of the family.”

  Barlow asked, “He was sent out here at the age of fifteen, wasn’t he?” He waited, but no one spoke. “Got into some trouble with the police back home? Mother shipped him across the country to live with his granny?”

  “Nick told us all about it.” Andrew glanced nervously at Nick. “It was a tough road, but he still managed to get into Stanford.”

  “Right.” Barlow looked back at his notes. They were doing the silent thing again.

  Nick affected indifference. He brushed imaginary lint from his trousers. He gave Jane a quick wink. Only she could feel the tension inside his body. His arm behind her shoulders had gone taut. She could feel his fingers digging into her skin.

  Was he mad at her? Should she be defending him? Should she tell the agents that Nick was a good man, that he’d managed to pull himself up from the gutter, that they had no right to treat him this way because he was—

  Losing.

  Nick didn’t see it now, but he had lost the game the minute he’d walked into the room. He had been making fun of the government agents for days, railing against their stupidity, bragging about his own cleverness. He had not realized that they were just as capable of putting on an act as he was.

  Jane took a stuttered breath. She had started to cry again. Nothing was more terrifying than watching him try to punch his way out of a tight spot.

  “Mr. Queller.” Barlow looked up at Andrew. “Did Mr. Harp mention to you that he attended one of Dr. Maplecroft’s lectures?”

  Andrew shot Jane a frightened look that mirrored her own feelings: What should they say? What did Nick want?

  “I can answer that one,” Nick offered. “If you’d like me to?”

  “Why not?” Barlow sat back on the couch.

  Behind him, Danberry opened and closed another box.

  Nick made them wait.

  He reached for the cigarette in the ashtray. He inhaled audibly, then blew out a stream of smoke. He tapped off some ash. He lined the cigarette up with the groove in the marble ashtray. He leaned back against the couch. His arm went behind Jane.

  Finally, he looked up, pretending to be surprised that they were all waiting on him. “Oh, you want my answer now?”

  Danberry crossed his arms.

  Jane swallowed back a flood of bile that rushed up her throat.

  Nick asked Barlow, “Do you have a record of my attendance at this lecture?”

  “According to her assistant, Dr. Maplecroft didn’t believe in keeping attendance.”

  “Pity.”

  “We’ll be talking to other students this week.”

  “That must be quite an undertaking,” Nick said. “How many kids are at Berkeley now? Thirty, forty thousand?”

  Barlow gave a heavy sigh. He opened his notebook again. He resumed the game, directing his words toward Andrew. “At the conference, when Mr. Harp approached Laura Juneau, who was at that time posing as Dr. Maplecroft, Mr. Harp mentioned attending one of Dr. Maplecroft’s lectures. The police officer and the girl working the check-in table both heard him say the same thing.”

  Andrew said, “I wasn’t there for that part of the conversation, but I’m sure Nick can—”

  “Are you aware that Mr. Harp has a drug conviction?”

  Nick snapped, “Are you aware that Mr. Queller does?”

  “Christ,” Jasper muttered.

  “Just making sure they have the facts,” Nick said. “It’s a felony to lie to an FBI agent. Isn’t that correct, Mr. Danberry?”

  Danberry kept silent, but Jane could tell he’d picked up on the fact that Nick had not been here when the agents had introduced themselves. Jane could’ve told him that he was likely listening at the top of the stairs. She had learned the hard way that Nick was a stealthy eavesdropper.

  Andrew volunteered, “Two years ago, I was convicted for possession of cocaine. I performed community service in exchange for my record being expunged.”

  Nick added, “That kind of thing doesn’t stay a secret in times like these, does it?”

  Barlow quipped, “It does not.”

  Jane tried not to wince as Nick ran his fingers roughly through her hair. He told Barlow, “I met Laura Juneau in the KLM lounge at Schiphol. We were both en route to Oslo. She approached me. She asked if the seat next to me was taken. I said no. She introduced herself as Dr. Alexandra Maplecroft. She said she recognized me from one of her lectures, which could be true, but honestly, gentlemen, I was stoned out of my mind during most of my classes, so I’m hardly a reliable witness.”

  “Hardly,” Barlow echoed.

  Danberry still said nothing. He’d made it to the Bösendorfer Imperial Concert Grand on the other side of the room. Jane tried not to bristle when he soundlessly glided his fingers over the extra bass keys.

  Barlow said, “So, Mr. Harp, as far as you can recall, you met Dr. Maplecroft for the first time at the Amsterdam airport, then you met her for the second time in Oslo?”

  “That’s right,” Nick agreed. Jane could have cried with relief when he returned to the script. “In order to be polite, I pretended to recognize the woman whom I thought was Dr. Maplecroft. Then I saw her again at the conference and again pretended in order to be polite.” His shoulder went up in a shrug. “I think the operative word here is ‘pretend,’ gentlemen. She pretended to know me. I pretended to know her. Only one of us had darker intentions.”

