She leaned back and closed her eyes, as if she could see those things even without a mirror.
“I see those same things sometimes in other women. I see them on the faces of strangers walking down the street. I see them occasionally on the faces of women I interview for the show. I see it at Pike Place market and on the bus and sometimes I think I see it when watching the news on TV. An abused woman can see the others if she’s paying any attention at all.”
Suzanne nodded.
“I talked to your friend—” She opened her notepad again. “Maria Delgado. She confirmed your story, saying you confided in her about being beaten.
“Yes. She’s the only person I ever told.”
“But you only told her a month ago.”
“It’s not easy to talk about.”
“I know.”
“Well?”
“Well, a more suspicious person might think you were setting up a motive.”
“What?”
“A more suspicious person would ask themself if everything was really the way it seemed. You say you hired a contract killer, which is a crime . . .”
“I’m ready for that.”
“But there’s been no payment. You also made that clear in your statement. So, you didn’t actually follow through on it. There’s no proof of anything. No e-mails, no voice recordings, no transcripts of your chats, no transfer of money, so a more suspicious person might hit a dead end pretty quickly. They might think you’ve been setting up an alibi.”
“Who might be more suspicious?”
Suzanne lowered her head and for the first time, Cindy noticed her partner was missing.
“Are you on the job right now?”
Suzanne looked up and shook her head gently. “I just want to help.”
“I really don’t know what you’re saying.”
Suzanne thought of her mother again and remembered the look in her eyes that Cindy had talked about.
“You need to be sure there’s never going to be a money trail, Cindy. Or any other kind of trail. You need to be absolutely sure. Because if there’s no trail, it’s only your confession. That’s not enough to convict you. Right now, you’re your only enemy. You need to be sure there’s no loose ends.”
Cindy stared at the detective, seemingly not sure what to say.
“You haven’t committed a crime, Cindy. You need to remember that.”
“I did. I started this whole thing.”
“No. You did nothing wrong. That is where your mind has to be.”
Suzanne reached over and took Cindy’s hand.
“And you need to get away from him. With Avril gone, he has no strings to pull on you. You need to get him out of your life.”
Cindy looked like she wanted to cry, but instead she squeezed Suzanne’s hand and nodded silently.
* * *
In the middle of the afternoon, Cindy was sitting in her living room (our living room, she corrected herself), sipping a glass of Coke. It had started out cold but over the past couple of hours it had warmed and gone flat. She didn’t notice.
Instead, she tried to use some of the lessons she’d taught her thousands of listeners over the years. Part of her show was to include quick self-help topics she’d pulled from various magazines. Her favorite topics included lists like 10 Ways to Increase Your Self-Esteem and 12 Lessons to Live By. There were a million lists out there that she could pick and choose. Now, she remembered some of the most memorable things she’d taught her audience:
* * *
Do things you won’t be ashamed of in five years.
Live your own life, not somebody else’s.
Go to sleep happy every single night.
Laugh three times every day—real laughs, not forced.
* * *
And her own personal ideal: Don’t live with regrets, not a single one.
Cindy was full of regrets. Every aspect of the last month was something she regretted because it’d caused her to lose her daughter.
However, she knew there was a silver lining just waiting for her. It wasn’t much of a lining, just a glimmer, but today she would grab onto anything to find a reason to continue living.
The past thirteen years that she’d been married to Tony had been a horrendous nightmare. She’d come to accept that as a matter of course. It was just how things were.
Now, though, she had a choice. It didn’t have to be that way. She didn’t have to be a victim a minute longer, because Tony no longer had the leverage to hurt Avril. He had no power over her anymore.
The realization frightened Cindy. She’s been sitting for an hour after the epiphany hit her. She really didn’t have to be beaten anymore.
“Can’t believe it’s possible,” she said to the empty room.
But it is.
At a little after 4:00 p.m., the doorbell rang. Out of an abundance of caution, she peeked out the window to check, but the man at the door was exactly who she expected. She cracked open the door.
“Hello,” she said.
“Ma’am! I’m with Century Locks.”
“Yes. I need my locks changed. Front and back. Oh, and the door from the garage to the house.”
“Won’t take long. Maybe an hour.”
She nodded.
When he was finished, the locksmith gave her the new keys and said the company would bill her. She thanked him and smiled as he left. She immediately locked every door, and secretly wished for Tony to show up soon. Let the bastard know he no longer had a home.
She vaguely wondered where he was. She hadn’t seen him for . . . two days? Or was it three?
“Maybe I’m rid of him for good.”
Even as she said the words, she knew it would be too good to be true.
Chapter 24
September 1
Tony woke in the middle of the afternoon after a nap in Deb’s bedroom. She wasn’t home and he’d decided not to bother going in to work today.
Fuck it, with a million bucks in the bank, who needs to sit around wasting time waiting for customers in a rinky-dink music store?
