“I’ll call them,” I said. “I’ll call them and I’ll come over.”
“Don’t!” she wailed even louder. “No police; just you!”
Michael made a snorting sound and I froze, looking back toward the bed, but he’d merely been rolling onto his side, his breathing once again deep and even.
“What did he do to you?” I said to Heather, picturing her hiding from Viktor. “Are you bleeding badly? Can he get to you?”
“No!” A long, drawn-out wail.
“Where is he?”
She didn’t answer, her sobs increasing. I tried to listen for background noise, expecting to hear Viktor pounding on their bedroom door, but it was impossible to make out any sounds beyond her wails.
“Heather, where is he? Where is Viktor?”
“He’s dead!”
chapter thirteen
ALISON
What is it about the dark that transforms the ordinary into something frightening and otherworldly? The plane trees along the narrow, winding road were ghostly in the headlights, their branches outstretched like arms reaching to stop me as I raced toward Heather’s house. My pulse was racing just as fast. At a traffic light I cried out at the sudden flutter of a large gray moth batting against my windshield. How was that creature alive in this cold? How could Viktor be dead? I struggled to believe it. Julie didn’t seem to believe it either. “He’s dead?” she repeated when I called her from the car.
“I don’t know—that’s what Heather says. I’m on my way to her house. Call Sarah, okay?”
“Yes, of course. Maybe it’s a mistake?”
“Maybe.”
But Julie hadn’t heard Heather’s voice, her panic. “Hurry,” she’d sobbed on the phone to me. “Hurry, please!”
I almost missed the entrance to her house; the gas lamps that topped the stone pillars weren’t lit. Braking hard, I quickly reversed and jerked the wheel to turn onto her drive, the grind and groan of my car’s engine jarringly loud. The lights that lined either side of the road weren’t lit either, and I jumped as a branch from a bare forsythia bush brushed against my car.
The drive wound up and up, seeming twice as long as it did in the daytime, and I felt a slight panic that it would go on forever. Finally I reached the top of the hill and the house came into view, lights blazing from the first-floor windows and pouring from an open bay in the three-car garage to the right. As I parked, I saw a dark shadow step into the light of the open garage door, a figure in black, pacing nervously. It was Heather, wearing jeans and a black turtleneck, her blond hair in disarray.
“What happened?” I said breathlessly as I got out of the car.
She pointed toward the open garage door, giving me an unblinking stare, clearly in shock. As I hurried toward her, another car crested the hill, the sweep of the headlights startling both of us. It was Julie, and as she stepped out of her car, Sarah’s car pulled in behind her.
“I shot him,” Heather said, and then she just kept repeating it, “I shot him, I shot him,” her voice as blank as her face, while she tugged at the fingers of one fine-boned hand, then the other.
Sarah pushed past her into the garage, and I called after her, “Careful! Don’t touch anything.” Julie looked from Heather to the open door and back again. Then we heard Sarah moan, “Oh, God,” and Julie followed me as I headed into the garage.
Viktor’s bottle-green Mercedes was parked inside, but the lights were on, and now that I was close I could hear the faint pinging of a key left in the ignition. I saw a foot first, clad in a black leather men’s dress shoe, sticking out of the open driver’s door. As I got closer, I saw Viktor’s body slumped sideways in the driver’s seat, his head falling forward onto the passenger side. He might have been napping except for the gaping wound in the back of his head. Blood and what I guessed was brain matter, a dark, sticky mass in his light brown hair, dripped in rivulets onto his face and pooled on the leather passenger seat. There was an overpowering smell, like raw meat, with a faint rotten-egg odor on top of it. I gagged, rearing back and covering my mouth.
“Jesus!” Julie cried. “What happened? What did you do?”
“I had to do it, he was going to kill me,” Heather said in a dull voice behind us.
“Where’s Daniel?” I asked. I looked around, terrified that he’d seen this final, awful violence between his parents.
