False Witness

by Karin Slaughter

  And it was the most likely location that Andrew would store the video tape of Buddy’s murder.

  Callie pressed down on her torn fingernail, the pain bringing her back to reality. She wasn’t here to party. Sidney was young and innocent, but so was Maddy. Only one of them had a rapist psychopath in their lives. Callie was going to keep it that way.

  Sidney swung the car around the back of the house. The BMW screeched to a stop in front of an industrial-looking glass garage door. Sidney pressed a button on the bottom of the rearview mirror. She told Callie, “Don’t worry, he’s tied up all day.”

  He was one of the ways she referred to Andrew. She called him my stupid boyfriend or my idiot husband, but she had never used his name.

  The car lurched into the garage, nearly hitting the back wall.

  “Fuck!” Sidney yelled, jumping out of the car. “Let’s get this party started!”

  Callie reached over and pressed the button to turn off the engine. Sidney had left the keys in the cupholder along with her phone and her wallet. Callie looked around the garage, searching for a hiding place for a video tape, but the space was a clean white box. Even the floor was spotless.

  “Do you swim?” Sidney was reaching under her shirt to take off her bra. “I’ve got an extra suit that’ll fit you.”

  Callie had a moment of darkness as she thought about the scars and track marks underneath her long-sleeved shirt and jeans. “It’s too hot for me, but I love to watch.”

  “I bet you do.” Sidney slid out her bra through her sleeve. She fumbled with the buttons on her shirt, opening up a V-shaped view of her cleavage. “Fuck it, you’re right. Let’s just get wasted in the air conditioning.”

  Callie watched her disappear into the house. Her knee caught as she got out of the car. She tried to register the pain, but her nerves were dulled by the chemicals coursing through her body. She had been careful at the restaurant, making sure she didn’t let herself get too out of hand. The problem was that she really, really wanted to let things get out of hand. The receptors in her brain hadn’t been on stimulants in such a long time that it felt like every second a new one was popping awake, begging for more.

  She found another Xanax in her purse to bring her down a notch.

  Andrew’s house beckoned her inside. Sidney had left her bra and shoes on the floor. Callie looked at her Doc Martens but the only way the boots would come off was if she got on the floor and pulled. She made her way up a long, white hallway. The temperature dropped like she was walking into a museum. No rugs. Stark white walls and ceiling. White fixtures. Black and white art showing extremely sexy women posed in artistic states of bondage.

  Callie was so used to hearing gurgling aquarium filters that she didn’t register the sound until she was in the main part of the house. The view was meant to showcase the backyard but Callie ignored it. An entire wall had been dedicated to a magnificent reef aquarium. Soft and hard coral. Anemones. Sea urchins. Starfish. Lionfish. French angelfish. Harlequin tuskfish. Lipstick tangs.

  Sidney was close beside her, shoulders touching. “It’s beautiful, right?”

  All Callie wanted in the world right now was to sit on the couch, take a fistful of Oxy and watch the colorful creatures float around until she either fell asleep or met Kurt Cobain. “Is your husband a dentist?”

  Sidney gave one of her husky laughs. “Car salesman.”

  “Fuck me.” Callie forced herself to look around the giant living room, which had an Apple Store meets Soviet Union aesthete. White leather couches. White leather chairs. Steel and glass coffee and side tables. Floor lamps dipping their white metal heads like leprotic cranes. The television was a giant black rectangle on the wall. None of the components were showing.

  Callie joked, “Maybe I should start selling cars.”

  “Fuck, Max, I’d buy anything you were selling.”

  Callie hadn’t gotten used to being called by her fake name. She took a moment to recalibrate. “Why pay when they’re giving it away?”

  Sidney laughed again, nodding for Callie to follow her into the kitchen.

  Callie kept her pace slow, listening for the hum of electronics that would supply the television. There were no bookshelves, no storage bins, no obvious hiding places for a VCR, let alone a video tape. Even the doors were obscured, nothing but a thin black outline indicating they existed. She had no idea how they opened without doorknobs.

