False Witness

by Karin Slaughter

  She asked, “What happened, Leigh? Why are you here?”

  “To—” Leigh laughed, because she seemed to realize that what she was about to say was stupid, but she said it anyway. “To see my sister.”

  Callie wanted to keep twisting the chains the way she used to, spinning up in one direction, then down in another, until she got so dizzy that she had to stagger to the seesaw to find her bearings.

  She asked Leigh, “Do you think the word seesaw is because you see someone when they’re up, and then you saw them when—”

  “Cal,” Leigh said. “Andrew knows how I killed Buddy.”

  Callie gripped the cold chains tight in her hands.

  “We were in the conference room going over his case,” Leigh said. “He told me that his mask made it hard to breathe. He said it was like someone wrapped cling film around his head six times.”

  Callie felt shock freeze its way through her body. “Is that how many—”

  “Yes.”

  “But—” Callie ran back through the tiny snippets she could remember from the night Buddy had died. “Andrew was asleep, Harleigh. We kept going back into his room. He was drugged out of his mind.”

  “I missed something,” Leigh said, always eager to take the blame. “I don’t know how he knows, or what else he knows, but it gives him power over every single part of my life. I control nothing right now. He can do what he likes, force me to do whatever he wants.”

  Callie saw the point of her misery. “What does he want you to do?”

  Leigh looked down at the ground. Callie was used to seeing her sister angry or annoyed, but never ashamed.

  “Harleigh?”

  “Tammy Karlsen, the victim. Reggie stole her patient chart from Tech’s student mental health services. She attended one session a week for almost two years. There’s all kinds of personal details in it. Stuff that she wouldn’t want anyone to know.” Leigh let out a long, pained breath. “Andrew wants me to use the personal information to break her on the stand.”

  Callie thought about her own medical charts scattered across so many different rehab centers and psych units. Had Reggie looked for those, too? She had never said anything about the murder, but there were things in those notes that she wouldn’t want anyone reading.

  Especially her sister.

  Leigh said, “He’s looking for a moment, like in a movie, where Tammy breaks down and—I don’t know—gives up? It’s like he wants to watch her being assaulted again.”

  Callie didn’t ask Leigh whether or not she was capable of making this moment happen. She could tell by her sister’s demeanor that her legal brain had already developed a blueprint. “What’s in her medical chart?”

  Leigh pressed together her lips. “Tammy was raped in high school. She got pregnant, got an abortion. She never told anybody but, after, she became isolated. She lost her friends. She started cutting herself. Then drinking to excess. Then she developed an eating disorder.”

  “Did no one tell her about heroin?”

  Leigh shook her head. She wasn’t in the mood for dark humor. “A professor noticed some of the warning signs. He sent Tammy to student mental health. She got therapy, and it really turned her life around. You can see it in the chart. She was a total mess, but then, slowly, she started to get better. She took control of her life. She graduated with honors. She has—had—a good life. She made that for herself. She crawled out of that pit and made it.”

  Callie wondered if Leigh was asking why Callie hadn’t been able to pull herself out of a similar tailspin. There were too many if onlys behind that question—If only the social workers had taken them away from Phil. If only Linda had been their mother. If only Leigh had known that Buddy was a pedophile. If only Callie hadn’t broken her neck and ended up a stupid fucking junkie.

  “I—” Leigh looked up at the sky. She had started crying. “My clients are never good people, but I usually like them. Even the assholes. Especially the assholes. I understand how you can make bad choices. How you can get angry and do bad things. Terrible things.”

  Callie didn’t need clarification on the terrible things.

  “Andrew’s not afraid of being convicted,” Leigh said. “He’s never been scared, not since the moment I met him. Which means he’s got a way out of this.”

  Callie knew the best way out for Tammy. She had considered the option for herself often enough.

  Leigh said, “It was one thing when I felt like it was just me who could get in trouble. I did a bad thing. I should’ve gone to prison. That’s fair. But Tammy is innocent.”

