False Witness

by Karin Slaughter

  She selected Callie’s folder next. The log had started one day after Maddy’s. Callie was selling drugs on Stewart Avenue. She was working at Dr. Jerry’s clinic. She was living at the motel, then she was meeting Leigh, then they were in her car, then Callie was walking to Phil’s. The photos backed up the log, but there was more: her sister waiting at the bus stop, letting her cat in through the window at Phil’s house, walking outside a strip mall that was so familiar to Leigh that her eyes burned at the sight of it.

  Callie was pictured standing underneath a covered breezeway. She was in the exact location where they had buried the butchered chunks of Buddy Waleski’s body.

  Leigh asked Reggie, “Where were you last night?”

  “Watch—” He cleared his throat. There was no denying the apprehension on his face. He knew that this was bad. He knew that even if he managed to walk out of here, Andrew or the police would be waiting for him. “Watching your sister.”

  Leigh examined Callie’s log for yesterday. She had visited the library, then gone to Maddy’s soccer practice, then she had returned home on the bus. According to Reggie’s notes, he had stayed outside Phil’s house from five in the evening until midnight last night.

  Investigators were paid by the hour. It was generally frowned upon if they wasted time setting up outside a house unless there was the possibility that the subject would leave. Leigh didn’t have to look back through the logs to know that Callie never left once she settled in for the night. Her sister was disabled. She was vulnerable because of her addictions. She didn’t go out at night unless she had to.

  Leigh asked, “Did Andrew know you were watching Callie at five o’clock?”

  “Called. Said to stay.” Reggie knew what her next question would be. “Burner phone. Made me leave … other one here.”

  Leigh said, “And your logs are handwritten, not backed up onto the computer.”

  Reggie gave a slight nod to confirm. “No copies.”

  Leigh looked at Walter, but he was staring down at the broken skin on the back of his hand.

  She asked Reggie, “Where were you the night that Tammy Karlsen was raped?”

  The stunned look that crossed Reggie’s face was quickly replaced with dread. “Andrew hired—I followed Sidney.”

  “What about the memory cards in the camera? Does Andrew have those, too?”

  Reggie’s head moved in a quick nod.

  “And he paid you cash, right? So there are no invoices.”

  He didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to.

  Leigh knew Reggie hadn’t considered the worst of it. She laid out the rest of Andrew’s plan. “What about the other nights, the three women who were raped near Andrew’s regular haunts. Where were you?”

  “Working,” Reggie said. “Following exes.”

  Leigh remembered the names of the two new witnesses on Dante’s list. “Lynne Wilkerson and Fabienne Godard?”

  Reggie let out a low, distressed sigh.

  “Jesus,” Leigh said, because everything was lining up. “What about your car’s GPS?”

  His eye had closed. Blood seeped from the corner. “Turned it off.”

  Leigh watched him silently making the connections. Reggie did not have an alibi for any of the rapes. He had no alibi for Ruby Heyer’s murder. He hadn’t logged his notes into his computer. There were no invoices itemizing his activities. There was no phone or camera or memory card that would pinpoint his location while the attacks were occurring. An argument could be made that he’d turned off the tracking in his car to avoid incrimination.

  This was why Andrew had never been afraid. He had set up Reggie to take the fall.

  “Fucker,” Reggie said, because he knew it, too.

  “Walter,” Leigh said. “Take the servers. I’ll get the laptop.”

  Leigh jammed his laptop into her purse. She waited for Walter to pull all of the wires and plugs out of the metal boxes. Instead of leaving, she returned to the filing cabinet. She found the files for Lynne Wilkerson and Fabienne Godard. She stacked them with the others on the desk so that Reggie could see. “I’m keeping all of these. They’re your only alibi, so fuck with me and I’ll fuck you into the ground. Do you understand?”

  He nodded, but she could tell he wasn’t worried about the files. He was worried about Andrew.

  Leigh found the scissors where she’d dumped them out of the desk drawer. She told Reggie, “If I were you, I’d get myself to the hospital and then find a damn good lawyer.”