He looked in the fridge and only saw healthy foods that he had no intention of eating. Deb had to change her eating habits, and quick.
There was a couple of beers sitting there, and he grabbed one and twisted the cap off just as he heard the first few bars of Summer Drive playing on his iPhone. He wanted to ignore it, because that was a special ring tone he’d set up years ago. Cindy.
He drank half the beer in one long gulp and then picked up his phone. This time it was an e-mail, not a phone call or text. A small nagging part of his mind tried to remember the last time he’d been home. Three days? Four?
Finally noticed, you dumb bitch?
He clicked open the e-mail.
* * *
Tony,
I’ve changed the locks on the house and I’ve changed the code on the security system. The police know about the beatings. They will protect me from you now.
You can have your stuff, but it has to be somebody else who picks it up, something like a moving company. And the police will be here when it happens. Your clothes are out on the curb right now in six green garbage bags. It makes no difference to me if you actually pick them up, but as you know, it’s only four days until garbage day.
I’ve also changed all our banking. You’ll find that our joint accounts are all closed and our shared credit cards no longer are active.
You’ve hurt me enough. I’ll be filing for a divorce in due course. Until then, I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to hear from you. I don’t want you to e-mail or text me. If you do, I’ll just start blocking you.
Just make this easier for us both and leave me alone.
Cindy
* * *
Tony read the e-mail and then re-read it two more times.
“You fucking bitch . . .”
He licked his lips and felt himself breathing heavier. He wanted to throw something and found himself clenching his phone tightly enough th
at he was worried it would snap to pieces.
“You think you can just get me out of your life, do you?”
His voice was somber and low. He ignored the rest of his beer and rushed to the door, slamming it shut behind him. He felt his face turning red from anger and he marched to his car and climbed in, not even stopping to buckle his seatbelt. His car screamed as he floored the accelerator and took off.
Tony had no intention of leaving things the way that she wanted them left. She would not humiliate him by throwing him out. Even after being married for a dozen years, clearly she still had a lesson or two to learn.
He didn’t notice that he raced right through a red light. Fortunately for him, there were few other cars on the road. It wasn’t quite rush hour yet, and Deb lived in a quiet area of town.
Tiny random drops of rain spit on Tony’s car. At first he didn’t notice but eventually the windshield was spotted all over and he turned the wipers on. Just as quickly, the few drops of rain stopped, but the wipers carried on even as the sun peeked around the clouds. Tony wasn’t thinking of his windshield wipers. He was thinking of breaking the fucking bitch’s neck.
It took 20 minutes to get to his house. He slammed the door and stared at his home.
Yes, indeed, six green garbage bags on the curb.
A car was parked near the bags: a Vic Crown Royal. Tony hesitated and stared at the bay window. He could see two people.
The stupid bitch was there.
So was the cop who had interviewed him after Avril’s body was found.
He gritted his teeth and clenched his fists. They hadn’t seen him, but he wasn’t sure he cared. He had his Colt .45 in the glove compartment, and he could just sneak up to the window and blast the shit right out of them both. Part of him wanted to do just that and he found himself climbing in the car to reach for the gun before a small amount of his good sense returned.
He finished getting into the car and pounded the steering wheel.
Bitch is gonna pay, he thought.
He felt blood running down his chin as he’d bit into his lip.
Oh, yes, you’re gonna pay.
* * *
Tony drove back to Deb’s slowly, his anger slowly smoldering and turning to rage.
This wasn’t how things were supposed to turn out.
Step one was winning the lottery. That made him realize he had a future.
Step two was sucking every penny he could from his father-in-law. That didn’t work because the old man didn’t believe his own daughter.
Step three was dumping the bitch and starting a new life somewhere.
He tried to console himself, realizing he still had the money from the lottery. Deb had it safely stashed away, and nobody knew it was really his money, not hers. She was the one whose photo was on the news, and since she was a nobody, she was quickly forgotten, like last week’s trash.
Tony clenched the steering wheel, his car moving like a cat down the side streets to Deb’s house. He still couldn’t believe that Cindy had thrown him out. It was humiliating and every cell of his body just wanted to go back and beat the living shit right out of her.
This time he would kill her.
He parked the car and slammed the door. After hesitating only a second, he made a fist and slammed it into the front of the hood. A rocketing pain rushed up his arm but he didn’t care. He just looked at the dent in his car, imagining it to be Cindy’s face.
As he walked to the house, he felt every pore in his body, every atom crying out for him to do something. He couldn’t just be locked out of his own house.
Fuck that.
His vision was blurry from the anger shaking his body and when he saw Deb in the kitchen, smiling back at him, all he could think was, Now she’s laughing at me, too.
The smile disappeared from Deb’s face almost immediately.
“What’s wrong?”
As he moved toward her, she took a step back and her mouth opened in the same expression he’d often seen on Cindy’s face. Pure fear.
Now it was his turn to smile.
