False Witness

by Karin Slaughter

  Burke finally got to the point of the interview. He shifted in the chair, crossing his legs at the knees. “Ms. Karlsen, I can’t begin to know how difficult this is for you, but if you feel like you can, would you please tell me what happened last night?”

  She said nothing at first, and Burke had the experience not to push her. Leigh stared at the numbers in the upper right-hand corner, watching the time tick by until, forty-eight seconds later, Tammy finally spoke.

  “I don’t—” She cleared her throat again. Her esophagus wasn’t raw just from the strangulation. During the rape exam, a nurse had stuck a long swab down her throat to find traces of semen. “Sorry.”

  Burke stretched to his left and opened a mini fridge Leigh had not noticed before. He took out a bottle of water, twisted open the top, and placed it on the table in front of Tammy before sitting back.

  She hesitated, but finally took the bottle. Leigh winced as she watched the woman struggle to swallow. Water dripped from the corners of Tammy’s swollen lips, pooling into the collar of her scrubs, darkening the green.

  Burke said, “There’s no rule to this, Ms. Karlsen. You start the story where you feel comfortable. Or don’t. You can walk out of here at any time.”

  Tammy’s hands shook as she returned the bottle to the table. She looked at the door, and Leigh wondered if she was going to leave.

  But she didn’t.

  Tammy took a few tissues from the box on the table. She wiped her nose, flinching from the pain. She worked the tissues in her hand as she started talking, slowly walking Burke through the beginning of a normal evening that had turned into a nightmare. Getting off work. Deciding to go out for a drink. Leaving her car with the valet. Sitting alone at the bar as she drank a gin martini. She’d been ready to leave when Andrew offered to buy her another drink.

  Leigh flipped back in her notepad. She counted off the two and a half gin martinis that the security cameras at Comma Chameleon had recorded Tammy consuming.

  As Tammy told the story of moving to the rooftop deck, she was off her alcohol consumption by half, but most people didn’t remember how much they drank. It didn’t matter. Leigh would look petty in front of the jury if she pushed the woman on actually ordering three martinis instead of two.

  She turned her attention back to the video.

  Tammy was describing Andrew the same way anyone would describe him—a little hard to read, but nice, professional, an adult at an age when a lot of her generation was not. Tammy was clearly cut from the same cloth. She told Burke that she felt like they had hit it off. No, she didn’t know Andrew’s last name. He worked at a car dealership, she thought. Maybe a mechanic? He liked to talk about classic cars.

  “I let him—I kissed him,” Tammy said, the guilt in her tone implying that she thought that made everything that had happened afterward her own fault. “I flirted with him, then at the valet, I kissed him for a while. For too long. And then I gave him my business card because—because I wanted him to call me.”

  Burke let her sit in silence. He was clearly making the connection that Tammy had spent so much time talking about Andrew for a reason, but he was wise enough not to try to put words in her mouth.

  For her part, Tammy was looking down at her hands. She had shredded the tissues. She tried to clean up the mess, gathering the stray fibers on the table. When she reached down to the floor, she groaned, and Leigh was reminded of the damage that the Coke bottle had done.

  Burke leaned to his left again, this time to pick up the trashcan. He placed it by the table. He was so big and the room was so small that he did all of this without leaving his chair.

  Tammy worked to get every single wisp of torn tissue into the wastebasket. Seconds passed. Then minutes.

  Burke patiently watched. Leigh imagined he was processing the story so far, checking his own boxes, making sure that he’d gotten answers: Where did the victim first come into contact with the suspect? How much alcohol was consumed? Were they taking illegal drugs? Was the victim with friends? Who could be a potential witness?

  Or maybe Burke was considering the next batch of questions: Did the victim shove, punch or kick her assailant? Did she say “Stop” or “No” at any time? How did the assailant behave prior, during, and after the assault? What was the chronology of the sex acts performed? Was force or threat used? What about a weapon? Did he ejaculate? Where did he ejaculate? How many times?

