False Witness

by Karin Slaughter

  “It’s funny that you think you’ll be judged by your peers.” Leigh didn’t give him time to respond. “How old were you when I started babysitting you?”

  “I—” The question had obviously thrown him. He laughed to cover his discomfort. “Six? Seven? You would know better than I.”

  “You were five and I was thirteen,” Leigh said. “I remember because I’d just gotten out of juvie. Do you know why I was in juvie that time?”

  Andrew looked back at the house. He seemed to realize that Leigh had set the terms of this conversation and he had blindly followed along. “Enlighten me.”

  “A girl was teasing Callie about her haircut,” Leigh said, though haircut was a nice way to say that Phil had gotten drunk and cut off most of Callie’s hair. “So I found a piece of broken glass, and I followed the girl out to recess, and I held her down and hacked off her hair until her scalp was bleeding.”

  He looked fascinated. “And?”

  “I did that to a stranger who pissed me off. What do you think I’m going to do to you?”

  Andrew paused a moment, then laughed. “You’re not going to do anything to me, Harleigh. You think you have some agency here, but you really don’t.”

  “Buddy made you put a camera in the attic.”

  His face registered surprise.

  She said, “There’s no way he could’ve wedged his fat ass up into that small space. So he made you do it for him.”

  Andrew said nothing, but she could tell that she had finally gotten to him.

  Leigh kept punching. “Linda listed the house for sale with Re/Max in May of 2019, one month before you found your first rape victim at the CinéBistro.”

  His jaw worked as he clenched it.

  “I’m guessing that’s when you remembered putting the camera in the attic for Buddy.” Leigh raised one shoulder in a shrug. “You wanted to relive that father/son bonding experience. And now you’re a rapist just like he was.”

  Andrew loosened his jaw. He looked back at the house. When he turned to Leigh, the darkness had returned to his eyes. “You and I both know that Callie understood exactly what she was doing.”

  “Callie was twelve years old when it started,” Leigh said. “Buddy was almost fifty. She had no idea what—”

  “She loved it,” Andrew said. “Did she tell you that part, Harleigh? She loved what Dad did to her. And I know because, every night, I would lie in bed and listen to her moaning his name.”

  Leigh struggled to keep her emotions in check. With very little effort, her memory summoned Callie’s raspy whisper begging Leigh to check on Buddy, to make sure he was okay, that he wouldn’t be mad if they got him help.

  He loves me, Harleigh. He’ll forgive me.

  Andrew said, “You’re right about the attic. Dad had me go up there a few weeks before you murdered him.”

  Leigh felt sweat break out on her skin. This was why she had brought him back here away from cameras and recorders and prying eyes. She was sick of dancing around the subject, performing a show for Reggie’s clueless benefit. “Did he tell you why?”

  “There were some break-ins in the neighborhood.” Andrew let out a sharp laugh, as if he regretted his childhood innocence. “Dad said it was for security in case someone broke in. Pretty stupid that I believed him, I suppose.”

  Leigh said, “You were never very clever.”

  He blinked, and she saw a hint of the vulnerable little boy who always cried when he thought that Leigh was mad at him.

  Then he blinked again, and it was gone.

  She asked, “What does Sidney know?”

  “She knows that I love her.” Andrew shrugged, as if to acknowledge the lie. “As much as I can love anyone.”

  “And Reggie?”

  “Reggie is as loyal as my pockets are deep.”

  Leigh tensed when Andrew moved, but he was only kneeling down to smooth a mark out of the artificial grass.

  He looked up at her, saying, “Callie loved him, Harleigh. Didn’t she tell you? She was in love with him. He was in love with her. They could’ve been happy together. But you took that away from them.”

  Leigh couldn’t listen to this bullshit anymore. “What do you want, Andrew?”

  He took his time standing back up. He smoothed an invisible crease out of his pants. “I want to be normal. I want to fall in love, to get married, to have kids, to live the kind of life I would’ve had if you hadn’t taken my father away from me.”

