Someone We Know

by Shari Lapena

  “Who else got broken into?” Suzanne asks. “I haven’t heard anything.”

  “I don’t know,” Zoe says. “The letter says that there were others. Carmine showed it to me—I read it.”

  Olivia feels slightly nauseated, and puts her glass of wine down. This is not what she meant to happen, not at all. She’d only wanted to apologize. She didn’t want other people reading the letter! She didn’t want someone trying to find out who had written it! She certainly didn’t want people gossiping about it. She should have left well enough alone. How could she have been so stupid? The lawyer was right—all she’d done was stir things up.

  “You should have seen this letter!” Zoe exclaims. “The poor woman who wrote it. Apparently the kid went through people’s computers and get this—he even sent prank emails from their email accounts!”

  “No!” Suzanne says, aghast.

  “What did they say?” Jeannette asks, appalled and entertained in equal measure.

  “I don’t know,” Zoe says. “Carmine says she didn’t find any on her computer. That must have been at somebody else’s house.”

  Glenda says, in a no-nonsense voice, “Sounds like some teenage stupidity to me, and the mother’s doing the decent thing, apologizing. It’s the sort of thing that could happen to any of us with kids. You know what teenagers are like.”

  Olivia notices a few rueful, sympathetic nods from some of the other women. She feels intensely grateful to Glenda at that moment but is careful not to show it.

  Suzanne says, “I guess I should be more careful about locking the doors and windows. I don’t always check them at night.”

  “It’s so creepy to think of somebody going through your house and getting into your computers when you’re not there,” Jeannette says in a hushed voice. “And to think—if this woman Carmine hadn’t got that letter, she would never even have known.”

  There’s silence as they all seem to contemplate that for a minute.

  “Maybe some of us have been broken into,” Zoe says.

  “But then we would have gotten a letter,” Suzanne says.

  “Not necessarily,” Zoe says. “What if the kid only admitted to some of the houses, didn’t tell his mother the full extent of what he was up to? That’s what Carmine thinks. There could be lots of houses this kid’s broken into, and people wouldn’t necessarily know. Maybe we should all be worried.”

  Olivia looks around at the women in the circle, all of whom appear to be genuinely alarmed at the idea of having been broken into without being aware of it. Could Raleigh have lied to her about how often he’d done this? Her stomach feels queasy and she wants to go home.

  “I guess we should talk about the book,” Suzanne says at last.

  EIGHT

  Olivia follows Glenda out the door. It’s chilly now, and she’s glad it’s dark as the other women slip away. Glenda waits for her and they talk quietly at the end of the driveway, pulling their jackets closed.

  Olivia waits until the others are out of earshot and says miserably, “Thanks for not saying anything.”

  “Why would I say anything?” Glenda replies. “Your secret is safe with me.” She snorts. “Awfully smug of Zoe, if you ask me. She’s got two girls, she doesn’t have any boys. She has no idea.” Then she asks, “How did it go with the lawyer?”

  They turn down the sidewalk toward Glenda’s house. Olivia tells her about the visit to the lawyer. Then she adds anxiously, “I shouldn’t have written those letters.”

  “You didn’t tell me about that.”

  “I know.” She glances at Glenda. “I haven’t told Paul or Raleigh either. Promise me you won’t tell. If Paul finds out, he’ll be furious. I never should have sent them. Now everyone’s going to be trying to find out who wrote them.”

  “How many are there?”

  “Just two. Raleigh said he only broke into two houses. I made him show me which ones.”

  “Whose was the other house?”

  Olivia hesitates. “The Pierces’.”

  “Seriously?”

  Olivia nods. She feels sick about it. What if Robert Pierce is a murderer?

  “Do you believe him?” Glenda asks after a moment.

  “I did. To be honest, I don’t know anymore. Maybe Zoe’s right, and he didn’t tell me about all of them. I never would have thought Raleigh capable of such a thing.” They’re quiet for a moment, walking down the sidewalk in the dark, Olivia imagining Suzanne, Becky, Jeannette, and Zoe all getting on to their computers as soon as they can and checking their sent messages looking for emails they hadn’t written. After a while Glenda asks, “Do you think Robert Pierce murdered his wife?”

  Olivia glances at her uneasily. “I don’t know,” she says. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know either.”

  “I didn’t even know her,” Olivia says, “but she was a neighbor—she was one of us. It seems awfully close.”

  * * *

  —

  Carmine Torres has decided to go door-to-door on her street, telling her neighbors that she’d been broken into and showing them the letter. This morning, she’d spoken again briefly to Zoe next door, who told her that no one in her book club the night before had heard anything about it. Then of course they’d started talking about what had been on the news: a woman from this supposedly quiet neighborhood—just one street over—had been found brutally murdered.

  Carmine also plans to go up and down Sparrow Street, the street the murdered woman lived on, and see what she can learn about this woman in the trunk. Carmine loves a good gossip.

