False Witness

by Karin Slaughter

  “Buddy was still alive when I got there. Callie had nicked his femoral vein with the knife. He didn’t have long, but we could’ve called an ambulance. He might’ve been saved. But I didn’t try to save him. Callie told me what he’d been doing to her. That’s when I remembered what happened in the car. It was like a light switch turning on. One minute I didn’t remember. The next minute, I did.” Leigh tried to take another breath, but her lungs would not fill. “And I knew that it was my fault. I pimped out my own sister to a pedophile. Everything that happened to her, everything that brought me there, was my fault. So I told Callie to go into the other room. I found a roll of cling film in the kitchen drawer. And I wrapped it around Buddy’s head and I suffocated him.”

  She watched Walter’s lips part, but he still said nothing.

  “I murdered him,” she said, in case that wasn’t vividly clear. “And then I made Callie help me chop up his body. We used a machete from the shed. We buried the pieces in the foundation for a strip mall off Stewart Avenue. They poured the concrete the next day. We cleaned up after ourselves. We let Buddy’s wife and kid believe that he had left town. And I stole around eighty-six grand from him. That’s how I paid for law school.”

  Walter’s mouth moved, but he still said nothing.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, because there was more to this confession. If she was going to finally tell him the truth, she was going to tell him the whole truth. “Callie has—”

  Walter held up his hand, asking her for a moment. He stood up. He paced to the back of the RV. He turned around. One hand rested on the kitchen counter. The other braced against the wall. He shook his head again, completely without words. It was his expression that killed her. He was looking at a stranger.

  She pushed herself to continue.

  “Callie has no idea that Buddy tried it with me first,” Leigh said. “I never had the balls to tell her. And I guess while I’m at it, I should tell you that I don’t regret killing him. She was a child, and he took everything from her, but it was my fault. It was all my fault.”

  Walter started to slowly shake his head like he was desperate for her to take it back.

  “Walter, I need you to understand that I really mean what I just said. Not warning Callie—that’s the only part of this that I regret. Buddy deserved to die. He deserved to suffer more than the two minutes that it took for him to suffocate.”

  Walter turned his head, wiping his mouth on his shirtsleeve.

  “I carry that guilt with me every second of the day, with every breath, with every molecule inside of me,” Leigh said. “Every time Callie has overdosed, every emergency room visit, every stretch of time when I don’t know whether she’s alive or dead or in trouble or in jail, the one thing that my mind always goes back to is why didn’t I make that motherfucker suffer more?”

  Walter gripped the countertop. His breathing was erratic. He looked like he wanted to bust apart the cabinets, to pull down the ceiling.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should’ve told you before, but I told myself that I didn’t want to burden you or I didn’t want you to get upset, but the truth is, I was too ashamed. What I did to Callie is unforgivable.”

  He wouldn’t look at her. His head bowed. His shoulders shook. She waited for him to scream, to rail against her, but he only wept.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, her heart breaking at the sound of his grief. If she could’ve held him for just one moment, if there had been a way for her to ease his pain, she would’ve done it. “I know you hate me. I’m so sorry.”

  “Leigh.” He looked up at her, tears pouring from his eyes. “Don’t you know that you were a child, too?”

  Leigh stared at him in disbelief. He wasn’t disgusted or angry. He was astonished.

  “You were only thirteen years old,” Walter said. “He molested you, and nobody did anything. You said you should’ve protected Callie. Who protected you?”

  “I should have—”

  “You were a child!” He banged his fist against the counter so hard that the glasses shook in the cabinet. “Why can’t you see that, Leigh? You were a child. You should’ve never been in that position in the first place. You shouldn’t have been worried about money or getting a goddam job. You should’ve been at home in bed thinking about which boy you had a crush on in school.”

  “But—” He didn’t understand. He was thinking about Maddy and her friends. It was different in Lake Point. Everyone grew up faster there. “I killed him, Walter. That’s first-degree murder. You know that.”

  “You were only two years older than Maddy is now! The man had molested you. You’d just found out that your sister—”

  “Stop,” she said, because there was no point in arguing the facts. “I’m telling you this for a reason.”