  She laughed, because the fantasy was ludicrous. “Buddy couldn’t stand to—”

  “Don’t ever laugh at me.” The change had happened again, but this time he did nothing to temper the threat. “Do you know what happens to women who laugh at me?”

  His tone stopped any more sound from leaving her throat. Leigh looked back at the house. She looked over the fence. She had thought having this conversation in isolation would protect her, but now she could see that she’d given him an opportunity, too.

  “I know what you’re planning to do, Harleigh.” He had somehow gotten closer to her. She could smell mint on his breath. “You think you’re going to use your legal maneuvering to make it look like you’re defending me, but all the while you’re going to be doing everything you can to make sure I get sent to prison.”

  She looked up at him, too late realizing her mistake. Leigh became transfixed by his gaze. She had never seen anything so malevolent. Her soul threatened to leave her body again. Like any predator, Andrew exploited the weakness. Leigh could do nothing as his hand reached toward her chest. He pressed his palm flat to her heart. She felt it pounding into his palm, a rubber ball bouncing endlessly against a brutally hard surface.

  “This is what I want, Harleigh.” He smiled as her lips started to tremble. “I want you to be terrified that any day, any moment, I can send that tape to the police and everything you have—your perfect, fake mommy life with your PTA meetings and school plays and your stupid husband—will disappear the same way my life disappeared when you murdered my father.”

  Leigh stepped back. Her throat felt as if his hands were wrapped around it. Sweat rolled down the side of her face. She gritted together her teeth to keep them from chattering.

  Andrew studied her like he was taking in a performance. His hand stayed exactly where she had left it, hanging in the air as if it was still pressed to her heart. While she watched, he moved his palm to his face. He closed his eyes. He inhaled, as if he could smell her scent.

  She said, “You can’t mail a tape from prison.”

  “You were supposed to be the smart one, Harleigh.” His eyes had opened. His hand went into his pocket. “Don’t you know I’ve got a backup plan?”

  Leigh hadn’t really been that stupid. She wanted him to admit he had a fail-safe. “Why did you save the knife?”

  “You can thank Callie for that. She kept holding on to it, walking around the house with it in her hand, keeping it with her while we watched cartoons. And then she’d sit at the kitchen table for hours looking at that damn anatomy drawing.” Andrew shook his head. “Poor, sweet Callie. She’s always been the delicate one, hasn’t she? The guilt of what you made her do was too much for her to handle.”

  Leigh felt her throat strain to swallow. She wanted to cut her sister’s name out of his disgusting mouth.

  “I kept the knife so I had something to remember her by.” His lips tugged up at the side. The smirk was making its first appearance. “And then I saw how she used it on Dad, and it finally made sense.”

  Leigh had to get herself back under control, but, more importantly, she had to move him off of Callie. She asked, “Andrew, has it ever occurred to you what that tape will really show?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Enlighten me.”

  “Let’s game this out, all right?” She waited for him to nod. “You show the cops the tape. The cops arrest me. I go through booking and all of that. You remember the procedure from the first time you were arrested, right?”

  He nodded, clearly bem
used.

  “So, what I’ll do then is I will ask for a meeting with the prosecutor. And the prosecutor and I will watch the tape together so I can explain that the way your father’s femoral vein was nicked shows the same pattern of behavior that you used with all of the women you raped.”

  Andrew looked as startled as Leigh had seconds before. He’d never considered the possibility.

  “It’s called a modus operandi, Andrew, and it will send you to prison for the rest of your life.” Leigh put a finer point on it. “Mutually assured destruction.”

  He took only a moment to recalibrate. He made a point of slowing it down, shaking his head theatrically, even tsking his teeth. “Silly girl, do you think that’s the only tape I can show people?”

  Leigh felt her bones shaking beneath her skin. He sounded so much like his father that she was back in the yellow Corvette again, her legs clenched together, her heart racing, her stomach turning inside out.

  Andrew said, “I’ve got hours of your poor, fragile little sister being fucked in every hole she’s got.”

  Leigh felt as if each word was a punch to her face.