  Barlow made a mark in his notepad.

  Andrew picked up his part. “At the conference, Nick introduced me to the Juneau woman as Dr. Maplecroft. I recognized the name, if not the face. There aren’t many photographs of Maplecroft in circulation, as I’m sure you’ve realized now that you’re searching for her. I believe I said something to the fake Maplecroft about being on Father’s panel. She didn’t have a badge, so I asked if there was a problem with the check-in.” He shrugged the exact same way that Nick had shrugged. “That w
as the extent of my interaction with the woman. The next time I saw her, she was murdering my father.”

  Jane flinched. She couldn’t help it.

  Barlow said, “That’s a very tidy explanation.”

  Nick said, “Most explanations are. The ones that are complicated are the ones I’d look out for.” He smoothed out the leg of his trousers. “But you know, gentlemen, it seems to me that I’ve already told this to your compatriots. We all have, endlessly. So, I think I’ll make my exit.”

  Neither agent moved to stop him.

  Nick hesitated only slightly before he kissed Jane on the mouth, then crossed the room in long strides. Jane felt her heart drop when he took a left instead of a right. He wasn’t going upstairs to wait for her.

  He was leaving.

  The front door opened and closed. She felt the sound reverberate like a knife to her heart. She had to part her lips again to take in breath. She was torn between relief to have him gone and fear that she would never see him again.

  “I’m sorry Nick is such an ass,” Jasper told Barlow. “But he does have a point. We can’t keep doing this. The answers are not going to change.”

  Barlow said, “This is an active investigation. The people who orchestrated the Oslo assassination still have Dr. Maplecroft.”

  “Which is a tragedy,” Jasper said. “However, there’s nothing my family can do about it.”

  Barlow said, “The ransom note for Dr. Maplecroft asked for an admission of guilt from your father’s company. They blame him for Robert Juneau’s murderous spree.”

  “It’s the family’s company.” Jasper had been sensitive about this since taking over last year. “The kidnappers also asked for one million dollars, which is preposterous. We can’t take responsibility for the actions of a madman. Do you know how many homes Queller Healthcare runs? Just in the Bay Area?”

  “Fifteen,” Andrew answered, but only Jane heard him.

  Barlow said, “The kidnappers are calling themselves the Army of the Changing World. You’ve never heard of them?”

  Both Jane and Andrew shook their heads.

  Across the room, Danberry closed the fallboard on the piano.

  Jane felt her heart lurch. The ivory would yellow without sunlight.

  Jasper picked up on her distress. He asked her, “Shouldn’t that be up?”

  She shook her head. Nick would tell her to let the keys yellow. To skip practice. To stop pushing herself so hard. Martin could not punish her from the grave.

  “Major Queller?” Barlow was waiting. “Have you heard of the Army of the—”

  “Of course not.” Jasper edged close to losing his cool, but brought himself back quickly. “I don’t have to tell you how damaging those lies are to the company. We were meant to go public this week. We’ve got some very powerful investors who are getting very antsy about this mess. The charges the kidnappers made are ludicrous. We don’t torture sick people, for Chrissakes. This isn’t Soviet Russia.”

  Danberry tried, “Major Queller—”

  “My father was a good man,” Jasper insisted. “He made some controversial statements, I’ll admit, but he always had the good of the family, the good of the country, in his mind. He was a patriot. His mission in life was to serve others, and that’s what got him killed.”

  “No one here is disagreeing with that.”

  “Look.” Jasper moderated his tone. “Laura Juneau obviously had a screw loose. We may never know why she—”

  “The why is pretty clear.” Andrew spoke quietly, but they were all listening. “Robert Juneau was kicked out of half a dozen Queller group homes. He should’ve been hospitalized, but there was no hospital to go to. You can say the system failed him, but we’re the system, Jasper. Queller is the system. Ergo—”

  “Ergo, shut the hell up, Andy.” He glared at Andrew, fire in his eyes. “The company could be ruined by this idiotic bullshit. The investors could pull out completely. Do you understand that?”

  “I need some air.” Jane stood up. Andrew and Barlow did the same. She felt dizzy. Her stomach flipped. She had to look down at the floor as she walked away. Her boots might as well have been crossing a spinning wheel. She wanted to go to the bathroom and throw up or cry or just sit there, alone, and try to figure out what was happening.

  Where had Nick gone?

  Was he mad at Jane? Had she made a mistake? Had she been silent when Nick wanted her to defend him? Would he be angry? Would he shut her out again?

  Jane couldn’t be shut out again. She couldn’t take it. Not now.

  Not when she was carrying his child.

  Instead of going into the bathroom or stopping in the kitchen to leave a desperate message on Nick’s answering machine, she walked to the back of the house and went outside.