  Reggie watched her cut through the tape around his wrists.

  That was all the help she was going to give him. She left the scissors in his hand.

  She gathered up the stolen items, telling Walter, “Let’s go.”

  Leigh waited for him to leave the room first. She still didn’t trust Walter to not go after Reggie again. Her husband was quiet as he carried the servers down the stairs. Through the lobby. Out the door. She threw everything into the trunk. Walter did the same with the two servers.

  He had driven them here, but Leigh got behind the wheel of her car. She reversed out of the space. Her lights flashed along the front of the building. She saw the shadow of Reggie Paltz standing at his office window.

  Walter said, “He’ll go to the police.”

  “He’ll get himself cleaned up, and then he’ll catch the first flight to Vanuatu, Indonesia, or the Maldives,” Leigh said, listing a few of the preferred nations that did not extradite to the United States. “We need to find Callie’s videos on his server and destroy them. We have to keep the rest for insurance.”

  “For what?” Walter asked. “Andrew’s still got the originals. We’re still trapped. He’s got us in the same damn place as before.”

  “We’re not,” Leigh said. “He hasn’t.”

  “He paid that cocksucker to follow Maddy. He knows where she was, where she’s going. He took photographs. I saw your face when you saw them. You were terrified.”

  Leigh wasn’t going to argue with him because he was right.

  “And what he did to Ruby. Jesus Christ, she was mutilated. He didn’t just kill her. He tortured her and—” Walter’s throat gave out a strangled sound of grief. He put his head in his hands. “What are we going to do? Maddy will never be safe. We’ll never get away from him.”

  Leigh pulled over to the side of the road. She wasn’t that far from the same spot she’d pulled over to after the first meeting in Reggie Paltz’s office. Then, she had been sick with panic. Now, her steely resolve took over.

  She held on to Walter’s hands. She waited for him to look at her, but he didn’t.

  “I understand,” he said. “I get why you did it.”

  Leigh shook her head. “Did what?”

  “Callie’s always been more like your daughter. She’s always been your responsibility.” Walter finally looked up at her. He had cried more in the last twenty minutes than she had seen him cry in nearly twenty years. “When you told me that you killed him, I—I don’t know. It was too much to take in. I couldn’t understand. There’s right and wrong and—what you did …”

  Leigh felt her throat work.

  “I couldn’t imagine ever being capable of hurting somebody like that,” he continued. “But when I recognized Reggie in the parking lot, and then I realized the threat to Maddy—I couldn’t see. I was blind with rage. I was going to kill him, Leigh. You knew that I was going to murder him.”

  Leigh pressed together her lips.

  “I don’t understand everything you told me about what happened,” Walter said. “But I understand that.”

  Leigh studied her sweet, kind husband. In the light of the dashboard, the streaks of sweat and blood across his face took on a purple hue. She had done this to him. She had put their daughter in danger. She had turned her husband into a raving lunatic. She had to fix this, and she had to do it now.

  She told Walter, “I need to find Callie. She has a right to know what’s happened. What’s going to happen.”

  Walter
asked, “What’s going to happen?”

  “I’m going to do what I should’ve done three days ago,” Leigh told him. “I’m going to turn myself in.”

  18

  Callie stood in front of the locked drug cabinet in Dr. Jerry’s clinic. She had abandoned Sidney’s convertible BMW across two parking spaces outside. Driving was harder than the last time she had stolen a car. There had been lots of stops and starts, beginning in Andrew’s garage where she’d scraped off the right side of the BMW trying to get out. In the driveway, the back end had clipped his watchtower mailbox. The rims had bitten into several curbs as she’d miscalculated turns.

  That the car had survived her stay inside the shooting gallery off Stewart Avenue was a testament to heroin’s stupification. She had taken Sidney’s wallet and phone inside to trade, but no one had stripped off the car’s expensive tires. No one had broken the windows and ripped out the radio. They were either too high to formulate a plan or too desperate to wait for the chop shop to send a runner.