  Tammy had finished cleaning up the tissue. She sat back on the couch. Her head started to shake back and forth, as if she’d heard Burke’s silent questions and already knew her response. “I don’t remember what happened next. When I got to the valet. I was in the car, I think? Or—I don’t know. Maybe I remember some things. I can’t be sure. I don’t want to—I can’t ruin—if I don’t remember—I know I need to be sure.”

  Again, Burke waited. Leigh admired his discipline, which spoke to his intelligence. Twenty years ago, an officer in his position would’ve grabbed Tammy by the shoulders, shaken her, yelled about how she needed to talk if she wanted to punish the guy who did this, or was she making it all up because she wanted attention?

  Instead, Burke told Tammy, “My son fought in Afghanistan. Two rotations.”

  Tammy’s head tilted up, but she still would not look him in the eye.

  Burke said, “When he came back, he was different. So much had happened over there that he couldn’t bring himself to talk about. Now, I’ve never served, but I know what post-traumatic stress looks like because I spend a lot of time talking to women who have survived sexual assault.”

  Leigh could see Tammy’s jaw start to clench and unclench. She hadn’t put it into those stark terms yet. She was not a regional manager or a Tech grad. She was a victim of sexual assault. The scarlet letter would burn into her chest for the rest of her life.

  Burke said, “PTSD is triggered by a traumatic event. Symptoms include nightmares, anxiety, uncontrollable thoughts, flashbacks, and sometimes amnesia.”

  “Are you—” Tammy’s voice caught. “Are you saying that’s why I don’t remember?”

  “No, ma’am. We should know more about that when we get back the toxicology report.” Burke was going out on a limb, but he pulled himself back. “What I’m saying is everything you’re experiencing—whether you’re sad, or angry, or in shock, or wanting revenge, or not wanting revenge, or wanting to punish this guy, or maybe you never want to see him again—all of that is perfectly normal. There is no right way or wrong way to act here. What you’re feeling—all of that is right for you.”

  The revelation broke Tammy Karlsen. She started to sob. There was no guidebook women were given at birth about how to respond to sexual trauma. It was like getting your period, or miscarrying a child, or going through menopause: the kind of thing every woman dreaded but was for unknown reasons taboo to mention.

  “Jesus Christ,” Leigh mumbled. This gentle giant was going to single-handedly turn the jury away from Andrew. She should send him a fruit basket after the trial.

  Leigh checked her heartlessness. This wasn’t a game. On the video, Tammy’s body was wracked by sobs. She grabbed a fistful of tissues. Burke didn’t go to comfort her. He stayed in the chair. He glanced at the female officer to make sure she did not move, either.

  “I don’t—” Tammy said. “I don’t wanna ruin anybody’s life.”

  “Ms. Karlsen, I say this with great respect, but you do not have that kind of power.”

  She finally looked up at him.

  Burke said, “I know that you are an honest woman. But my belief and your words are not enough for a court of law. Anything you tell me has to be investigated, and if your memory has failed you, or you’ve mixed up events, then our investigation will find that out in quick order.”

  Leigh sat back in her chair. It was like watching Jimmy Stewart give a speech on the courthouse steps.

  “All right,” Tammy said, but still, almost a full minute passed before she continued. “I was in the park. That’s where I woke u
p. Or came to. I’ve never been there before, but it—it was a park. And I—I was handcuffed to the table. That old man, the one with the dog? I don’t know his name. He called the police and—”

  In the silence, Leigh could hear Tammy’s breath on the audio, a quick in and out as she tried not to hyperventilate.

  Burke told the woman, “Ms. Karlsen, sometimes, our memories come to us in images. They flash like an old movie across the screen. Is there anything about the attack, any stray detail, that you can tell me about the man who raped you?”

  “He—” her voice caught again. The word rape had just cut through the fog. She had been raped. She was a rape victim.

  She said, “He had a ski mask on. And h-handcuffs. He handcuffed me.”

  Leigh wrote premeditated on her notepad, because the ski mask and handcuffs had been brought to the scene.

  She stared down at the word.