  “Does there have to be a reason?” He couldn’t move off his outrage. “Jesus Christ, Leigh. How could you live with this guilt for so long? You were a victim, too.”

  “I wasn’t a fucking victim!”

  She had screamed the words so loud she was afraid Maddy would hear them inside of the house. Leigh stood up. She walked over to the little window in the door. She looked up at Maddy’s bedroom. The bedside lamp was still on. She pictured her precious girl curled up with her nose in the book, the same way Callie used to do when she was a kid.

  “Baby,” Walter said. “Look at me. Please.”

  She turned back around, arms hugging her waist. She could not stand the softness in his voice. She did not deserve his easy forgiveness. Callie was her responsibility. He would never understand that.

  She told him, “The client, the rapist I had to meet with Sunday night. Andrew Tenant. That’s who I babysat for. He’s Buddy and Linda’s son.”

  Walter had gone speechless again.

  “Andrew has all of his father’s videos. He found the murder tape in 2019, but he’s had the rape videos since he went off to college.” Leigh wasn’t going to let herself think about what Andrew had said about watching the tapes. “There were at least two cameras recording everything. There are hours of Buddy raping Callie. Everything that happened the night of the murder was recorded, too. Callie getting into the fight with Buddy, slicing his leg with the knife, then me coming in and murdering him.”

  Walter waited, a grim set to his mouth.

  “The woman Andrew raped, all the other women he raped, he cut their leg right here.” She put her hand to her own thigh. “The femoral vein. Exactly where Callie cut Buddy.”

  Walter waited for the rest.

  “Andrew didn’t just rape these women. He drugged them. He kidnapped them. He tortured them. He ripped them apart the same way his father ripped apart Callie.” Leigh put a finer point on it. “He’s psychotic. He’s not going to stop.”

  “What—” Walter had the same question that Leigh had. “What does he want?”

  “To make me suffer,” Leigh said. “He’s blackmailing me. Voir dire starts tomorrow. Andrew told me he wants me to destroy the victim on the stand. He stole her medical records. I’ve got the information to do it. And then he’s going to make me do something else. Then something else. I can’t stop him.”

  “Wait.” Walter’s sympathy was finally draining away. “You just said this guy is a violent psychopath. You have to—”

  “What?” she asked. “Throw the trial? He told me he has a fail-safe—either a backup to the cloud or maybe he has the tapes in a bank vault or I don’t know. He said if anything bad happens to him, then he’ll release all of the videos.”

  “So fucking what?” Walter said. “Let him release them.”

  It was Leigh’s turn to be astonished. “I told you what’s on those tapes. I’ll end up in prison. Callie’s life will be over.”

  “Callie’s life?” Walter repeated. “You’re worried about Callie’s fucking life?”

  “I can’t—”

  “Leigh!” He banged his fist again. “Our teenage daughter is twenty feet away inside of our house. This man is a viol
ent rapist. Did it never occur to you that he could hurt Maddy?”

  Leigh was rendered speechless, because Maddy had nothing to do with this.

  “Answer me!”

  “No.” She started shaking her head, because that would never happen. This was between her and Andrew and Callie. “He wouldn’t—”

  “He wouldn’t rape our sixteen-year-old daughter?”

  Leigh felt her mouth move, but she couldn’t respond.

  “God dammit!” he yelled. “You and your fucking compartments!”

  He was falling back into their old argument when this was completely different. “Walter, I never—”

  “What? You never thought the violent, sadistic rapist who’s been threatening your freedom would spill into your fucking private life because what—because you won’t let him? Because you’re so goddam good at keeping everything separate?” Walter punched the cabinet door off its hinges. “Jesus fucking Christ! Are you taking your fucking parenting tips from Phil now?”

  The wound felt deep and fatal. “I didn’t—”

  “Think?” he demanded. “You didn’t get it through your twisted fucking head after it happened to Callie, after you intentionally and willfully murdered a man, that maybe it’s a bad idea to connect another teenage girl with a goddam rapist?”

