False Witness

by Karin Slaughter

  She asked, “What else?”

  Andrew’s eyes narrowed. Like any predator, his senses were finely tuned. “I assume you agree that going over Tammy’s sordid past is the best course of action?”

  Reggie saved her from answering. “It’s he said/she said, right? The only way you can fight back is to make sure the jury hates her.”

  Leigh wasn’t going to openly challenge a graduate of the Twitter School of Law. “There’s more nuance to it than that.”

  “Nuance?” Reggie repeated, clearly trying to justify his paycheck. “What does that mean?”

  “A subtle difference or distinction.” Leigh pulled back on the sarcasm. “It means that, generally, you have to be very careful. Tammy will come across as extremely sympathetic.”

  “Not when you tell them she nearly ruined a guy’s life in high school,” Reggie said. “And then killed his baby.”

  Leigh pushed the pile of shit back in his lap. “Honestly, Reggie, everything will rest on your testimony. You’ll have to be flawless on the stand.”

  Reggie’s mouth opened, but Andrew’s hand went up to stop him.

  He told his lapdog, “I’d like a cup of coffee. Sugar, no cream.”

  Reggie stood up. He left his laptop and phone on the table. He kept his eyes straight as he passed by Leigh. She heard a click, but she wasn’t sure if it was from the door closing or from Andrew’s finger picking at the corner of the file.

  He knew that something was wrong, that somehow, at some point, he had lost the upper hand.

  For Leigh’s part, all that she could think about was that she had not been alone with Andrew since their brief conversation in the parking lot. She looked at the pen on the table in front of her. She did an inventory of the objects in the room. The trophies on the credenza. The heavy glass vase with its wilting flowers. The hard edge of her phone case. They could all be used as weapons.

  Again, she returned to her safe spot, which was the case. “We should go over—”

  Andrew banged his fist onto the file.

  Leigh jumped before she could tell herself not to. Her arms instinctively flew up. She expected Andrew to explode, to come across the room and attack her.

  Instead, his expression maintained its usual icy composure as he shoved the file across the table.

  She watched the pages flutter as the folder slid across the polished wood and stopped a few inches away from her notepad. Leigh dropped her defensive posture. She recognized the gold seal of the Georgia Institute of Technology. Black letters designated the file as from Student Mental Health Services. The name on the tab read KARLSEN, TAMMY RENAE.

  Leigh’s inner siren started trilling so loudly she could barely hear herself think. HIPAA, the healthcare law guaranteeing that all medical data was kept private, fell under the purview of Health and Human Services. Violations were investigated by the Office for Civil Rights, and if they found criminal acts, they referred the case to the Department of Justice for prosecution.

  Federal law. Federal prosecutor. Federal prison.

  She bought herself time, asking Andrew, “What is this?”

  “Intel,” he said. “I want you to study those records front to back and, when the time comes, I want you to use every detail inside to shred Tammy Karlsen on the stand.”

  The siren grew louder. The medical chart looked like the original, which meant Reggie had either broken into a secure location inside Georgia Tech, a state institution that took federal dollars, or he had paid someone working in the office to steal the file for him. The list of crimes behind the theft or the receipt of stolen property were almost impossible to calculate.

  And if Leigh used the ill-gotten gains, she could be setting herself up as a co-conspirator.

  She straightened the pen against the edge of her notepad. “This is not A Few Good Men. The Jack Nicholson moment you and Reggie are looking for could turn the jury completely against me. They’ll think I’m a raging bitch.”

  “And?”

  “And,” Leigh said. “You need to understand that when I am in the courtroom, I am you. Whatever comes out of my mouth, however I behave, whatever tone I set, helps the jury form their opinion of what kind of man you really are.”

  “So, you go after Tammy, and I stand up and order you to stop,” Andrew said. “That way you tear down her credibility and I look like a hero.”

  Leigh wanted that to happen more than Andrew realized. The judge would probably declare a mistrial and Leigh could get kicked off the case.

