by Shari Lapena
“She says she followed you, in her car, far enough behind you that you wouldn’t notice her.” Karen remains perfectly still, and Tom’s heart sinks as he watches complex emotions play across her face. It’s true, he thinks, what Brigid said.
“What else did she say?”
“She said she followed you until you parked and then she parked across the street. She watched you go to the back of the restaurant. She heard gunshots. Three shots. And then she saw you run out of the building to your car. She says she saw you tear off the gloves and get in the car and speed away.”
His wife says nothing. She is clearly shocked by this news.
“Karen,” Tom whispers.
She still says nothing.
“Karen!” Tom says it urgently. He lowers his voice, instinctively looking around to be sure they aren’t overheard. But no one else can hear them in the room’s chatter. “She was there!”
“Maybe she’s lying.”
“I don’t think so,” Tom says quietly. “How would she know about the gloves?” Karen is quiet, her eyes wide. He can see a vein throb in her throat. Nobody knows about the gloves—except the police. Tom shakes his head. “I think she was there. I think she saw you. She says you had a gun in your hand on the way in, and you ran out with just the gloves on the way out.”
“And what did she do then?” Karen asks, her hands gripping the edge of the table.
“She went into the restaurant and saw the body,” Tom says. He watches Karen go pale, and feels bile rising in his throat. “She freaked out and got the hell out of there and went home.” He leans as close to her as he dares under the guard’s watchful eye, disturbed by the story her face is telling him. “Karen, tell me the truth. Do you really not remember?” He says it gently, coaxingly. He forgives her—if only she will tell him the truth. He can see by the look on her face how terrorized she must have been. Surely a jury will see it, too.
“She’s a witness,” Karen says, as if she can hardly believe it.
“Did you kill him?” Tom presses, his voice so low it’s almost inaudible. He looks around again. No one’s paying any attention to them. “You can tell me,” he says. “Only me.”
She looks back at him and says, “I don’t remember. But I don’t think I could shoot anyone.”
If only he could believe her. He sits back in his chair, full of despair. Maybe the jury will understand why she did what she did. Even so, she’ll still be in jail for years and years, Tom thinks bleakly. It’s not fair, when it was all Robert Traynor’s fault. If he hadn’t come after her again, if he’d just left her alone, they wouldn’t be sitting here right now, in a county jail, frightened and miserable.
Even if she can’t admit the truth to him—maybe she can’t even admit it to herself, maybe she’s completely repressed it from her conscious mind—he thinks he still loves her, this different, terribly wronged, Karen. He can’t let her go to prison for the rest of her life. Living without her through empty days, empty nights, thinking of her locked up in a cage—it’s unimaginable.
“She’s a witness,” Karen says again, pulling herself together and leaning toward him. “Even if they’re able to prove the gloves are mine, that still isn’t proof that I killed him. It’s only proof that I was there. I was there—but I—” She looks desperately at him. “If I were able to kill him, I would have done it when I was married to him, don’t you think? If Brigid says she heard shots and saw me running out right after, she must be lying!” Karen looks at him with fear in her eyes. “Why would she lie?”
Tom shakes his head and says nothing. He doesn’t think Brigid is lying; he thinks Karen is lying—or at best, she really doesn’t know what happened. “I don’t think she’s going to say anything,” Tom says finally.
“How can you be so sure?” Karen whispers back, anxiety in her voice.
“She’s your friend,” he says uneasily.
“What kind of friend makes up a lie like that? Maybe she followed me, maybe she was there—but maybe it didn’t happen the way she says it did.”
Tom looks at Karen unhappily. He leans forward again and says, “We have to make sure they never find out that she was there. They have no reason to think she knows anything about it. They have no reason to call her as a witness. She’s not going to say anything.”
“I hope you’re right,” Karen says apprehensively. “But I don’t trust her anymore.”
Tom doesn’t trust Brigid either, but he does think she’s telling the truth.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Karen starts to tremble when Tom leaves. As she watches him go, it’s as if her last connection to the outside world is disappearing. In here, she fears her real self might just dissolve. Watching his retreating back she almost screams, Don’t leave me here! But then a guard comes for her and she must hold it together, because if she doesn’t, if she shows weakness, she will never survive in here.
It all may work out, Calvin has told her. But it’s getting harder and harder to believe it. She’s shocked that Brigid followed her that night. She suddenly remembers something she glimpsed from the corner of her eye, in the plaza, something familiar that didn’t quite register at the time—Brigid’s car. She remembers it now. Why can’t she remember the rest? It’s driving her mad.
Why did Brigid follow her? What possible reason could she have had? It can only be because Brigid saw her tear out of the house so fast; she sensed drama and couldn’t resist.
What incredibly bad luck for her that Brigid lives across the street.
—
Tom is on his way to his car when he gets a call from the office. His heart sinks. He doesn’t want to deal with work. He’s going to have to tell them that he needs some time off. He hasn’t been to the office since Karen was arrested the day before, and he’d flown out when Jack Calvin called. And now the story is all over the papers.
He reluctantly takes the call.
“Tom,” James Merritt says. Merritt is a senior partner at Simpson & Merritt. Tom has never much cared for him.