He felt an erection growing through his anger as he reached Deb and grabbed her hair. He pulled it and then quickly slapped his other hand over her mouth.
“Don’t say a word. Don’t forget your lessons.”
Her eyes were wide and she tried to shake her head, but he was crushing her and she could barely move.
Tony pulled her hair harder, backward, and her head snapped back with it. A muffled cry escaped through his fingers and that just made him angrier.
“I told you to shut the fuck up!”
He made the same fist he had used to dent his car, pulled back, and then punched her as hard as he could. She went crashing backward into the granite counter beside the sink, and her head banged hard against a cabinet.
“Please, stop. You’re not yourself.”
The words were like little bubbles, slowly dropping from her mouth along with the stream of blood.
Anger and the need to hurt overtook Tony. He grabbed Deb’s head and smashing it over and over onto the countertop. Each hit got sloppier and mushier but that didn’t stop him.
This was Tony as he wished he could always be. It was him being truly alive.
He smashed her skull until it burst like a watermelon and the blood and spongy brain spurted out all over the floor.
Finally he dropped the body and stepped back. He tried to control his breathing, taking a long deep breath, trying to force the animal part of himself back into its cage.
“Deb . . .”
Shit.
He’d gone too far this time.
He hadn’t loved her. Hell, he barely liked her. But, she was useful to him. She let him hurt her and then fucked him after. She made him food and provided a place for him to hang out that Cindy wouldn’t know about. And, of course, she’d cashed the lottery ticket.
He blinked as he thought of the ticket.
“Goddammit.”
He looked around and found Deb’s purse sitting in the living room. He dumped the contents out and sorted through them.
“Where’s the bank book, Deb. Where’s my money?”
Nothing.
He looked around and saw a pile of papers on a desk in the corner. Bills, junk mail . . . but no bank book.
He pulled open the drawers of the desk, but mostly they were empty. The only contents were a stapler, a roll of tape, and some paper clips.
There was no other obvious hiding place, but he searched every inch of Deb’s living areas to no avail. He spent two hours looking. Nothing.
Tony couldn’t believe his bad luck. How the hell had he gotten rid of her before finding out where she’d stashed the money?
And why wasn’t there any record of it around? Maybe she’d planned all along to take the money from him? Stupid bitch deserved what she got.
Now what?
He drank the last of the beer that was sitting in Deb’s fridge and thought. By the time he was done drinking it, he knew he had to get rid of the body. If she was gone, nobody could nail him for murder. Nobody even knew he had ever been here. If she just disappeared, well, she was young, and who knew, maybe she just wandered off. She’d been a 15-minute news celebrity after winning the lottery and could easily have decided on an extended vacation in Europe.
The neighborhood was dark, which was very useful tonight. He crammed her body in the trunk and threw all her clothes in there too, along with her personal items, her purse, all her shoes, and a few other odds and ends. Then he cleaned up the blood and brain matter scattered around the kitchen. By the time he left, the place was spotless and nobody would ever suspect anything. She was just a runner.
He drove back to the abandoned farm house that he’d held Avril captive in. By the time he got there, it was after midnight and he was dead tired. He left Deb’s body in the trunk of his car to bury in the morning, and he just found the couch in the barn and fell asleep almost immediately, dreaming of finding his lottery winnings again and h
aving a fucking wonderful life yet to come.
Chapter 25
September 3
Cindy stared out the window of the front of her home. She’d spent a lot of time doing exactly that over the past few days, expecting that at any moment Tony would come banging on the door, possibly try to break a window to get in or just wait until she went out to get some groceries and spring on her from the side. He’d kill her. She had no doubt.
Suzanne McDermott had recommended she get an injunction ordering him to stay away from her, but she didn’t have money to hire a lawyer for things like that.
Except for the donations, of course. When she’d talked on the radio about needing money to save Avril, the money came flooding in. She had no idea how much there was, but just in the Paypal account that Ryan had set up there was more than $20,000. In addition there were boxes full of envelopes stuffed with cash and checks sitting at the station and a large pile of envelopes on Cindy’s kitchen table.
All of it would be returned, but sometimes she couldn’t help but think of how useful all that money would be. She’d transferred all the money out of their joint bank account to one of her own, but there was only a few thousand dollars in it.
She’d never asked Tony where the money went. She knew that would just lead to him losing his temper.
“No more pain,” she whispered to the glass window. It was her new mantra. “It’s time to start over.”
So far, so good. It’d only been 48 hours since she e-mailed Tony and told him he was no longer welcome in their home, but those two days had been peaceful and quiet.
Actually, longer, she thought.
She wasn’t sure when the last time he’d come home. It might have been a week, but whatever time it was, she cherished it. For the first time in years, no part of her body hurt.
“Where are you, Tony?”
She had no clue. Part of her didn’t give a rat’s ass, but part of her worried what he was up to. Was he planning something?
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