  Callie watched her kick at the dirt. This defeated woman was not the sister she had grown up with. Leigh never gave up on anything. If you came at her with a knife, she came back at you with a bazooka. “So what’s next?”

  “What’s next is this is getting too dangerous. I want you to get your things, pack up your cat, and I’ll drive you somewhere safe.” Leigh caught her eye. “Andrew already has me under his thumb. It’s just a matter of time before he comes after you.”

  This would’ve been a really good time to tell Leigh about the man in the boarded-up house, but Callie needed her sister to focus, not spin off into a paranoid vortex.

  She said, “If you want to measure the height of a mountain, the hardest part isn’t finding the peak, it’s figuring out where the bottom starts.”

  Leigh gave her a confused look. “Did you get that off a fortune cookie?”

  Callie was fairly certain she had stolen it from an eel historian. “What’s the rock-bottom question about Andrew that we can’t answer?”

  “Oh,” Leigh seemed to understand. “I thought of it as the Andrew Hypothesis, but I couldn’t figure out the B that connects the A and the C.”

  “I think we should spend the next two hours pinning down the correct terminology.”

  Leigh groaned, but she clearly needed this. “It’s a two-part question. First part: what does Andrew know? Second part: how does he know it?”

  “So, to find the what and the how, begin at the beginning.” Callie rubbed her numb hand, pressing blood into the fingers. She had worked so hard to forget everything about Buddy’s murder, but now she didn’t have a choice but to confront it head-on. “Did I check on Andrew after the fight with Buddy? I mean, before I called you?”

  “Yes,” Leigh said. “That was the first thing I asked you about when I got there, because I was worried there was a witness. You told me that you left Buddy in the kitchen, you went into Andrew’s room and kissed his head, then you called me from the master bedroom. You told me he was completely out of it.”

  Callie mentally walked herself through the Waleskis’ filthy house. She could see herself kissing Andrew on the head, making certain he was really asleep, then heading down the hall to the master bedroom and picking up the pink princess phone by Linda’s side of the bed.

  She told Leigh, “The cord was ripped off the phone in the kitchen. How could I call you from the bedroom?”

  “You hung the receiver back up. I saw it on the wall phone when I got there.”

  That made sense, so Callie believed her. “Was anyone else there? Like, a neighbor who could’ve seen?”

  “When it was happening?” Leigh shook her head. “We would’ve heard about it before now. Especially when Linda came into all of that family money. Someone would’ve approached her about buying the information.”

  She had that right. There was not one person in the entire ’hood who would’ve let the opportunity for a cash payday slip by. “Was there a time when we were both out of the house?”

  “Not until the end when we were loading the trash bags into my car,” Leigh said. “And before that, we backtracked the fight. It took us four hours, and we kept making sure Andrew was asleep every twenty minutes at least.”

  Callie nodded, because she could vividly recall that she had been the one to go into the room each time. Andrew always slept on his side, his tiny body curled into a ball, a clicking sound coming out of his
open mouth.

  “We’re back where we started,” Leigh said. “We still don’t know how much Andrew knows or how he knows it.”

  Callie didn’t need the reminder. “Tell me the list you’ve been going over for the last two days.”

  “We searched for more cameras. We searched for more video cassettes,” Leigh counted off the items on her fingers. “We checked every book on the shelves, turned over the furniture and mattresses, shook the jars and vases, the potted plants. We took everything out of the kitchen cabinets. We unscrewed the grills from all the air vents. You even put your hand inside the aquarium.”

  Leigh had run out of fingers.

  Callie asked, “Maybe Andrew was pretending to be asleep? He could’ve heard me in the hallway outside his door. The boards creaked.”

  “He was ten years old,” Leigh said. “Kids that age are ridiculously transparent.”

  “We were kids, too.”

  Leigh was already shaking her head. “Think about how complicated the cover-up would have to be. Andrew would have to pretend he hadn’t seen his father murdered. Then keep pretending when Linda got home from work the next morning. Then lie to the cops. Then lie to whoever asked him about the last time he’d seen his father. Then keep the secret from you for a month while you were still babysitting him. Then keep the secret for all these years.”

