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.