  All of the breath left her body.

  She felt her feet start to float away from the floor. Her hands fluttered into the air as if her blood had been replaced with helium. She recognized the sensation from the days before, the lightness that came when her soul couldn’t take what was happening, so it abandoned her body to deal with the consequences. She realized now that the first time she had felt it happen was inside Buddy’s yellow Corvette. The Deguils’ house was outside the window. Hall & Oates was playing softly on the radio. Leigh had floated against the ceiling, her eyes closed but somehow still seeing Buddy’s monstrous hand wrenching apart her legs.

  Jesus your skin is so soft I can feel the peach fuzz you’re almost like a baby.

  Now, Leigh watched her own shaking hand reach for the small, silver handle on the door. Then she was stepping down the metal stairs. Then she was walking down the driveway. Then she was getting into her car. Then the engine was rumbling and the gear was shifting and the steering wheel was turning and Leigh drove along the empty road away from her husband and child, alone in the darkness.

  Thursday

  13

  At what felt like the crack of dawn, Callie got off the MARTA bus at Jesus Junction, an intersection at three roads in Buckhead where three different churches competed for clientele. The Catholic cathedral was the most impressive, but Callie had a soft spot for the Baptist steeple, which looked like something out of Andy Griffith, if Mayberry had been filled with ultra-wealthy conservatives who thought everybody else was going to hell. They also had better cookies, but she had to admit that the Episcopalians knew how to rock a pot of coffee.

  The Cathedral of St. Phillip was at the crest of a hill that Callie had been able to easily climb before Covid. Now, she followed the sidewalk around to the side, taking a slower incline to reach the meeting space. And still, her mask was too much for the journey. She had to let it hang from her ear so she could catch her breath as she walked toward the driveway.

  BMWs and Mercedes peppered the parking lot. Smokers in business attire were already congregating around the closed door. There were more women than men, which was not unusual in Callie’s experience. The preponderance of DUI arrests fell on men, but women were more likely to get court-ordered AA than their male counterparts, especially in Buckhead where high-dollar lawyers like Leigh helped them walk away from responsibility.

  Callie was twenty feet from the entrance when she felt eyes on her, but not in the usual, wary way that people looked at junkies. Probably because she wasn’t dressed like a junkie. Gone were the cartoony pastels she normally chose from the kids’ rack at Goodwill. A deep raid of her bedroom closet had delivered a long-sleeved black spandex top with a scooped neck and form-fitting jeans that made Callie feel like a slinky panther when she’d modeled them for Binx. She’d tied it all together with a pair of scuffed Doc Martens she’d found thrown under Phil’s bed. And then she’d risked pink-eye using her mother’s make-up to follow a ten-year-old doing a YouTube smoky eye tutorial.

  At the time of her self-Pygmalion, Callie’s only concern had been to pass as a non-junkie, but now that she was out in the open, she felt conspicuously female. Men were appraising her. Women were judging her. Gazes lingered around her hips, her breasts, her face. On the streets, her low weight was a sign that something was wrong. In this crowd, her thinness was an attribute, something to be appreciated or coveted.

  She was grateful to be able to pull up her mask. A man in a dark suit nodded at her as he held open the door. Callie resisted the urge to shudder at the attention. She had wanted her costume to buy her entry into normal society, but she hadn’t realized what that society was like.

  The door closed behind her. Callie leaned against the wall. She pulled down her mask. From down the hall, she heard beeping and snorting and giggles from the pre-school of boisterous children gearing up for the day. Callie took another few moments to collect herself. She pulled her mask back on. She went the opposite direction from the toddlers, coming face to face with a giant banner that said GOD IS FRIENDSHIP.

  Callie doubted God would approve of the kind of friendship that she had in mind this morning. She walked under the banner toward the meeting rooms, passing photographs of the reverends and the very reverends and the reverend canons from years past. A paper sign taped to the wall pointed toward an open door.

  8:30 AA MEETING

  Callie loved AA meetings, because it was the only time she could truly let her competitive side out for a stroll.