“Yes?” Tom says impatiently.
“We need you to come into the office,” Merritt says in his smooth, commanding baritone.
“Now? I . . . I have some things I have to sort out—”
“Half an hour, in the boardroom.” The call is disconnected.
“Fuck!” Of course they know that Karen’s been arrested for murder. That won’t play well with the clients.
He drives home quickly to put on a suit and then heads to the office. He parks in his usual spot and sits for a minute in the car, preparing himself. With a strong sense of foreboding, he climbs out of the car and strides into the building. He takes the elevator up to the boardroom on the twelfth floor, a room he rarely visits.
When he steps inside, he sees the partners all seated around the large, smooth table. The murmuring in the room stops suddenly in an unnerving way, and Tom knows that, of course, they were talking about him. About his wife.
“Have a seat, Tom,” Merritt says, directing him to an open chair.
Tom sits, looking around the room at the members of the firm gathered there. Some of them meet his eyes curiously, others don’t.
“What’s this about?” Tom asks boldly.
“We were hoping you would tell us,” Merritt says.
Tom is anxious. He’s never really fit in. He’s not from the right background. He doesn’t come from money, doesn’t play golf in the right clubs. He’s risen as far as he has because he’s a damned good accountant. And he works like a fiend, never complaining. But they were probably never going to make him partner. And now this.
“If this is about my wife, I don’t think it’s any of your business,” Tom says.
“On the contrary, we do think it’s our business,” Merritt says. He gives Tom a cold look. “We’re sorry for your troubles,” he continues, not looking particula
rly sorry. He and the other partners look more appalled than anything. “But we are naturally concerned about how it looks.” Merritt sweeps his eyes down the table at the other partners, most of whom are nodding silently.
Tom stares at each of them in turn, quietly furious.
“There’s no question you’re an excellent accountant, Tom,” Merritt says. “But you must understand our position. We have to think of our clients, their sensibilities. I’m afraid we have to suspend you without pay, until such time as the charges against your wife are dropped.” He lets that sink in. “Of course,” he adds, “you’re free to pursue opportunities elsewhere. We would be happy to give you a good reference.”
Tom blinks rapidly. They’re firing him. He stands up and, without uttering a word, walks out of the boardroom, slamming the door resoundingly behind him.
He tears out of the parking lot in a fury. He needs money for Karen’s legal bills, which are going to be enormous. And now he has no way to pay them.
—
Brigid sees Tom return home. She watches him get out of the car and slam the door, as if he’s angry. He strides up the steps and disappears inside the house.
Her heart picks up speed. She wonders what’s happened now.
The sooner he’s rid of Karen, the sooner he has her as a fixture in his life, the happier he’ll be. Brigid believes this with her whole heart.
It’s so perfect that Karen is out of the way, in jail. When Tom visits her, Brigid thinks, how different she must be, with her unwashed hair and ugly prison clothes. Karen was always so attractive—she has those perfect features and that expensive pixie haircut that shows off her fine bone structure. She won’t have that flattering cut for much longer. How fun it would be to visit her, Brigid imagines. She would like to visit Karen in jail and see the new, unattractive Karen for herself. How satisfying that would be. Brigid always sensed a certain entitlement in Karen. But now, Brigid is the one who’s entitled to everything—including Tom. She will have all of Karen’s nice things, including her husband. Soon Karen will understand that and she won’t be able to do a damn thing about it.
Brigid will wait until later, until Bob has come home to grab supper and has gone out again. Really, the man just comes home to eat and sleep. And now she’s glad, because it leaves her free to do as she pleases.
This afternoon, she had her hair cut short, in the same pixie style that Karen wears. And she had a mani-pedi. Brigid knows that Karen regularly treats herself to mani-pedis. Or at least she used to. She won’t be doing that anymore. Brigid smiles when she thinks that maybe Karen will be getting homemade tattoos in prison instead. She even knows which nail salon Karen went to, and who cut her hair, because Karen had told her. Now, Brigid regards herself in her bathroom mirror and likes what she sees. Gone is the shoulder-length brown hair with the boring middle part. The new short, flirty cut makes her look completely different. She loves it. As she sat in the stylist’s chair and watched her hair fall to the floor in clumps, she could feel her old life, and her old self, falling away. She feels like a gorgeous butterfly emerging from a long sleep.
If she’s going to slip into Karen Krupp’s life, she’s going to do it right. She will be everything Tom wants her to be, but more. She holds her hands out in front of her and admires her professionally done nails.
Soon she will go across the street and see Tom again. She quivers with excitement. He won’t dare turn her away.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Jennings pops his head in Rasbach’s door again at the end of the day. Rasbach looks up. “What is it?” Rasbach asks.
“We got another call about the Krupp case. From the same woman.”
“Already? What did she say this time?”
“She asked why we weren’t searching the Krupps’ property for the murder weapon.”
Rasbach sits back in his chair, while Jennings takes his usual seat in front of Rasbach’s desk. “So she knows we aren’t there searching. She must be keeping an eye on the place. A neighbor, maybe.”
“Yup. I wouldn’t have bothered you with it, but she said something else that rang some very loud bells.”