  “He’s a psychopath.”

  “Sure, but he was still a baby,” Leigh said. “Cognitively, even smart ten-year-olds are a mess. They try to act like adults, but they still make kid mistakes. They lose stuff all the time—jackets, shoes, books. They can barely be trusted to bathe themselves. They tell stupid lies you can see straight through. There’s no way even a ten-year-old psychopath could pull off that level of deceit.”

  If anyone knew how bad a liar Andrew had been at ten, it was Callie at fourteen. “What about Andrew’s girlfriend?”

  “Sidney Winslow,” Leigh provided. “Yesterday at Reggie’s office, I gave Andrew my little speech on the exceptions to spousal privilege. He looked like he was going to shit himself. He made Sidney wait in the parking lot. She pitched a fit. He knows he can’t trust her.”

  “Which means he probably hasn’t shared anything about how his father really died.” Callie asked, “Do you think we could use her to get to him?”

  “She’s definitely a weak link,” Leigh said. “If you take it on faith that Andrew was planning to screw with me during that first meeting with Reggie Paltz, the thing that sidetracked him was Sidney.”

  “What do you know about her?”

  “Not a damn thing,” Leigh said. “I found a credit check that the previous lawyer had Reggie do last fall. No outstanding debt. Nothing suspicious or damning, but the report is very superficial. Normally, when I want a deep dive on a witness, I assign an investigator to ask questions and follow them around, check all social media, look into where they work, but my boss made Reggie the exclusive investigator on the case. If I hire another one, Andrew or Linda or my boss will see the charges on my billing and ask for an explanation.”

  “Can’t you pay somebody out of your own pocket?”

  “I’d have to use my credit card or checking account, both of which would leave a trail. And all the investigators I know are already working for the firm, so that would get out almost immediately. And then I’d have to explain why I was doing it privately instead of through the firm, and then that gets me back to Andrew finding out.” Leigh anticipated the alternative. “You can’t use Phil’s computer for something like this. It’s not looking up a deed.”

  “The cameras at the downtown library have been broken for the last year. I’ll use one of the public computers.” Callie shrugged. “Just me and the other junkies wasting time in the air conditioning.”

  Leigh cleared her throat. She hated Callie calling herself a junkie almost as much as she hated the fact that Callie was a junkie. “Make sure the cameras are still broken. I don’t want you to take any risks.”

  Callie watched Leigh wipe away her tears.

  Leigh said, “We still haven’t found the B.”

  “You mean the rock-bottom.” Callie watched her sister’s eyes roll. She repeated the two questions. “What does Andrew know? How does he know?”

  “And what’s he going to do with the information?” Leigh added. “He’s not going to stop with Tammy. That’s for damn sure. He’s like a shark that keeps moving forward.”

  “You’re giving him too much power,” Callie said. “You’re always telling me that nobody is a criminal mastermind. They get lucky. They don’t get caught with their hand in the cookie jar. They don’t brag about stealing cookies. It’s not like Andrew had a secret army of drones in the sky when he was ten years old. Obviously, he—”

  Leigh stood up. Her mouth opened, then closed. She looked out in the street. She turned back to Callie. “Let’s go.”

  Callie didn’t ask where. She could tell by the look on her sister’s face that Leigh had thought of something. All Callie could do was try to keep up as she followed her sister out of the park.

  Her lungs were not prepared for the brisk pace. Callie was breathless by the time they reached the road that looped back to Phil’s. Except Leigh didn’t take the left. She kept going straight, which would lead them past the Waleskis’ mustard-colored house again. The route added no more than three minutes. Callie knew because she had walked both many times before. There had been no streetlights back then, just the dark silence and the understanding that she had to wash off what had just happened before she could go to bed in her mother’s house.

  “Keep up,” Leigh said.