  Andrew asked, “Is that a good strategy?”

  He was testing her again. He could go back to Cole Bradley and ask him to weigh in, and then Leigh wouldn’t just be dealing with an enraged psychopath. She would be looking for a job.

  She said, “It’s a strategy.”

  Andrew was smiling without the smirk. He was telling Leigh that he knew what she was trying to do, but he didn’t care.

  She felt her heart skip.

  Why didn’t he care? Was Andrew holding back something even more horrifying than stealing Tammy Karlsen’s most intimate therapy moments? Did he have a strategy that Leigh could not divine? Cole Bradley’s Netflix Detective warning came back to her.

  Peeping Tom turns into rapist. Rapist turns into murderer.

  Andrew’s smile had intensified. It was the first time since she’d met him that he truly seemed to be enjoying himself.

  Leigh broke contact before her fight or flight sent her running out of the building. She looked down at her notepad. She turned to a fresh page. She had to clear her throat again before she could speak. “We should—”

  Reggie chose this moment to return. His footsteps dragged as he placed the steaming cup of coffee in front of Andrew. He sat back heavily in the chair. “What did I miss?”

  “Nuance.” Andrew took a sip from the cup. He grimaced. “Damn, that’s hot.”

  “It’s coffee,” Reggie said, absently checking his phone.

  “I hate when I burn my mouth like that.” Andrew was looking directly at Leigh again, making sure she knew that his words were meant for her. “And then you put on your mask, and it feels like you can’t catch your breath.”

  “Hate that.” Reggie wasn’t paying attention, but Leigh was.

  She felt like she was caught in a tractor beam. Andrew was doing the same thing he had done the day before, luring her into his sights, gently pressing at Leigh’s weak points until he found a way to break her.

  “I’ll tell you what it feels like,” Andrew said. “Like—what’s that kitchen stuff called? Is it plastic film? Cling film?”

  Leigh’s breath abruptly stopped.

  “Do you ever get that feeling?” Andrew asked. “Like somebody took out a roll of cling film from the kitchen drawer and wrapped it around your face six times?”

  Vomit rushed into her mouth. Leigh clamped her jaw tight. She tasted the bitter remnants of lunch. Her hand went to her mouth before she could stop it.

  “Dude,” Reggie said. “That’s a weird way to put it.”

  “It’s horrible,” Andrew said, light playing across his dark, callous eyes.

  Leigh choked the vomit back down. Her stomach pulsed with her heartbeat. This was too much. She couldn’t process it all. She needed to get away, to run, to hide.

  “I—” her voice caught. “I think we have enough for today.”

  Andrew asked, “Are you sure?”

  There was the smirk again. There was the soft but deep voice. He was feeding off Leigh’s terror the same way he had fed off Tammy Karlsen’s.

  The room turned sideways. Leigh was lightheaded. She blinked. The out-of-body sensation took over, sending her soul somewhere into the firmament while her other self performed the menial tasks that would extricate her from his talons. Left hand closing her notepad, right thumb clicking the pen, then stacking together her two phones, standing on trembling legs, turning to leave.

  “Harleigh,” Andrew called.

  With effort, Leigh turned back around.


  His smirk had turned into a pleased grin. “Don’t forget the file.”

  9

  Callie scrolled through Nat Geo, reading about the African crested rat, who rubs against the bark of the poison arrow tree to store lethal poison in the porcupine-like hairs on his back. Dr. Jerry had warned her about the creature as they were counting out the cash drawer at the end of the day. If he noticed there were more crumpled twenties than usual, he didn’t bring it up. He seemed more concerned that Callie never, ever accept an invitation to one of the prickly rodent’s dinner parties.