  Callie, on the other hand, had been mournfully aware. Her methadone tapering regimen had not been rewarded the same way it had been so many times before. She’d been expecting the rapturous rush of euphoria with her first taste, but her body had cycled through the heroin so fast that she had chased the high along an eternal loop of despair. The sudden seconds of sickness as the liquid pushed in, the five short minutes of bliss, the heaviness that lasted for less than an hour before her brain told her she needed more more more.

  This was called tolerance, or sensitization, which was defined as the body requiring a higher dose of the drug in order to achieve the same response. Predictably, the mu receptors played a big role in tolerance. Repeated exposure to opiates dampened the analgesic effect, and no matter how many new mus your body created, those mus were going to inherit the memories of the mus that came before.

  Tolerance was incidentally why addicts started cross-mixing drugs, adding in fentanyl or Oxy or benzos or, in most cases, shooting themselves up with so much shit that they ended up laughing with Kurt Cobain about how his daughter was now older than he’d been on the day he’d rested that shotgun beneath his chin. Maybe he would softly sing the Neil Young passage he quoted in his suicide note—

  It’s better to burn out than to fade away.

  Callie stared at the drug cabinet, trying to summon her rage. Andrew in the stadium tunnel. Sidney writhing on the closet floor. The disgusting video of Callie and Buddy playing on the television. Maddy running across the bright green field, no cares in the world because she was cherished and loved and she would always feel that way.

  The first key slid into the lock. Then the second key. Then the cabinet was open. With an expert’s light touch, Callie traced her fingers along the vials. Methadone, ketamine, fentanyl, buprenorphine. On any other day, she would be shoving as many vials as she could into her pockets. Now, she left them alone and found the lidocaine. She started to close the cabinet, but her mind rushed to stop her. Several vials of pentobarbital were lined up along the bottom shelf. The liquid was blue, like the color of glass cleaner. The containers were larger than the others, almost three times the size. She selected one, then locked the doors.

  Instead of going into a treatment room, she went to the front lobby. The plate-glass windows gave an overview past the burglar bars and into the parking lot. The streetlights had been busted out, but Callie could clearly see Sidney’s shiny convertible. Nothing else was in the lot except for a stray rat making its way toward the Dumpster. The barbershop was closed. Dr. Jerry was probably at home reading sonnets to Meowma Cass, the bottle-fed kitten. Callie wanted to tell herself that coming here was a good idea, but after a lifetime of rash decisions, she found herself absent her usual disregard for any and all consequences.

  Tell Andy if he wants his knife back, he’s going to have to come and get it.

  Callie wasn’t a complete Luddite. She knew cars gave off signals to GPS satellites that told people exactly where they were. She knew Sidney’s ridiculously expensive BMW would act as a giant neon sign, pointing Andrew to her location. She also knew several hours had passed since Andrew had been released from his jury selection.

  So why hadn’t he come for her?

  Callie grabbed a surgical pack on her way to the breakroom. Her leg was aching so much that she was limping by the time she reached the table. She gently placed one little and one big vial on the table. She opened up the surgical pack. Her hand went to her thigh as she sat down. The abscess in her leg felt like a robin’s egg under her jeans. She pressed into it, because the physical pain was better than the pain she was feeling inside.

  She closed her eyes. She stopped her brain’s fight against the inevitable and let the video play in her head.

  Callie’s fourteen-year-old self trapped on the couch.

  Buddy, please, it hurts too much please stop please …

  Buddy’s enormous body grinding into her.

  Shut the fuck up Callie I said hold the fuck still.

  She hadn’t remembered it that way. Why hadn’t she remembered it that way? What was wrong with her brain? What was wrong with her soul?

  At the snap of her fingers, Callie could relay in intricate detail ten thousand horrible things that Phil had done when Callie was little, whether it was beating her unconscious or abandoning her on the side of the road or scaring the shit out of her in the middle of the night because the tinfoil hat men were waiting outside with their probes.

  Why was it that Callie had never, ever in the last twenty-three years let herself recall how many times Buddy had threatened her, thrown her across the room, kicked her, forced himself inside of her, tied her up, even strangled her? Why had she blocked the memories of the ten thousand times he’d told Callie that it was her fault because she cried too much or begged too much or couldn’t do all of the things that he wanted her to do?