  Before she goes, she wanders around the house uneasily, touching things, studying them, straightening pictures. She looks inside her medicine cabinet. Has anything been moved? She can’t tell for sure. She feels a bit creeped out now, alone in her own house, which she never was before. She hates being a widow; it’s lonely. And she hates the idea of someone—even if only a teenage boy—riffling through her things. Reading what’s on her computer. Not that there’s anything on there that shouldn’t be. What kind of kid would do something like that? There must be something wrong with him.

  * * *

  —

  Raleigh finds himself avoiding Mark at school on Tuesday morning. He doesn’t want to talk to him about the meeting with the lawyer. He’s decided this is it—he’s not going to break into any more houses. Ever.

  * * *

  —

  Webb and Moen are back at the medical examiner’s office for the autopsy results on Amanda Pierce. The large room is freshly painted, and lots of natural light floods the space from the large windows all along the upper half of the room. The smell is still bad, though. Webb sucks on one of the mints that Moen has brought. His shoes squeak on the spic-and-span tiles. Along the wall beneath the windows is a long counter with sinks and sterilized instruments neatly laid out. Weigh scales hang over the counter—they look just like the scales in the supermarket where one might weigh a paper bag of mushrooms, Webb thinks.

  John Lafferty, a senior forensic pathologist, says, “Cause of death is blunt force trauma. She was struck in the head repeatedly with an object, most likely a hammer, by the looks of it.”

  Webb focuses on the body lying on the steel table. The sheet has been peeled back. It’s a gruesome sight. The decomposing body is bloated and the skin has a hideous, greenish cast. She looks much worse than she did the day before.

  “Sorry about the smell, but bodies tend to deteriorate rapidly once they come out of the water,” Lafferty says.

  Undeterred, Webb moves in closer to study the corpse. The autopsy has been concluded, the organs studied and weighed, and she has been sewn up again. Her head is a pulpy mess. One of her eyes is mashed out of her face.

  “It’s almost impossible to estimate time of death under the circumstances,” the pathologist says. “It’s very difficult to dete
rmine time of death from postmortem changes more than seventy-two hours after death, and the fact that she’s been in the water—sorry.”

  Webb nods. “Understood.”

  “No obvious evidence of sexual assault or any other injuries,” the pathologist continues. “She was definitely dead before she went into the water. No defensive wounds, nothing under her nails. No obvious signs of a struggle, even though it appears she was struck from the front. Perhaps she knew her killer. Most likely the first blow came as a surprise and incapacitated her. She was hit several times, with great force. The first couple of blows probably killed her. The repeated blows indicate uncontrollable fury.”

  “So it was personal.”

  “Looks like it.” He adds, “She was a healthy woman—no signs of any old fractures that might indicate ongoing domestic abuse.”

  “Okay,” Webb says. “Anything else?”

  “She was pregnant. About ten weeks. That’s about it.”

  “Thank you,” Webb says, and he and Moen head out. “We know she was alive and at work on Friday, September twenty-ninth,” Webb says. “She must have been killed sometime that weekend. She was probably dead by the time her husband reported her missing on Monday.”

  They walk to the car, both of them inhaling deep breaths of fresh air. Moen says, “Not every man is happy to learn he’s going to be a father.”

  “A bit drastic, isn’t it, murder?” Webb counters.

  She shrugs. “We’ve only got Robert Pierce’s word for it that she told him she was going away with Caroline,” Moen points out. “No one’s corroborated it—she didn’t mention going away for the weekend to anyone she was working with.”

  Webb nods. “Maybe she wasn’t going anywhere. Maybe he made that up, after he killed her. We haven’t found any record of her booking a hotel.”

  “He could have killed her and packed her bags and sunk her car and hoped she would never be found. So that it looked like she planned to leave him.”

  “We’d better talk to Caroline Lu,” Webb says.

  * * *

  —

  Olivia is having an unproductive week. She blames Raleigh—and the shocking news about Amanda Pierce—for her inability to concentrate. It’s early Tuesday afternoon and she’s accomplished almost nothing yet today. She turns away from the file open on her screen, gets up, and goes downstairs for a fresh cup of coffee. The house is quiet—Paul is at work and Raleigh is at school. But she can’t stop thinking about things other than her current editing project. She’s worried about Raleigh.

  What if Raleigh isn’t telling her everything? She didn’t like the way his eyes shifted away from hers when she asked him. He seemed genuine when he said he wasn’t taking drugs, but she still feels there’s something he is keeping from her.

  And Olivia can’t put her finger on why, but she can’t help feeling that Paul is keeping something from her, too. The last few weeks he’s seemed to have something on his mind, something he’s not sharing with her. When she’d broached him about it, he’d brushed her off with a comment about being overloaded at work. Of course, now he’s upset about Raleigh, too.

  Restlessly, she picks up the daily newspaper, the Aylesford Record, and carries it over to the easy chair in front of the sliding-glass doors that look out onto the backyard. She’s already read it, and followed the story online. But she puts her coffee down on the little side table and opens the paper again. On page 3, there’s a picture and a headline. MISSING WOMAN FOUND DEAD. The photograph shows a picture of Amanda Pierce; she’s smiling and pretty in the photo, with no hint of the tragedy that will befall her. She looks as lovely as she did at the neighborhood party, everyone eating out of her hand.