  She let the phone rest in her lap as she looked out the bus window. Her body ached the way it always ached when her brain was telling her that the two maintenance doses of methadone every day were not enough. She tried to ignore the craving, focusing instead on the sun as it flashed through the tops of passing trees. The taste of rain was in the air. Binx would want to cuddle. Dr. Jerry had persuaded Callie to take one of the twenties as a bonus. She could give it to Phil as down payment on next week’s rent and possibly something to eat for dinner, or she could get off at the next stop, head back to Stewart Avenue and buy a quantity of heroin that would have Janis Joplin clutching her pearls.

  The bus wheezed to a slow stop for a red light. Callie turned in her seat, looking through the back window. Then she looked at the vehicles lined up beside the bus.

  Only a handful of white dudes, but none driving a nice car.

  After sneaking out of her mother’s house this morning, Callie had taken two different bus routes to Dr. Jerry’s. Then she had gotten off early and walked down the long, straight road to the clinic so that she could make sure no one was following her. Even with that, she couldn’t shake the sensation that she was going to turn around and see the camera’s unblinking eye tracking her every move.

  Now, she ran through the mantra that had helped her get through the day: No one was watching her. No one had taken photos of her through the plate-glass windows that fronted the vet clinic. No camera-strangling man from the boarded-up house was waiting for her back at Phil’s.

  Reggie.

  Callie should use the name of Andrew’s private detective, at least in her head. She should also tell Leigh about him, maybe turn it into a funny story about Phil streaking across the road with her baseball bat and scaring the shit out of him, but the thought of texting her sister, of giving her a point of return contact, felt burdensome.

  As much as Callie enjoyed having Leigh back in her life, there was always the downside of seeing her own miserable existence through her sister’s eyes. Was Callie eating enough? Was she doing too much dope? Why was she so thin? Why was she breathing so hard? Was she in trouble again? Did she need money? Was this too much money? Where had she been all day?

  Well, after I unleashed Mom on my stalker, I sneaked out through the backyard, caught the bus, then I trafficked narcotics on Stewart Avenue, then I passed the proceeds on to Dr. Jerry, then I went to a tanning salon so I could shoot up in the privacy of a small, windowless space instead of going home to my depressing childhood bedroom where a telephoto lens could capture me jamming a needle into my leg again.

  Callie rubbed her thigh. A painful bump pressed back against her fingers. She could feel the heat of an abscess festering inside her femoral vein.

  Technically, methadone was designed to pass through the digestive system. The take-home syringes they used at the clinic were needle-less because owners were incapable of helping their pets maintain a healthy weight; very few of them were going to jam a needle into their beloved fluff.

  Oral medications took longer to hit the system, which was why the usual burst of euphoria was delayed. Injecting it directly into your veins was shitifyingly stupid. The oral suspension contained glycerin and flavoring and coloring and sorbitol, all of which easily broke down in your stomach. Pushing it into your bloodstream could result in particles traveling straight into your lungs and heart or a clog developing at the site of the injection, which resulted in the very type of nasty abscess Callie could feel growing under her fingertips.

  Stupid junkie.

  The only thing Callie could do was wait for it to get large enough to drain and steal some antibiotics from the drug locker. Then she could steal some more methadone and inject more methadone and get another abscess that had to be drained because what was her life if not a series of drastically bad choices?

  The issue was that most IV drug users weren’t only addicted to the drug. They were addicted to the process of shooting the drug. It was called a needle fixation, and Callie was so fixated on the needle that even now, her fingertips pressing at what was likely to become a raging infection, all she could think about was how good it would feel when the needle pierced the abscess on its way into her femoral vein again.

  Why this made her think of Leigh again was something for her biographers to decipher. Callie tightened her fingers around the phone in her hand. She should call her sister. She should let her know that she was okay.

  But, was she really okay?

  Callie had made the mistake of looking at her entire naked self in the mirror inside the tanning salon. In the blue glow of the ultraviolet bulbs, her ribs had stood out like whalebone on a corset. She could see the joint in her elbows where the radius and ulna plugged into the humerus. Her hips looked as if someone had clipped her legs to a clothes hanger meant for trousers. There were red, purple, and blue tracks on her arms, belly, legs. Broken needle tips that had been surgically removed. Old abscesses. The new one starting in her leg. Scars she had made, scars that had been made upon her. A pinkish bump in her neck where the Grady doctors had inserted a central line directly into her jugular in order to deliver the medications to treat her Covid.