“What?” Rasbach says sharply.
“She asked me whether we got the gloves.”
Rasbach leans forward intently. “Nobody knows about the gloves.” Only the police, and Karen and Tom Krupp. There has been nothing in the newspapers about the gloves.
“This woman does.”
“We might have a witness,” Rasbach says, “or at least somebody who knows something.” He feels a little thrill of adrenaline. “There’s no way Karen Krupp could have put the murder weapon back in her house,” Rasbach says. “We talked about this earlier today. It wasn’t in the car when she crashed, and if she’d hidden it, or thrown it out the window, we would have found it.”
“Maybe she wasn’t the only one there,” Jennings suggests. “Maybe someone else was there, and picked up the gun.”
Rasbach looks at him and nods. “Yeah. We’d better get a warrant.”
—
One of the worst things for Tom is that he can no longer talk to Karen whenever he wants. He never realized how much he relied on hearing her voice throughout the day, and on the e-mails and texts they exchanged. She was always there. And now she isn’t. He can only talk to her when she gets to use the phone at the jail, and he doesn’t know when or how often that will be. And they won’t be able to say much. He can only visit during visiting hours.
She has been put away. How apt that description is.
And he’s here, alone in the house. Tom feels like he’s going out of his mind—but it must be so much harder for her. Being trapped in there like an animal, with so many other people, people not like her. People who have done bad things. Karen hasn’t really done anything wrong, has she, except protect herself? But even if she gets lucky and they are lenient with her, there will be years, probably, when she will suffer horribly in prison, even if she was justified in what she did.
And when she finally gets out . . . they will both be so changed.
Tom thinks uneasily about Brigid. He’s afraid she’ll be back. And he can’t afford to piss her off.
He hopes that all she wanted was a one-night stand, for old times’ sake, that she’ll be happy with that, and go back to her husband. But as if his thoughts have drawn her, he hears a rap on the door. It makes him jump.
Too late, Tom realizes that he should have spent the night at a hotel. Or gone to stay with his brother. He shouldn’t be here, where Brigid can find him. He should go stay with his brother for a while. That should stop her coming around. But he doesn’t know if he dares, or if that will only infuriate Brigid into doing something to hurt him and Karen.
She’ll have seen his car in the driveway. Reluctantly, he pulls the door open. He’s startled—appalled—by her appearance. “You’ve cut your hair,” he says before he can stop himself.
“Do you like it?” she asks coyly.
He’s sickened. She’s cut her hair to look exactly like Karen’s. What is wrong with her? And her tone of voice is so off-putting, so inappropriate under the circumstances. He’d dislike her less if she came out and said, Sleep with me or I’ll tell the police about your wife. But this pretending that they’re lovers again, it’s making him nauseated. He wants to slam the door in her face and put the deadbolt on. No one can take the place of Karen, no one. Especially not Brigid.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
“Nothing,” he says, recovering quickly. He’s not sure how to handle her. Her moods change so quickly; he remembers that about her, how volatile she is. He doesn’t want to sleep with her again. He doesn’t want to touch her. He doesn’t want anything to do with her. He wants her to leave.
“Then,” she says, walking into the living room and turning around to face him as he closes the door, “why don’t you get me something to drink?
”
So, she wants a replay of the night before. He hasn’t got the stomach for it. He doubts he can even perform to her satisfaction. Maybe that’s his out. Maybe he won’t be able to get it up and she’ll laugh at him and scorn him and leave him alone. That would be fine by him. But what if it makes her angry, and she tells the police what she saw?
Tom feels the perspiration tickle the back of his neck. His heart is beating hard in his chest. He knows he’s got himself into a mess. He can’t tell Karen about this.
“Brigid,” he says, letting all the exhaustion and despair he’s feeling find an outlet in his voice, “I don’t think I’m up to anything tonight. I’m exhausted.”
She looks at him, her eyes narrowing in disappointment.
“And—I’m really worried about Karen,” he adds. He immediately realizes that was the wrong thing to say, and silently curses himself for being an idiot.
“You need to stop worrying about Karen,” Brigid says, with an edge to her voice. “She’s in jail. There’s nothing you can do for her. You know, and she knows, and I know that she killed a man. She’s going to be convicted. She won’t be out for a very long time.” She adds even more harshly, “She deserves what’s coming to her.”
Tom can’t believe what he’s hearing. And the sudden hatred on Brigid’s face is alarming. “Brigid—she’s your friend,” Tom reminds her. “How can you feel that way?” His heart is pounding; his voice has begun to sound pleading.
Brigid says, “She stopped being my friend the day she killed that man and lied to you and ruined your life. What kind of woman does that to the man she loves? You deserve so much better than that.”
She walks up close to him. She puts her hands around his neck. He tries not to pull his head back in disgust. He realizes now—looking at her with her hair cut just like Karen’s—that she’s delusional, unhinged. She’s not thinking like a normal person.
“Brigid,” he says, looking her right in the eyes. “I don’t know what you’re thinking. . . .”
“Oh, I think you do,” she says in a breathless, sexy voice. He wants to recoil from her, but he doesn’t dare.