  Callie heard the smack of her lips. Her brain had drawn a direct line from Phil to Buddy to the locked drug cabinet.

  Methadone. Ketamine. Buprenorphine. Fentanyl.

  She had picked up her backpack at Phil’s when she’d changed out of the slinky black top and into her torn Care Bears T-shirt and yellow satin rainbow jacket. She’d snapped the front up to her neck because it felt safer that way, almost like a security blanket. Callie’s dope kit was inside the backpack. Her tie-off. Her lighter. Her spoon. A used syringe. A fat baggie filled to the top with off-white powder.

  Without thinking, she was reaching down. Without a thought, she was opening the kit, her muscle memory laying out the lighter, the tie-off, the fat baggie with its unknowable mysteries.

  The dealer who’d sold her the heroin wasn’t someone Callie knew. She had no idea what he’d cut it with—baking soda, powdered milk, meth, fenty, strychnine—or even how pure the drug was when he’d started. What had mattered at the time was that she had forty dollars and some prescription pills left over from her debacle with Sidney and he’d had enough heroin to kill an elephant.

  Callie swallowed the blood in her mouth. Her lip was bleeding because she could not stop biting it. With effort, she managed to pull her attention away from the dope. She leaned up in the chair so that she could slide down her jeans. In the overhead light, her thigh was the color of Elmer’s glue, if you dropped a bright red, pus-filled glob at the top. She gently brushed her fingers along the abscess. Heat pulsed into her fingertips. There were dried specks of blood where she had injected herself through the infection.

  All for less than five minutes of a high that she was never, ever going to catch again no matter how many times she chased it.

  Fucking junkies.

  She drew back a few ccs of lidocaine, not bothering to measure the dose. She watched the needle dip into the abscess. Another trickle of blood rewarded the effort. There was no pinch of pain because everything in her body hurt right now. Her neck, her arms, her back, her kneecap that she’d drilled into Sidney’s crotch. The heavy feeling from the heroin that used to lull Cal
lie into a senseless sleep had turned into a weight that was going to eventually smother her.

  She closed her eyes as she felt the lidocaine spreading through the abscess. She listened for the gorilla. Strained to feel his hot breath on her neck. The loneliness was stark. She had lived with the threat of him stalking on the horizon since that night in the kitchen, but now, there was nothing. The creature had disappeared inside the stadium tunnel a few moments before she had attacked Andrew. The puzzle of that paradox would not stop nagging at Callie’s brain. If she pushed to the edges of the equation, the solution was simple: all of these years, Buddy Waleski had not been the gorilla.

  The ferocious, bloodthirsty demon had been Callie all along.

  “Hello, friend,” Dr. Jerry said.

  Callie spun around to face him, her soul igniting with shame. Dr. Jerry was standing in the doorway. His eyes flitted across the table. Her dope kit with the fat baggie of heroin. The surgical pack. The lidocaine syringe. The large bottle of blue pentobarbital.

  “Goodness.” Dr. Jerry turned his attention to the giant red knot in her leg. “May I help with that?”

  Callie’s mouth flooded with apologies, but her lips wouldn’t let them come out. There were no excuses for this situation. Her guilt was laid out like evidence at a trial.

  “Let’s see what we have here, young miss.” Dr. Jerry sat down. His lab coat was wrinkled. His glasses were askew. His hair had not been combed. She could smell the sour odor of sleep on his breath as his fingers gently pressed around the abscess. He told her, “If you were a calico, I would say that you’d gotten into a very nasty altercation. Which, of course, is not unusual for a calico. They can be quite pugilistic. Unlike pugs, who are notorious recounters. Especially if you get a few drinks into them.”

  Callie’s vision blurred with tears. The shame had spread to every fiber of her being. She couldn’t just sit here the same way she always did when he shared one of his stories.

  “I see you’ve already started with the lidocaine.” He tested her leg, asking, “Does this feel numb enough, do you think?”