  Burke was right about the way memories could flash up. Leigh thought about the vacation photos in Reggie Paltz’s office. If she knew her grifters, Andrew had probably paid for those trips so that he could set the agenda. There might be a photo of him somewhere in a ski mask.

  One more possible mark against Andrew.

  “I—” Tammy’s throat worked as she tried to swallow. “I asked him to stop. To please stop.”

  Leigh made another note. She had seen more than one jury hang up on the fact that a woman had been too terrified, or too overwhelmed, to forcefully say the word no.

  “I don’t remember if—” Tammy swallowed a breath. “He took my clothes off. His fingernails were long. They scraped—I felt them scrape my—”

  Leigh watched Tammy’s hand go to her right breast. She hadn’t noticed Andrew’s fingernails. If he was still keeping them long at the start of the trial, she certainly wasn’t going to tell him to clip them.

  “He kept telling me that—” Tammy’s voice cut off again. “He told me that he loved me. Over and over. That he loved my—my hair, and my eyes, and that he loved my mouth. He kept saying I was so tiny. He said it, like—your hips are so slender, your hands are so small, your face is perfect like a Barbie doll. And he kept saying that he loved me and—”

  Burke didn’t rush in to fill the silence, but Leigh saw him clasp together his hands in his lap, as if he needed to keep himself from reaching out to reassure her that everything was going to be okay.

  Leigh felt the same need as she watched Tammy Karlsen rocking back and forth, hair falling into her face to hide her expression, as she tried to disappear from this cruel world.

  Callie had done the same thing the night Buddy had died. She’d rocked back and forth on the floor, sobbing, repeating the line from the operator in a mechanical tone.

  If you’d like to make a call …

  There was a pack of Kleenex in Leigh’s desk drawer. She used one to wipe her eyes. She waited through the silence as Tammy Karlsen shook with grief. The woman was clearly blaming herself, trying to think about how she had messed up, what stupid thing she had said or done that had put her in this position. She should be at work right now. She had a job. She had a master’s degree. And now she had fleeting memories of a violent attack that had completely devastated her carefully planned life.

  Leigh intimately knew that self-blame, because it had almost happened to her in college. She had been sleeping in her car, trying to save money, and woken up with a stranger on top of her.

  “I’m sorry,” Tammy apologized.

  Leigh blew her nose. She sat up in her chair, leaned closer to the monitor.

  “I’m sorry,” Tammy repeated. She was shaking again. She felt humiliated and stupid and completely out of control. In the course of twelve hours, she had lost everything, and now she had no idea how to get it back. “I can’t—I can’t remember anything else.”

  Leigh swallowed her own self-loathing and made a tick on her notepad. That was the fifth time Tammy Karlsen had said that she couldn’t remember anything.

  Five points for Andrew.

  She looked back at the screen. Burke remained motionless. He waited a few seconds before prompting, “I know that his face was covered, but with a ski mask—now, correct me if I’m wrong—you can see the eyes, is that right?”

  Tammy nodded. “And the mouth.”

  Burke kept gently pushing her toward the obvious question. “Did you recognize anything about him? Anything at all?”

  Tammy swallowed loudly again. “His voice.”

  Burke waited.

  “It was the guy from the bar. Andrew.” She cleared her throat. “We talked a long time. I recognized his voice when he was—when he was doing what he did.”

  Burke asked, “Did you call him by name?”

  “No, I thought—” she stopped herself. “I didn’t want to make him angry.”

  Leigh knew from her earlier reading that Andrew had been compelled to participate in an audio line-up along with five other men. Their voices had been recorded as each one repeated phrases from the attack. When the detective had played all of the samples back for Tammy, she had immediately picked out Andrew.

  Burke asked, “What makes the man’s voice distinctive?”

  “It’s soft. I mean, the tone is soft, but the register is deep, and—”

  Burke’s supernatural composure showed a crack. “And?”

  “His mouth.” Tammy touched her own lips. “I recognized that, too. It went up on the side, like he was … I don’t know. Like he was playing a game. Like, he was saying he loved me, but he was enjoying that—that I was terrified.”