  “His mom controls the money.” Sidney was in the kitchen washing her hands at the bar sink. They had both left their masks back at the restaurant. “She’s such a fucking bitch. She controls everything. The house isn’t even in his name. She gave him a fucking allowance to furnish it. Even told him which stores he was allowed to go to.”

  Callie felt her teeth ache at the sight of the ultra-modern kitchen. White marble countertops, high-gloss white cabinets. Even the stove was white. “I guess she’s already gone through menopause.”

  Sidney didn’t get the period joke, which was fair. She had a small remote control in her hand. She pressed a button, and music filled the room. Callie had expected more pounding n-words, not Ed Sheeran crooning about being love drunk.

  Another button was pressed. The lights were lowered, softening the room. Sidney winked at her, asking, “Scotch, beer, tequila, rum, vodka, absinthe?”

  “Tequila.” Callie sat down on one of the torturous, low-backed bar stools. The romantic ambience had thrown her, so she pretended it hadn’t happened. “You wouldn’t be the first wife who didn’t get along with her mother-in-law.”

  “I fucking hate her.” Sidney hinged open one of the upper cabinets. The alcohol bottles were all evenly spaced, labels out, in keeping with serial killer fashion. She grabbed a beautiful-looking amber bottle. “The week before the wedding, she offered me a hundred K to back out.”

  “That’s a lot of money.”

  Sidney waved her arms around the house. “Bitch, please.”

  Callie laughed. She had to hand it to Sidney for gaming the system. Why take a quick payday when she could milk the Tenant cash cow for as long as she stayed married to Andrew? Especially with the looming prospect of prison in Andrew’s future. It wasn’t a bad gamble.

  “He’s such a fucking sycophant around his mother,” Sidney confided. “Like, with me, he’s all, like, I hate that fucking cunt I wish she’d die already. But then she walks into the room and he turns into this idiot mama’s boy.”

  Callie felt a pang of sadness. The one thing she had accepted as gospel when she was babysitting Andrew was that Linda had loved her son unconditionally. The mother’s entire existence had been built around keeping him safe and trying to find a way to make their lives better.

  “It’s smart,” Callie said. “I mean, you don’t wanna piss her off if she’s giving you all of this.”

  “It’s his anyway.” Sidney used her teeth to open the plastic seal on the bottle. Don Julio Añejo, a sipping tequila. “Once the old bitch dies, he’s going to make some changes. She’s doing all this stupid shit like the internet never happened. It was his idea to go virtual when the pandemic hit.”

  Callie gathered that a lot of people had gotten the brilliant idea to go virtual when the pandemic hit. “Wow.”

  “Yeah,” Sidney said. “You want margaritas or straight?”

  Callie grinned. “Both?”

  Sidney laughed as she leaned down to find the blender. Her ass went out again. The girl was a walking soft porn photo shoot. “I swear to God, I am so fucking happy I ran into you. I was supposed to go to work today, but fuck that.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “I answer phones at the dealership, but that’s just so my parents will stop nagging me about spending the rest of my life in college. That’s how I met Andy.” If she realized this was the first time she’d actually said his name, Sidney didn’t show it. “We work at the same dealership.”

  “Andy?” Callie said. “Sounds like a mama’s boy.”

  “Right?” Sidney pushed on
e of the cabinet fronts. The door popped open. She scooped up shot and margarita glasses with the expertise of a bartender. Callie watched her move. She really was extraordinary. She had to wonder what the woman saw in Andrew. It had to be more than money.

  Sidney plopped the glasses down on the counter. “I know you’re here for an interview, but what are you doing for work?”

  Callie shrugged. “Nothing, really. My husband left me with enough money, but I know what happens when I have too much free time.”

  “Speaking of which.” Sidney filled two shot glasses to the rim.

  Callie held hers up in a toast, then took a sip while Sidney knocked hers back, which was something you could do when your neck wasn’t frozen at the base of your skull. She watched Sidney fill another shot. She was going for a third when Callie put her glass down for a refill.

  “Oh fuck.” Sidney seemed to remember something. She pushed open another cabinet and found a round wooden container. She placed it on the counter, knocking off the lid. Then she licked her finger and stuck it inside to pull up tiny crystals of black salt. She wagged her eyebrows as she sucked it off the tip of her finger.