Heather was staring at the car. Up close, under the garage lights, we could see that she had a fine mist of blood freckling her face and hair and spattered across her shirt.
“Heather?” Sarah snapped her fingers in front of the blank face. “Daniel. Where’s Daniel?”
“He’s not here.” Her voice was a scary monotone. A new chilling fear swept through me—had she killed him, too, in some misguided act of motherly love?
“Where is he?” I persisted.
She finally blinked, looking away from the car to me. It seemed to take her forever to form the words. “He’s with Viktor’s mother.”
“Thank God,” I said. She was trembling and I reached to try to comfort her, only then realizing that I was trembling, too.
“Where’s the gun?” Julie asked.
Heather slowly raised a finger, pointing, and we saw a small black handgun lying in a corner of the garage floor as if it had been tossed or kicked over there.
“We need to call the police,” I said. “This was self-defense, the police will understand.” I pulled out my cell phone, only to have it snatched away by Sarah.
“Don’t,” she said.
“We have to call now,” I said, trying to take it back from her. “The blood is congealing.”
The word made Julie moan, but Sarah only shook her head. “Not yet. Not until we know what happened.”
I realized she was right. What would the police say if they saw Viktor’s body and his blood spattered all over Heather? Sarah gave me back my phone and I slipped it into my coat pocket as she leaned into the open driver’s door, careful not to touch anything. “Where were you standing when you shot him, Heather?” she asked as she stepped back, crossing around the front of the car to peer in through the passenger window.
“Over there,” Heather said, pointing to a spot about five feet from the car where Julie was standing. Julie immediately moved away, as if that spot was tainted.
Sarah stepped back around the car to us and said to me in a low voice, “He was shot in the back of the head.”
“Did Viktor hit you?” Julie said, sounding desperate. “Is that what happened? He was hurting you?”
Heather nodded slowly. “He was going to kill me.”
I looked around the garage, trying to make sense of it. It was the closest bay to the house, with a connecting door, and against the back wall, beyond Viktor’s car, was a workbench with drawers and some tools mounted with hooks. It was hard to imagine Viktor, much less Heather, using any of them; they looked untouched. Viktor was inside his car and nothing else seemed out of place. “Did he have the gun?”
Heather shook her head, clearly still dazed.
“Listen, you need to start at the beginning and tell us everything,” Sarah said. “Now, Heather!” The last came out as a snap and Heather flinched.
“Sarah, don’t,” I said in a reproving tone, but she wheeled on me.
“We don’t have time to waste,” she barked, eyes wild and small body trembling.
That was when I noticed just how cold it was in the garage. The rest of us had coats or down vests over sweatpants or pajamas, but Heather didn’t and her feet were bare and almost blue with cold against the concrete floor.
“She’s in shock, I’ll go get her a coat and shoes,” Julie said, starting for the door into the house. I stepped in front of her.
“Wait, this is a crime scene. We can’t touch anything.”
As I said that, Heather started talking, the story spilling out in a monotone. “I was going to leave him. He was supposed to be at the hospital late—an emergency surgery—so I sent Daniel to stay w
ith his grandmother while I packed. But the surgery was canceled and Viktor came home early. When he saw the suitcase he started yelling—he shoved me up against the wall and said the only way I was leaving him was in a body bag.”
Julie inhaled sharply and Heather paused for a second, but Sarah urged her on, voice impatient. “What happened next?”
“He knocked me down,” Heather said, her face losing some of that slack expression. “And then he said he was going to go get Daniel, that I was a horrible mother, and that I was never going to set foot out of the house again. That he’d kill me first.”
“Is that when you got the gun?” I asked.
She nodded, face pale and eyes huge. “I went to the hiding place in the closet and took the gun down. I thought I would just hold it, just hold on to it so he’d let me leave.”
Her voice had dropped to a whisper; there was no other sound in the garage except the insistent pinging of the ignition.
“Somebody shut that damn thing off,” Sarah said before doing it herself, reaching in past the body and using a sleeve to turn the key to avoid leaving fingerprints.