  Olivia studies the photograph closely, recalling the discussion at the book club the night before. She rereads the article. There are few facts. They pulled her and her car out of a lake early yesterday morning. It says only that her body was found in the trunk. Olivia wonders how she died. The other information is scant. Police are being tight-lipped, saying only that “the investigation is ongoing.”

  She puts the paper down, decides to go for a walk, and laces up her shoes. Maybe a walk will clear her head and then she can get some work done.

  It’s awful, Olivia thinks, leaving the house. A woman who lived on their street was murdered. She can’t stop thinking about it.

  NINE

  Robert Pierce glances out at the street from behind one of the blinds in the master bedroom. There’s a cluster of people standing outside staring at the house, staring up at him, having caught the movement at the window. He can imagine what they’re saying about him.

  He turns away from the window and watches the forensics team continue its meticulous search of his bedroom. He watches and thinks. They have nothing on him. The only thing was her unregistered, pay-as-you-go cell phone, and now it’s safely buried in the garden.

  He thinks about the phone. It had become an issue between Amanda and him. Not one they talked about. That was the thing about them, so much of their marriage went on beneath the surface. They didn’t talk about things. They didn’t fight. Instead they played games.

  He knew she must have had a burner phone. He knew she kept it with her—probably in her purse—and hid it somewhere when she was in the house. Because he’d been through her purses, and her car, and he’d never found it. And then one night not long ago, he surprised her by making her dinner when she got home. Something simple—steak and salad and red wine. And a little something in her wineglass to knock her out.

  And while she was sprawled across their bed, oblivious, he’d torn the house apart methodically, much the way this crew is doing right now. And he found her secret hiding place. The box of tampons in the bottom of the bathroom cupboard. The bathroom was the one place in the house she could always count on being alone. Not too creative of her, really. If they look inside her box of tampons now, of course, they won’t find anything but tampons.

  How much does he really have to worry about?

  When she woke up the next morning with a walloping headache, he chided her for drinking too much. He pointed at the empty wine bottle left on the kitchen counter—he’d poured half of it down the sink—and she nodded and smiled uncertainly. Later on, when she was dressed for work, she seemed nervous, out of sorts. She approached him, some unreadable expression on her face. He wondered if she was going to ask him. He wondered if she had the guts. He gazed back at her blandly. “Are you all right, honey? You look upset.”

  He’d never been violent with her before, but she looked at him as if she were a silky little brown mouse facing a snake.

  They stared at one another. He’d taken her secret phone from its secret hiding place. He knew it and she knew it. Would she say anything? He didn’t think she’d dare. He waited.

  Finally she said, “No, I’m fine,” and turned away.

  He kept an eye on her to see if she would try to discreetly search the house for her missing phone before she left for work, but she didn’t. It was in his bottom desk drawer, beneath some envelopes. Easier to find than where she’d hidden it. But he knew she wouldn’t dare go into his desk. Not while he was home. So he stayed home until she left for work.

  That was the day she disappeared.

  * * *

  —

  Detective Webb is very much aware of Robert Pierce lurking around the house during their search. Did he kill his wife? And stuff her body in the trunk and sink her car in the lake? He’s not coming across particularly well as a bereaved husband. He seems twitchy.

  If he killed her here, in the house, they will find something. They know she was beaten to death with a hammer or something similar. There would have been a lot of blood. Even if a surface looks completely clean, if there are traces of blood, they will find them. But Webb doesn’t think he killed her here. He’s too smart for that.

  The team moves slowly ove
r the house. They dust everywhere for fingerprints, look in drawers and under furniture, searching for anything that might shed light on Amanda Pierce’s death.

  They take her laptop. Her cell phone had been found in her purse; two weeks in the water had rendered it useless, but her cell phone records will be scrutinized. Webb wonders what, if anything, Amanda Pierce might have been hiding. She told her husband that she was going away with a friend. They only have his word for it. But if what he says is true, then Amanda was lying to him about Caroline Lu. If so, who was she meeting? Had her husband found out the truth? Had he killed her in a jealous rage? Or maybe there was some other reason he killed her. Perhaps he was psychologically abusive. Was she trying to escape the marriage and he found out?

  Their interview of Caroline Lu had yielded nothing useful. The two women had been friends since college but had seen less of each other in recent months; Caroline hadn’t known if Amanda had a lover, and she was unaware of any possible marital problems. She’d been shocked when Robert called saying that Amanda had told him they were together that weekend.

  Now, in the master bedroom, Robert looks on silently, coldly observant. A technician approaches Webb and says in a low voice, “Four distinct sets of prints in the house. Downstairs in the living room, the kitchen. Up here, in the office—especially the desk and desk drawers, and in the bedroom on the light switch, the headboard—also in the en suite bath.”

  That’s interesting, Webb thinks, and glances at Moen, who raises an eyebrow at him. He turns to Robert and says, “Have you had friends in lately?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Did your wife?”

  “No, not that I know of.”

  “A cleaning lady?”

  Robert shakes his head. “No.”