  “I found them in my VHS collection when I went to college. I thought I’d get some nostalgia in by watching Disney, but then I realized Dad threw out the tapes and put his private collection in.”

  Leigh’s eyes filled with tears. They had never searched his room. Why hadn’t they searched his room?

  “Hour after hour of the best porn I’ve ever seen in my life.” Andrew studied her face, taking in her pain like a drug. “Is Callie still small the same way she was back then, Harleigh? Is she still like a little baby doll with her thin waist and her wide eyes and her tiny little pussy?”

  Leigh pressed her chin to her chest to deprive him of the pleasure of her agony.

  He said, “The second anything bad happens to me, every man, woman, and child with access to the internet will be able to watch your sister getting shredded.”

  Leigh squeezed her eyes closed to keep the tears from falling. She knew Callie was haunted by that very scenario. Her sister couldn’t walk down the street without worrying that someone would recognize her from Buddy’s movies. Dr. Patterson. Coach Holt. Mr. Humphrey. Mr. Ganza. Mr. Emmett. Their violation had hurt Callie almost as much as Buddy had. Andrew letting countless other disgusting men watch the vile acts would splinter Callie into so many pieces that no amount of heroin would be able to pull her back together.

  She used her fist to wipe her eyes. She asked the same damn question that she kept asking. “What do you want, Andrew?”

  “Mutually assured destruction only works until someone loses their nerve,” he said. “Convince the jury that I’m innocent. Tear apart Tammy Karlsen on the stand. Then, we’ll see what else you can do for me.”

  Leigh looked up. “How long, Andrew? How long is this going to last?”

  “You know the answer to that, Harleigh.” Andrew gently wiped away her tears. “For as long as I want it to.”

  11

  “Mrs. Takahashi?”

  Callie swung her legs to the side of the chair so that she could look up at the librarian. The woman’s mask said READ MORE BOOKS! She was holding a copy of A Compendium of North American Snails and Their Habitats. “I found this for you in the return bin.”

  “Wonderful, thank you.” Callie took the thick paperback. “Arigatou.”

  The librarian either bowed or did a kindly brontosaurus as she took her leave, both of which could be construed as cultural appropriation.

  Callie turned back around. She placed the book beside the computer keyboard. She assumed that she was the only junkie who had ever committed identity theft for a library card. Himari Takahashi had been a war bride. She’d sailed across the Pacific to marry her dashing soldier lover. They’d both enjoyed reading and taking long walks. He’d passed away before her, but she had contented herself with gardening and spending time with her grandchildren.

  At least that was the story Callie had told herself. In truth, she had never spoken to Mrs. Takahashi. The woman had been zipped inside a black body bag the first and last time they had met. Back in January, when Covid was wiping out nearly four thousand people a day, Callie had taken a cash-paying job with one of the local nursing home chains. She had worked alongside the ranks of other citizens who were desperate enough to risk their own health by loading Covid-positive bodies into refrigerated trailers that the National Guard had trucked in.

  Someone in the computer room coughed and everyone winced, then immediately turned accusatory, eyes darting around as if they wanted to burn the culprit at the stake.

  Callie made sure her mask was in place. Junkies always ended up on the wrong end of the pointing finger. She used her left hand to reach for the mouse. For a change, her right hand had decided to go completely numb this morning. Her entire body was sore from her long crawl through the attic space. She was so disgustingly weak. The most strenuous thing Callie had done in the last few months was arm-wrestle Dr. Jerry for animal crackers. The competition usually ended in a draw. Neither of them wanted the other to lose.

  She pulled the keyboard close. She highlighted the search bar, but she didn’t type anything in. Her eyes scanned the monitor. The Fulton County Tax Assessor’s office revealed that the Tenants still owned the Canyon Road house.

  Callie should tell Leigh. She should text her the information. She should call.

  She tapped her finger on the mouse. She glanced around. There was a camera in the corner, its black eye silently watching. The DeKalb County system was more on top of its security than the City of Atlanta. Callie had promised Leigh that she would go to the downtown library, but Leigh had promised Callie twenty-three years ago that they would never have to think about Buddy Waleski ever again.