“So you showed Viktor the gun?” Julie prompted.
“He said, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ I said I was leaving and he couldn’t stop me. But my hands were shaking and he started walking toward me. He said, ‘You’re not going to shoot me.’ And I couldn’t do it—I was too scared.”
Heather started speaking faster and I could feel my heart rate quicken in response, reliving it with her. “He yanked the gun from my hand, slammed me up against the wall, and then he pointed it at me. I begged him not to shoot me.” Her voice climbed. “I begged him.”
“How did you get the gun back?” Sarah asked.
“He tossed it on the ground.” Heather flung her hand out in imitation, her voice incredulous. “I thought I was going to die and he just laughed. He said, ‘You’re never going to leave me—you’re nothing without me.’
“I picked the gun up off the floor and followed him out to the garage.” She held up her hand as if she were still holding the gun. “He was looking away and I thought, This is it—shoot him now before he kills me. And it just went off. Bang!”
We all jumped at her shout.
“It’s self-defense,” Julie said. “We call the police and explain it to them.”
“She shot him in the back of the head,” Sarah said, running a hand through her hair. “It doesn’t look like self-defense.”
“We can tell them what happened,” Julie said. “Tell them how abusive he’s been.”
“Did he hurt you today?” I said. “Do you have any bruises right now?”
Heather slowly looked down at her body, staring for a second at her hands, which were speckled with her husband’s blood, before plucking at the bottom of her shirt, lifting it up so that we could see the pale skin underneath. She turned, trying to check, and we looked, too, circling her body, and I thought how different it was this time because now I was hoping to find a bruise or torn skin. Anything to prove that he’d hurt her.
But there weren’t any marks. Only a faint smudge of the palest lilac on her upper torso—barely a bruise at all. She yanked her arms out of the sleeves and we checked that skin, too. The red at her elbows was just from the cold, and her skin was so pale that I could practically see the blood running through her body, like veining in marble. We found a second, much smaller bruise on her left forearm, this one yellow and green. Also old. She became slightly panicky—we all were—hurriedly unzipping her jeans, jerking them down and her small lace panties with them. She let her clothes puddle around her ankles and stood there, naked and shivering, so we could scan her for evidence of Viktor’s abuse.
A faint scratch from a nail around her ankle, a nick around the knee from a razor—there was nothing else, no other injury. “Only those two bruises,” Julie said, “and they’re old marks.”
“Psychological abuse is just as real as physical,” I said, but I felt the same sinking feeling that I could see on Sarah’s face.
“There’s no evidence of abuse,” she said, as Heather fumbled back into her clothes. “We need evidence.”
“We can tell them,” Julie said. “The three of us. We can tell them what happened, what’s been happening. How he hurt Heather, terrorized her.”
“What Heather told us is hearsay,” Sarah said. “Inadmissible.”
“The bruises we saw aren’t hearsay,” I argued. “The kitchen wasn’t hearsay. We saw those ourselves.”
“But we have no proof of that, do we?” Sarah said, sounding despairing.
She was right—why would they believe us any more than Heather? “Why didn’t we think to—” I stopped short and looked at Heather. “Did you take the photos like we suggested? Photos of what Viktor did to you?”
“Yes,” Heather said. “But Viktor found the camera—he destroyed it.”
“Maybe the photos themselves are salvageable,” I said. “Where is it?”
“Inside,” Heather said, heading for the door, but I stopped her.
“Let me go. You’ve got blood on you.” I pulled open the door, careful to use my sleeve on the knob. “Where do I look?”
“In the kitchen.”