  Their eyes met, and Callie forced herself to pull away. “I can’t remember the last time I saw a salt cellar.”

  “Is that what it’s called?” Sidney went back to work. She pressed her hand against another cabinet front, but this time a long handle popped out. She opened the fridge door. “It was a wedding gift from one of Linda’s rich bitch friends. I looked it up online. Hand-carved Kenyan wood, whatever that is. Fucking thing cost three hundred dollars.”

  Callie weighed the cellar in her palm. The salt was obsidian black and smelled faintly of charcoal. “What is this?”

  “I dunno, some expensive shit from Hawaii. Costs more by weight than coke.” She turned, holding six limes between her hands. “Shit, I’d kill for some coke.”

  Callie wasn’t going to disappoint. She reached into her purse and flashed two eight-balls.

  “Fuck me.” Sidney snatched one of the baggies away. She held it up to the light. She was looking for the sparkly flakes that indicated purity, which put her up there with the professional coke users. “Damn, this looks lethal.”

  Callie wondered if that would be the case. Sidney was already buzzing on enough stims to take down a wildebeest. You didn’t get that kind of tolerance from recreational use.

  As if to prove the point, Sidney opened a drawer and took out a small mirror with a razor blade on top and a four-inch gold-plated straw that was either intended to aid particularly wealthy toddlers in the consumption of juice or for spoiled rich assholes to snort coke.

  Callie tested the waters. “You ever inject it?”

  For the first time, Sidney looked guarded. “Shit man, that’s a whole ’nother level.”

  “Forget I asked.” Callie opened the plastic bag and shook the pure white powder onto the mirror. “How long did you two know each other before you got married?”

  “Uh … I think it was two years ago?” Sidney was watching the coke with a hungry eye. Maybe her life was already on the downslope after all. “He’s got this jag-off friend, Reggie. He’d come into the dealership like he owned the place. He was always hitting on me but come on.”

  Callie knew what she meant. Sidney wasn’t going to waste her beauty and youth on a man who couldn’t afford it.

  “And then Andrew came up to me one day and we started talking, and I was like, what a surprise this guy’s not a total douche. Which, considering Reggie, was like a fucking miracle.”

  Callie made a show of chopping the blade through the white powder. She listened as Sidney droned on about Reggie—how he was always leering at her, how he was basically Andrew’s lapdog, but her eyes stayed on the razor blade the same hungry way Sidney’s were.

  If a scientist had been tasked with developing a drug that would make people waste all of their money, cocaine was what they would’ve come up with. The high lasted about fifteen to twenty minutes, and you could spend the rest of your miserable life chasing that first rush because it was never going to be better than the first big, beautiful hit. The joke was that two people could do a trailer load of coke between them and, when they were done, they’d both agree that all it would take was one more trailer load to get them high.

  Which was why Callie had laced the coke with fentanyl.

  She cut out four lines, asking Sidney, “So, how’d he ask you out?”

  “He caught me reading one of my psych books for school, and we started talking, and, unlike ninety-nine percent of the fucking mansplainers who try to educate me about what I’ve been studying for, like, six years, he actually knew what he was talking about.” The woman’s gaze had not left Callie’s hand, but now, she pulled herself away. More cabinets were opened. A small marble cutting board came out. She found a ceramic bowl for the limes. “Then he started flirting with me, keeping me from answering the phones, and I was, like, Dude, you’re going to get me fired. And he was like, Dude, I’m going to fire you if you don’t go out with me.”

  Callie gathered that was the official definition of workplace harassment, but she said, “I like a man who knows what he wants.”

  Sidney opened another drawer. “You like that in a woman, too?”

  Callie’s mouth opened to answer, but then she saw what Sidney took out of the drawer.

  The razor blade slipped through Callie’s fingers, screeching across the small mirror.

  Cracked wooden handle. Serrated blade bent three different ways. The steak knife looked like something Linda had bought at the grocery store. Callie had used it to cut Andrew’s hot dog into pieces. Then she had used it to slice open Buddy’s leg.

  “Max?” Sidney asked.