  She stood on the patio with her eyes closed and tried to breathe. The fresh air made her feel like the band around her chest was loosening. She looked up at the cloudy sky. She could see a tiny sliver of sun behind the Golden Gate Bridge. Morning fog still laced the Marin Headlands. There was a chill in the air, but Jane didn’t want to go back inside for her sweater.

  She saw signs on the wrought iron table that her mother had been here: Annette’s lipstick-stained teacup, a full ashtray, the newspaper held down by a cut glass paperweight.

  Jane’s eyes scanned the front page of the Chronicle, though she knew the ransom letter by heart. Nick had bragged about its cleverness, even as Jane worried that it made them sound like evil super villains in a cartoon—

  This is a direct communication from the Army of the Changing World. We have kidnapped Dr. Alexandra Maplecroft, a tool of the fascist regime, a pawn in the dangerous game played by Martin Queller and his so-called healthcare company. We demand an apology for the part that Martin Queller played in the genocide of the Juneau family and other families across the greater California area. Queller Healthcare must be stopped. They have systematically exploited, tortured and beaten patients in their institutions. More lives will be lost if—

  “Nice digs.”

  Jane startled.

  “Sorry.” Agent Danberry was standing in the doorway. He had an unlit cigarette in his mouth. He stared at the view with open admiration. “My apartment, I can see the alley I share with my neighbor. If I open the window, I get to smell the puke from the junkies sleeping it off.”

  Jane didn’t know what to say. Her heart was hammering so hard that she was sure he could see it moving beneath her blouse.

  “They closed it a few years ago,” he said. “The bridge. Wind gusts.” He took the cigarette out of his mouth. “That piano in there—probably could pay off my car, right?”

  The Bösendorfer could likely buy him fifty new cars, but he wasn’t here to talk about pianos.

  “What’re the extra keys for?” He waited.

  And waited.

  Jane wiped her eyes. She couldn’t just stand here crying. She had to say something—anything—about the bridge, the fog, the view, but her mind was so filled with panic that even the most innocuous observation could not make its way to her mouth.

  Danberry nodded, as if this was expected. He lit his cigarette. He stared past the trees at the bridge. The distant bray of foghorns floated up from the rocks.

  Jane looked up at the bridge, too. She thought of the first time she’d stood with Nick in the backyard to watch the fog roll in. It wasn’t until that moment that Jane had realized that she’d taken the view for granted. Only Nick had understood how lucky they were.

  Danberry said, “I saw you play once.”

  Jane knew what he was doing—trying to steer her to something familiar, to make her comfortable.

  “My wife dragged me to a club on Vallejo. Keystone Korner. This was a long time ago. They’ve moved across the Bay, I heard.” He pulled out a chair for Jane. She had no choice but to sit. He said, “I know this is hard for you.”

  Jane wiped her eyes with her fingers. The skin felt burned by her tears.

  He took a seat without bei
ng asked. “What were you doing in Germany?”

  Jane knew the answer to the question, at least the one she was supposed to give.

  “Miss Queller?”

  She forced out the word, “Working.” Her voice was barely more than a whisper. She had to pull herself together. They had practiced this. It was just like a performance. All the notes were in her head. She just had to coax them out with her fingers.

  She rubbed her throat to relax the muscles. She said, “It was meant to be temporary. I was filling in for a friend in Berlin as a session pianist.”

  “West Berlin, I hope.”

  He smiled, so Jane smiled.

  He told her, “I know what you’re thinking: we know what you did over there. We know where you lived. We know where you worked, where you ate lunch, that you went to the East sometimes. We also know your flight to Oslo was out of East Berlin, which isn’t unusual over there, right? The fares are cheaper.” He looked back at the house. “Not that you need to save money, but who can pass up a bargain?”

  Jane felt the panic start to return. Did he really know everything, or was this a trick?

  He asked, “How was East Germany?”

  She tried to see past his question. Did they think she was a communist? A spy?

  He said, “I hear everybody watches you. Like, what you’re doing, who you’re talking to, what you’re saying.” He tapped his cigarette into the overfull ashtray. “Kind of like me right now, huh?”

  He smiled again, so Jane smiled again.

  Danberry asked, “They let them listen to music over there?”

  Jane chewed her lip. She heard Nick’s voice in her head: If they try to make you comfortable, let them think they’re making you comfortable.

  Danberry said, “A little Springsteen, maybe some Michael Jackson?”

  She pushed out the well-rehearsed words, “Popular music is frowned upon, but it’s not completely verboten.”

  “Music is freedom, right?”

  Jane shook her head. There was no script for this.

  “It’s like—” He held out his hands, fingers splayed. “It moves people. Inspires them. Makes them wanna dance or grab a gal and have a good time. It’s got power.”