There was a light on in the mudroom, which opened up into a laundry room, and I ran through them both. The rest of the house was dark, silent. There were signs of a struggle—a laundry basket tipped on its side, clothes spilling out onto the floor, and beyond that, a black suitcase lying facedown just outside the door. I stepped around them, hurrying into the kitchen, my footsteps thudding on the tile. I switched on a light, blinking in the sudden brightness. A purse had been upended over the island, its contents scattered across the marble and onto the floor below. A leather wallet had been literally torn open, Heather’s face smiling up from her driver’s license, which was falling out of a ripped plastic sleeve. Receipts fluttered as I scrabbled through her makeup, mints, and keys, but I couldn’t see the camera anywhere until I thought to check the rest of the floor and that’s when I spotted the gray plastic shards near the sink. The camera had been smashed into little bits, beyond recognition unless someone knew what they were looking for. I got a paper towel and sifted through the mess, careful not to touch anything directly, but the SD card was missing. I checked the sink. It was damp and there were still tinier bits of plastic near the garbage disposal. If he’d sent it down the disposal, there really wasn’t any hope of finding those photos, but I gingerly reached a hand down inside, hoping against hope that I’d find the little card intact.
All I did was prick myself on a fine shard. “Shit!” Jerking my hand back out, I ran it under cold water for several seconds, only to realize that I’d forgotten to use a paper towel. I hurriedly grabbed one to wipe down the faucet.
“It’s no good,” I said once I was back out in the garage. “Those were the only photos you had?”
Heather nodded, patting her jeans pockets with shaking hands as if she’d find a photo hidden there.
Julie suddenly started patting her own pockets. “No, they’re not. I took some on my phone—it’s in the car.” She ran out of the garage and a few seconds later came back clutching her iPhone. “Here,” she said, breathless, holding it out. “Look, they’re a little blurry, but it’s proof, right?”
Sarah took the phone and peered at the screen, frowning as she scrolled through them. “What is this a photo of?” she said, holding the phone out to Heather. Julie and I leaned in to see as well.
“I think it’s my stomach. He punched me here once.” Heather pointed toward her side and I looked from where she was pointing to the photo, which was hard to comprehend. It looked like a Rorschach test—a white background with what appeared to be an irregular pattern of blue-purple ink across it.
“There’s no way to tell what this is,” Sarah said. “It could be a bruise or it could be a watercolor.” She scrolled through to another photo. In that one, at least, you could see that it was a person. It was
half of a female upper torso, and you could clearly see the strap of her bra, the shadow at the dip in her throat, the tight line of her lower jaw. Less clear was the faint discoloration around her visible shoulder.
“That could be a mark left from CrossFit or rough sex,” Sarah said. “It doesn’t look like much of anything.”
“There’s got to be a better one.” Julie snatched it from Sarah’s hand, frantically scrolling through her photos, but there were only four or five and none of them proved anything.
“We can testify to what we saw,” I said. “The police will talk to us—we’ll explain it to them.”
“It’s going to be her word against the man she killed,” Sarah said. “It’ll depend on the lawyer she gets, the jury.”
“Jury?” Heather said. She stared at Sarah, seeming not to fully comprehend the situation she was in. “It was self-defense,” she repeated. “I had to kill him.”
“Except you didn’t,” Sarah said bluntly. “You should have called the police, or us, and that’s what they’ll say, that you could have called for help.”
“She was terrified,” I said. “It’s a valid defense.”
“She shot him in the back of the head,” Sarah said. “You know as well as I do that even with strong evidence of abuse they’ll arrest her and charge her with murder.”
“I can’t go to jail!” Heather began screaming. “I can’t go to jail!”
“Shhh!” Sarah hissed. “Someone will hear you!”
“We’ve got to do something,” Julie said above her cries. “We can’t just let them arrest her.”
“We don’t have any other option,” Sarah said.
“We could dump the body somewhere else,” I said, thinking out loud, but Heather stopped midscream, and everyone looked at me.
“Yes, yes,” Julie said, sounding relieved. “That’s what we need to do—just put his body somewhere. They’ll think he was shot by someone else.”
“Where?” Sarah demanded, full of skepticism. “Where on earth would we put him and what about the car? What do we do with that?”
“Carjacking,” I said, thinking of a recent case. “We could make it look like a carjacking.”
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