  Callie searched for her voice. The sound of her own heartbeat was overwhelming, drowning out the soft music, muffling Sidney’s deep voice. “That—that’s a pretty cheap wedding gift.”

  Sidney looked at the knife. “Yeah, Andy gets pissed off when I use it, like he couldn’t go out and buy fifty more. He stole it from his babysitter or something. I don’t know the story. He’s so weird about it.”

  Callie watched the blade cut through one of the limes. Her lungs felt shaky. “He’s got a babysitter fetish?”

  “Girl,” Sidney said. “He’s got an everything fetish.”

  Callie felt a pinch of pain in her thumb. The razor had shaved off a thin layer of skin. Blood trickled down her wrist. She had come here with a plan, but the sight of the knife had taken her back to the Waleskis’ kitchen.

  Baby, you gotta c-call an ambulance, baby. Call an—

  Callie picked up the straw. She leaned down. She snorted up all four lines in quick succession.

  She sat back up, eyes watering, heart tripping, ears buzzing, bones shaking.

  “Fuck.” Sidney wasn’t going to be left out. She dumped the second eight-ball onto the mirror. She cut out the lines quickly, so eager to join the fun that she skipped the ass-pushing-out and the wink and hoovered up four lines herself. “Jesus! Fucking! Christ!”

  Callie gummed the residue. She could taste the fentanyl like a hidden message to her body.

  “Yes!” Sidney yelled, dancing around the kitchen. She disappeared into the living room, screaming, “Fuck yes!”

  Callie felt her eyes wanting to roll back in her head. Sidney had left the knife on the counter. Callie saw herself in the Waleskis’ kitchen, soaking the handle in bleach, picking around the crevices with a toothpick. Her fingers went to her throat. She could feel her heart pushing its way up toward her mouth. The coke was settling in, the fentanyl chasing its tail. What the fuck had she been thinking? The videos were here. Sidney was here. Andrew was in court but he would get out and then what would he do? What did he have planned for Maddy?

  She found the Xanax in her purse and popped three before Sidney came back into the kitchen.

  “Maxie, come look at the fish,” she said, taking Callie’s hand, pulling her into the living room.

&
nbsp; The music got louder. The lights got lower. Sidney dropped the remote on the coffee table as she tugged Callie down to the couch.

  Callie sank back into the soft cushions. The couch was so deep that her feet would not touch the ground. She curled up her legs, resting her arm on a pile of pillows. How the hell she recognized Michael Bublé on the speakers was a fascinating puzzle until she saw a lionfish scuttle behind a rock, the multiple spikes showing off red and black bands. The venomous fin rays made the fish one of the most dangerous predators in the ocean, but it only used the weapon defensively. The other fish were safe so long as they were too big to fit into the lionfish’s gawping tunnel of a mouth.

  “Max?” Sidney asked, her voice low and sultry. She played with Callie’s hair, her fingernails gently scratching the scalp.

  Callie felt a distant trill from the sensation, but she could not break her concentration away from a short-nosed unicorn fish flitting past a startled-looking starfish. Then the tang joined the party. Then the seagrass started to wave its slim fingers in her direction. There was no telling how long Callie sat there watching the colorful parade, but she could tell by the dulling colors that the Xanax was finally taking her down a notch.

  “Max?” Sidney repeated. “You want to shoot me up?”

  Callie’s attention strayed from the aquarium. Sidney was leaning against her, fingers still stroking through Callie’s hair. Her pupils were blown wide open. Her lips were lush and wet. She was so fucking ripe.

  Callie had syringes in her purse. A tie-off. Lighter. Cotton. This was what she’d planned, to talk Sidney into more, then a little more, until she was sticking a needle into Sidney’s arm, giving her a taste of the dragon she would chase into a deep, dark well of despair.

  If it didn’t kill her first.

  “Hey there.” Sidney bit her bottom lip. She was so close Callie could taste the tequila on her breath. “Do you know how fucking adorable you are?”

  Callie felt her body respond before her mouth could. She ran her fingers through Sidney’s thick, silky hair. Her skin was unbelievably soft. The color of her eyes reminded Callie of the expensive salt in the hand-carved cellar.