  Callie struggled to match Leigh’s purposeful stride. Her heart started to thump against her ribs. Callie imagined it was like two pieces of flint striking against each other until the spark ignited and her heart was on fire because they weren’t just going to walk past the Waleskis’ house. Leigh turned left, heading up their driveway.

  Callie followed her until her feet refused to take another step. She stood at the edge of the faded oil stain where Buddy used to park his rusted-out yellow Corvette.

  “Calliope.” Leigh had turned around, hands on her hips, already annoyed. “We’re doing this, so suck it up and stick close to me.”

  Her sister’s bossy tone was the exact same as the one she had used the night they had chopped up Buddy Waleski. Get his toolbox out of the car. Go to the shed and find the machete. Bring the gas can. Where’s the bleach? How many rags can we use without Linda noticing they’re gone?

  Leigh turned and disappeared into the black hole of the carport.

  Callie reluctantly followed, blinking her eyes to help them adjust. She could see shadows, an outline of her sister standing at the door that led into the kitchen.

  Leigh reached up, using her bare hands to pry back the slab of plywood nailed over the opening. The wood was so old it splintered. Leigh didn’t stop. She grabbed at the jagged edge and pulled until there was a wide enough space for her to reach the doorknob.

  The kitchen door swung open.

  Callie was expecting the familiar damp, musty odor but the stench of meth filled the air.

  “Christ.” Leigh covered her nose to fight the ammonia smell. “Cats must’ve gotten into the house.”

  Callie didn’t correct her. She hugged her arms to her waist. Somewhere in her head, she knew why Leigh wanted to be here, but she imagined that revelation being folded into a triangle, and then into the shape of a kite, and eventually transforming into an origami swan gliding toward the inaccessible currents deep within her memories.

  “Let’s go.” Leigh stepped over the plywood hurdle and, like that, she was inside the Waleskis’ kitchen for the first time in twenty-three years.

  If it bothered her, Leigh didn’t say. She held out her hand to Callie, waiting.

  Callie didn’t take her hand. Her knees wanted to buckle. Tears wept from her eyes. She couldn’t see into the dark room but she heard the loud pop of Buddy opening the kitchen
door. The hack of a wet cough. The slap of his briefcase on the counter. The bang of a chair being kicked under the table. The ping of cookie crumbs dropping from his mouth, because everywhere Buddy went there was noise, noise, noise.

  Callie blinked again. Leigh was snapping her fingers in front of her face.

  “Cal,” Leigh said. “You were able to stay with Andrew in this house and pretend for an entire month that nothing happened. You can pretend for another ten minutes.”

  Callie had only been able to pretend because she’d siphoned off alcohol from the bottles behind the bar.

  Leigh said, “Calliope, sac the hell up.”

  Her voice was hard, but Callie could hear that she was starting to crack. The house was getting to Leigh. This was the first time her sister had returned to the scene of their crimes. She wasn’t ordering Callie so much as begging her to please, for the love of God, help her get through this.

  That was how it worked. Only one of them could fall apart at a time.

  Callie grabbed onto Leigh’s hand. She started to raise her leg but, the second she was clear of the splintered plywood, Leigh yanked hard enough to pull her inside.

  Callie stumbled into her sister. She felt her neck crack. She tasted blood where she’d bitten down on her tongue.

  Leigh asked, “Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” Callie said, because anything that hurt her now could be chased away by the needle later. “Tell me what to do.”

  Leigh took out two phones, one from each of her back pockets. She turned on the flashlight apps. The beams caught the tired linoleum. Four deep indentations showed where the legs of the Waleskis’ kitchen table had been. Callie stared at the divots until she felt her face pressing into the table while Buddy stood behind her.

  Doll you gotta stop squirming I need you to stop so I can—

  “Cal?” Leigh was holding out one of the phones.

  Callie took it, shining the light around the kitchen. No table and chairs, no blender and toaster. The cabinet doors were hanging off. Pipes were missing under the sink. The outlets were stripped out where someone had stolen the electrical wiring for the copper.