  She opened Facebook on the computer. She typed in Sidney Winslow Atlanta.

  Only one page came back, which was surprising because girls these days seemed to all be named variations of the same. It wasn’t like when Callie was growing up and people teased her about not being able to correctly pronounce her own name.

  Sidney’s banner photo showed the outside of what used to be called Grady High School. The most recent post was from 2012, a picture of eight teenage girls crammed together at a concert inside the Georgia Dome. Judging by their conservative attire and the number of crosses in the background, Callie assumed Passion 2012 was not her kind of scene.

  Just as Facebook would no longer be Sidney Winslow’s scene. Andrew’s fiancée did not fall into the Facebook demographic, where a twenty-something might run into an embarrassing photo their parents had posted back in the mid-aughts.

  Callie went to TikTok and hit the Sidney Winslow jackpot. She felt her eyebrows arch at the volume of videos. She supposed this was what it was like to be a youngster these days. Sidney’s social media was practically a part-time job. Her profile photo showed a close-up of a pierced lip that had been generously smeared with purple lipstick, a clear indicator that the religious fervor had been a passing phase.

  There were thousands of videos listed, though Callie couldn’t play them because the library didn’t allow you to use sound without headphones. From the descriptions under the stills, she quickly sussed out that Sidney Winslow was a twenty-five-year-old student seeking an incredibly practical doctorate of psychiatry at Emory University.

  “Well,” Callie said, because she finally understood why Leigh’s tone dropped to a register of disgust every time she said Sidney Winslow’s name.

  When Sidney was on campus or waxing poetic behind the wheel of her car, she kept her hair pulled back, make-up just so, a colorful hat on her head or jaunty scarf around her neck. Nights out called for a very different look. The girl basically transformed into an updated version of Phil’s geriatric goth. Her tight shirts and leather pants were offset by an impressive number of piercings. Heavy make-up. Pouty lips. Shirt collar low enough to offer an enticing glimpse of her breasts.

  Callie had to admit that her breasts
were fantastic.

  But she also had to wonder why Andrew Tenant was not part of Sidney’s well-documented life. She kept scrolling through the stills, finding not even a passing mention of Andrew, which was strange considering they were about to be married. She checked who was following Sidney and found many Sidney-like clonegirls along with a smattering of young men who seemed to prefer to be photographed shirtless. And fair enough, because they looked damn good shirtless.

  She clicked to see who Sidney was following. Dua Lipa, Janelle Monáe, Halsey, Bruno Mars, countless #bromiesexuals, but no Andrew.

  Callie switched to Instagram and, after clicking enough times to put a cramp in her finger, finally found a photo of them both together. Two years ago. Backyard barbecue. Sidney was beaming at the camera. Andrew looked reluctant, his head down, his lips pressed into a thin, white, I am humoring you but hurry line. Callie had to think if you were a rapist and murderer, you wanted to avoid social media.

  He’d picked the wrong girl for the task. There were thousands of posts across the platforms, almost always accompanied by a generously poured container of alcohol. Drinking wine at parties. Drinking beer at bars. Drinking martinis on a deck. Drinking mojitos at the beach. Drinking slim cans of rock and rye in a car. Callie shook her head, because the young woman’s life was a train wreck. And Callie said this as someone whose life was a train wreck inside of a crashing airplane inside of the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb.

  Sidney’s Twitter account revealed the consequences of #YOLO. The party girl had gotten a DUI one month ago. Sidney had documented the process, tweeting out pithy thoughts about the criminal justice system, describing the mind-numbing uselessness of attending the DUI school on Cheshire Bridge Road, photographing her court-mandated log-in sheet to prove that she was attending the required number of AA meetings.

  Callie squinted at the log, which was familiar from her own travails through the court system. Sidney had been given the standard thirty meetings in thirty days, then two a week thereafter. Callie recognized the church where the early morning meetings were held. They had delicious coffee, but the cookies at the Baptist across the street were better.