  Leigh knew that smirk. She knew that voice. She knew that frightening, dispassionate look in Andrew’s cold, dead eyes.

  She let the video play out. There were no more notes to take, except three more ticks to the running count of Tammy saying she couldn’t remember. Burke tried to tease out more details. Trauma or Rohypnol had ensured that her recollection was shaky. Everything Tammy relayed came from the beginning of the attack. She couldn’t remember the knife. Getting cut on her leg. The violation with the Coke bottle. She didn’t know what had happened to her purse or her car or her clothes.

  Leigh closed the video when Tammy Karlsen was escorted from the room and Burke ended the recording. She searched for a particular crime scene photo. Tammy’s purse had been located shoved under the driver’s seat of her BMW. Her clothes had been found at the scene. They were neatly folded in the corner of the pavilion.

  As an obsessive compulsive, Leigh appreciated the careful symmetry of the staging. Tammy’s gray twill skirt had been folded into a tight square. On top of that was the matching suit jacket. The black silk blouse was tucked inside the jacket the way you’d see the set displayed in a store. A black thong was laid across the pile. The matching black lace bra was clasped around the bundle like a bow on a gift. Tammy’s black high heels were to the side, upright and carefully aligned to the tight square.

  Leigh remembered the way Andrew used to play with his food at snack-time. He would layer cheese and crackers in a Jenga tower, then try to slide one out without toppling the pile. He did the same thing with apple slices, nuts, leftover kernels of popcorn.

  The desk phone rang. Leigh wiped her eyes, blew her nose.

  “Leigh Collier.”

  Walter asked, “Is side dick like side boob?”

  She took a long moment to realize that he was talking about Maddy’s lip-synch video. “I think it’s like a dick you fuck on the side.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Well.”

  She had to give him credit for not saying, Like mother like daughter, because when Leigh said she was honest with her husband, she was honest about everything.

  Almost everything.

  “Sweetheart,” he said. “Why are you crying?”

  Her tears had stopped, but she felt them threaten to fall again. “I saw Callie last night.”

  “Would it be stupid to ask if she’s in trouble?”

  “Nothing I couldn’t handle.” Leigh would tell him about the unregi
stered Glock later. Walter had gotten the gun from one of his firemen buddies when she had started working on her own. “She looks bad. Worse than usual.”

  “You know it goes in cycles.”

  What Leigh knew was that, eventually, Callie wouldn’t be able to pull herself out of a dive. She wasn’t even sure that Callie could taper off. Especially with Phil around. There was a reason Callie had turned to heroin instead of her mother. And maybe there was a reason she hadn’t turned to Leigh. When Leigh had seen her sister’s dope kit in the motel last night, she had wanted to throw it against the wall and scream, Why do you love this shit more than you love me?

  She told Walter, “She’s too thin. I could see the outlines of her bones.”

  “So, you feed her.”

  Leigh had tried. Callie had barely managed half a cheeseburger. She’d made a face like Maddy the first time she’d tried broccoli. “Her breathing was wrong. Labored. I could hear her wheezing. I’m not sure what’s going on.”

  “Is she smoking?”

  “No.” Phil had smoked enough for the entire family. Neither one of them could stand the stench. Which was why it was doubly cruel that Leigh had let Callie go to their mother’s last night. What had she been thinking? If Andrew or one of his private detectives didn’t terrorize her into overdosing, then Phil would.

  It was her fault. It was all her fault.

  “Sweetheart,” Walter said. “Even if it’s Long-Covid, every day you hear about some people finally getting better. Callie’s got more lives than a cat. You know that.”

  Leigh thought about her own battle with Covid. It had started with four hours of uncontrolled coughing that had gotten so bad she’d burst a blood vessel in her eye. The hospital had discharged her with Tylenol and instructions to call an ambulance if she couldn’t breathe. Walter had begged Leigh to let him take care of her, but she’d sent him to find Callie instead.