  Callie reached up and lightly traced her finger along the tiny scar. She had been severely dehydrated when Leigh had brought her to the emergency room. Her kidneys and liver were shutting down. Her veins were blown from almost two decades of abuse. Callie was generally a master at blocking out most of the unpleasant moments of her life, but she could easily recall shivering uncontrollably in the hospital bed, breathing through the tube shoved down her throat, and the spacesuit-clad nurse gasping at the state of Callie’s ravaged body when she’d come to change the sheets.

  There were all kinds of postings on the Covid message boards about what it felt like to be intubated, alone, isolated in the ICU while the world raged on, mindless to your suffering and in some cases denying that it even existed. Most people talked about ghostly visits from long-dead relatives or getting maddening songs like “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” stuck inside their heads, but, for Callie, it was one moment that had stayed with her for almost the entire two weeks—

  Tap-tap-tap.

  Trevor’s grubby little fingers menacing the nervous blennies.

  Trev, are you tapping on the aquarium like I told you not to?

  No, ma’am.

  The bus gave off another low hiss, slithering to another stop. Callie watched passengers getting off and on. She allowed herself a brief moment to think about the man Trevor Waleski had grown into. Callie had met her share of rapists. Hell, she’d fallen in love with one before she was out of middle school. From what Leigh had said, Andrew was not big and obnoxious like his father. You could see that much from his website photo. There was none of the stalking, angry gorilla in Buddy’s only child. Andrew sounded more like a stargazer, a fish that buried itself in the sand in order to ambush unsuspecting prey. As Dr. Jerry would say, their spiteful reputations were rightfully earned. They had venomous spines to poison their prey. Some had weird, electrified eyeballs that could shock an unsuspecting invertebrate on the ocean floor.

  Leigh had certainly been shocked last night. Andrew had scared the shit out of her during the meeting with Reggie Paltz. Callie knew exactly what her sister meant by the cold, dead look in his eyes. When Andrew was a kid, Callie had seen flashes of his burgeoning psychopathy, but of course Andrew’s transgressions had been in the order of snack-stealing
and pinching Callie’s arm while she was trying to fix dinner, not being accused of sadistically raping a woman and slicing her leg the same way that Callie had sliced Buddy’s.

  She shivered as the bus revved away from the curb. Callie forced her thoughts away from Andrew’s current crimes and put her focus squarely back on Leigh.

  It was painful to watch her big sister flounder around, because Callie knew the worst part for Leigh was feeling like she had no control. Everything in her sister’s life was kept neatly sectioned off. Maddy and Walter and Callie. Her job. Her clients. Her work friends. Whoever she was screwing on the side. Any time there was an intermingling, Leigh lost her mind. Her burn-the-motherfucker-down instinct was never stronger than when she felt vulnerable. Aside from Callie, the only other person who could talk her off the ledge was Walter.

  Poor Walter.

  Callie loved Leigh’s husband almost as much as her sister did. He was much tougher than he looked. Walter had been the one to end their marriage, not the other way around. There was only a certain number of times you could watch someone set themselves ablaze before you stepped away. Callie assumed that growing up with two drunks for parents had taught Walter to choose his battles. This made him particularly understanding of Callie’s situation. It made him even more understanding of Leigh’s.

  If Callie had a needle fixation, Leigh had a chaos fixation. Her big sister longed for the calm normalcy of life with Walter and Maddy, but every time she reached a certain level of tranquility, she found a way to blow it up.

  Over the years, Callie had watched the pattern play out dozens of times. It started back in elementary school when Leigh was in line for a spot at the magnet school and ended up losing her slot because she had gone after a girl who’d teased Callie about her hair.