  Fiddled with by an uncle? Call me when you murder him.

  Gang raped by your brother’s friends? Did you chop them all to pieces?

  Uncontrollable shakes from the DTs? Lemme know when you shit a pint of blood out of your asshole.

  Callie walked into the room. The set-up was the same as every other AA meeting happening in every other corner of the world right now. Folding chairs in a large circle with big pandemic gaps in between. Serenity prayer in a picture frame on a table beside pamphlets with titles like How It Works! and The Promises and The Twelve Traditions. The line for the coffee urn was ten-deep. Callie stood behind a guy in a black business suit and green surgical mask who looked like he would rather be brainstorming outside of the box or putting a pin in his vision board or anywhere else but here.

  “Oh,” he said, stepping back so that Callie could go ahead of him, which she supposed was what polite gentlemen did for ladies who didn’t look like heroin junkies.

  “I’m fine, thank you.” Callie turned away, showing great interest in a poster of Jesus holding an astray sheep.

  The basement was cool, but sweat still rolled down her neck. The exchange with Business Suit had been as unsettling as the looks in the parking lot. Because of her small stature, because she tended to favor Care Bear T-shirts and rainbow jackets, Callie was often mistaken for a teenager, but she was rarely mistaken for a thirty-seven-year-old woman, which technically—she guessed—was what she was. A quick glance around the room told her that she wasn’t being paranoid. Curious eyes looked back. Maybe it was because she was new, but Callie had been new at this very same church before and people had shied away like she might suddenly lunge at them and ask for cash. She had looked like a junkie then. Maybe they would give her the money now.

  The coffee line moved up. Callie stuck her hand in her purse. She found the pill bottles she’d tucked into the pocket, a hangman’s collection she’d traded for a vial of ketamine. As discreetly as she could, she slipped out two Xanax, then turned so she could tuck her fingers under her mask.

  Instead of swallowing the tablets, she left them under her tongue. The medication would enter her system faster that way. As her mouth filled with saliva,
Callie forced herself to melt away with the Xanax.

  This was her new identity: She was in Atlanta for a job interview. She was staying at the St. Regis. She had been sober for eleven years. She was at a stressful point in her life and she needed the comfort of fellow travelers.

  “Fuck,” someone muttered.

  Callie heard the woman’s voice, but she didn’t turn around. There was a mirror above the coffee station. She easily spotted Sidney Winslow sitting in one of the folding chairs that had been placed in a circle around the room. The young woman was leaning over her phone, eyebrows knitted. Soft make-up. Hair gently brushing her shoulders. Callie recognized Sidney’s more sedate daytime attire, a black pencil skirt and white blouse with capped sleeves. Most women would look like the hostess at a mid-market steak house in the get-up, but Sidney managed to make it look elegant. Even when she muttered another fuck as she got up from the chair.

  Every man in the room watched her traverse the space. Sidney had absolutely no qualms about the eyes eagerly taking in her body. She had the bearing of a dancer, her posture exact, every movement fluid and somehow sexually charged.

  Business Suit made a low noise of appreciation. He saw Callie catching him in the act and raised his eyebrows over his mask, as if to say, who can blame me? Callie raised her eyebrows back in a certainly not I response because if there was one thing the group seemed to agree upon, other than that alcohol was delicious, it was that Sidney Winslow was fucking gorgeous.

  Too bad she was with a rapist asshole who had threatened Maddy’s tranquil, perfect existence, because Callie was going to fuck with her so hard that Andrew would be left with nothing but tattered shreds of the woman Sidney Winslow used to be.

  “I can’t—” Sidney’s husky voice carried from the hallway.

  Callie took a tiny step back so that she could peer into the hall. Sidney was leaning against the wall, phone pressed to her ear. She had to be arguing with Andrew. Callie had checked the court docket this morning. Andrew’s jury selection was starting in two hours. Callie hoped that he looked bruised and battered from their scuffle in the stadium tunnel yesterday afternoon. She wanted every juror to have it at the front of their mind that something was not right about the defendant.