“That could be a mark left from CrossFit or rough sex,” Sarah said. “It doesn’t look like much of anything.”
“There’s got to be a better one.” Julie snatched it from Sarah’s hand, frantically scrolling through her photos, but there were only four or five and none of them proved anything.
“We can testify to what we saw,” I said. “The police will talk to us—we’ll explain it to them.”
“It’s going to be her word against the man she killed,” Sarah said. “It’ll depend on the lawyer she gets, the jury.”
“Jury?” Heather said. She stared at Sarah, seeming not to fully comprehend the situation she was in. “It was self-defense,” she repeated. “I had to kill him.”
“Except you didn’t,” Sarah said bluntly. “You should have called the police, or us, and that’s what they’ll say, that you could have called for help.”
“She was terrified,” I said. “It’s a valid defense.”
“She shot him in the back of the head,” Sarah said. “You know as well as I do that even with strong evidence of abuse they’ll arrest her and charge her with murder.”
“I can’t go to jail!” Heather began screaming. “I can’t go to jail!”
“Shhh!” Sarah hissed. “Someone will hear you!”
“We’ve got to do something,” Julie said above her cries. “We can’t just let them arrest her.”
“We don’t have any other option,” Sarah said.
“We could dump the body somewhere else,” I said, thinking out loud, but Heather stopped midscream, and everyone looked at me.
“Yes, yes,” Julie said, sounding relieved. “That’s what we need to do—just put his body somewhere. They’ll think he was shot by someone else.”
“Where?” Sarah demanded, full of skepticism. “Where on earth would we put him and what about the car? What do we do with that?”
“Carjacking,” I said, thinking of a recent case. “We could make it look like a carjacking.”
“Yes, that’s perfect,” Julie said eagerly, Heather nodding in agreement, but Sarah shook her head.
“There are cameras everywhere,” she said.
“Not on the back roads,” I said. “We could leave him on one of those isolated wooded roads. Nobody’s out this late—not on a weeknight.”
“Including a carjacker,” Sarah said. “Who gets carjacked in the middle of nowhere?”
“He could have been followed off I-279,” Heather said, her hysteria morphing into an eagerness to make this plan—or any plan—work.
Sarah stared at the car, considering. “We’d need to leave the gun with the car, too,” she said after a moment. “We could make it look like the carjacker turned Viktor’s own gun on him.” She turned to Heather. “Is the gun registered to you or to Viktor?”
“Neither of us,” Heather said.
“Then where did you get it?” I asked.
She hesitated, gaze skittering away from mine, but before I could ask again Julie gave a short, sharp cough and said, “From me.”
chapter fourteen
SARAH
Alison and I stared at Julie in stunned silence for what must have been only a few seconds but felt much longer. “You gave her a gun?” I demanded. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“She needed to defend herself,” Julie’s voice rose. “You were the ones who said she needed some self-defense.”
“Yeah, like karate or something, not a gun,” Alison said. “Holy shit!”
“It’s not her fault,” Heather said. “She was trying to help me.”
“That doesn’t make it better—she can be charged as an accessory,” I said, and then to Julie, “I didn’t even know you owned a gun.”
“It’s to keep me safe. For protection when I’m showing houses alone—just in case.”
Alison gave a bitter laugh. “And you’ve just demonstrated why owning a gun isn’t safe. Now we’ve got to dump the gun, too.”
“Won’t Brian notice it’s missing?” I said.
Julie shook her head. “He doesn’t know. Nobody knows I have one.”
“Well, thank God for small favors,” I said.
It was just after two A.M. “We don’t have much time,” Alison said. “If we’re really going to do this, then we need to pick a deserted spot, someplace a carjacking could realistically happen.”
“How about somewhere along Fern Hollow Road?” Julie suggested. “It’s not far off I-279.”
“Yes, there, that’s a good place,” Heather said, eager to go with any plan that didn’t involve prison. “Viktor drives home that way sometimes.”
“They could have followed Viktor off the interstate and waited until he was on that stretch,” Alison said.
“Someone is going to have to drive the car,” I said, “and what do we do with his body in the meantime?”
We all stared at the car. Viktor was over six feet tall and now he was literally dead weight. “Leave him where he is,” Alison said. “We can’t move the body out of the front seat and then put it back—the police will be able to tell. For this to work we have to leave everything as is as much as possible.”
“How can we drive the car with him in it?” Julie said, her voice dipping on the personal pronoun as if she were afraid that uttering Viktor’s name would somehow bring him back.
“What if we covered him with a plastic bag so we didn’t leave any fibers,” Alison said slowly, staring at the car. “And then one of us could perch on the seat in front of him and drive that way.”
She looked at me, Julie and Heather following her gaze. “No way,” I said. “I don’t want to drive the car.”
“You’re the shortest.” Alison used her hands to approximate the available space. “It makes the most sense.”
The thought of having to touch Viktor’s body made me shiver. “Absolutely not.”
“No one else is small enough,” Alison said.
“Just shift the seat back and let her drive,” I said, pointing at Heather. “She’s the one who shot him.”
“She’s not fit to drive and shifting things would be bad,” Alison said. “We don’t want to move anything in the car if at all possible.”
“C’mon, Sarah,” Julie said. “We need you.”
She and Heather gave me pleading looks, while Alison pulled out her phone again. “We don’t have time to argue—if we’re going to do this we have to get going.”
“Fine,” I said, unable to think of another, better way. “But I’m not getting near that car without gloves.”
“I have some.” Heather hurried to the back of the garage and fetched a box of disposable latex gloves from a cabinet above the workbench. “Here, we can all wear these.” She put on a pair and passed the box around.
I pulled on a pair and felt strangely guilty, as if I’d fired the gun myself. And what about that gun? “What are we going to do with it?” I asked, pointing.
Alison slipped on some gloves before squatting down to carefully pick it up, quickly and expertly emptying the chamber.
“Wow, you know how to handle guns?” I was surprised.
“The things we learn about each other,” she said sardonically.
I tentatively pressed a gloved hand against Viktor’s leg. It moved slightly and I reared back, crying out. Heather shrieked and Julie and Alison turned to look.
“Sorry, it’s okay, he isn’t alive,” I said. “I’m just checking to make sure we can still bend his leg to get it in the car.”
“Do you have any large plastic garbage bags?” Alison asked Heather.
“They’re in the house, under the kitchen sink.”
“I’ll get them,” Julie said to Heather. “You should go shower.” She headed inside, but Alison stopped Heather from following her.
“Take off your clothes here so you don’t get any blood inside,” she said. “And after you shower you’ve got to pour bleach down the drain.”
Heather stripped and collected her clothes. “I’ll throw these in the wash.”
I shook my head. “It’s too risky—the police might be able to tell that you ran the machine. You have to get rid of them.”
“What a waste—I liked these jeans,” Heather said, letting the clothes drop. It was jarring to hear her say that with her dead husband just a few feet away. But she was in shock—I think we all were.