The next morning, when Kathryn was helping Frankie exercise, he suffered a hypoglycemic crisis and passed out. Kathryn brought him around with an injection and his blood sugar levels soon stabilized. No one was to blame for the incident, but the question of the key had stirred up Cheryl against Kathryn. She accused her of mistreating her son and sacked her on the spot. “You can’t get rid of me. It was Frank who hired me. Only he can fire me, and I doubt he’ll do that,” Kathryn replied haughtily, despite which she picked up her things and left.
Cheryl spent the rest of Thursday with her stomach churning as she waited for her husband. When he arrived that evening there was no need to explain anything, because he already knew. Kathryn had called him. Frank grabbed Cheryl by the hair, dragged her into their bedroom, slammed the door so violently the walls shook, and punched her so hard in the chest it left her gasping desperately for air. When he saw this, Frank was afraid he had gone too far, and went to his own room in a fury. On the way he bumped into Evelyn, who was waiting anxiously for the chance to go to Cheryl’s aid. Frank pushed her out of the way and stormed off. Evelyn ran to the bedroom and helped Cheryl lie down. She made her comfortable on the pillows, gave her painkillers, and put ice compresses on her chest, afraid Cheryl might have suffered some broken ribs, just as she herself had when attacked by the MS-13 gang members.
That Friday before anyone was awake, Frank Leroy left home very early in a taxi to catch his flight before the airport closed due to the blizzard. Cheryl spent the whole day in bed, drugged with tranquilizers, and Evelyn looked after her. Cheryl remained stubbornly silent, not shedding a tear, but as she lay there, she decided she must act. She loathed her husband and it would be a blessing if he left with Kathryn Brown, but that was not going to happen in the normal course of events. The bulk of Frank Leroy’s wealth was in offshore accounts that she would never have access to, but the remainder still in the United States was in her name. This was something he had set up to protect himself if he ran into any legal problems. To Frank, the best solution was to get rid of her and Frankie. He had fallen in love with Kathryn Brown and was in a sudden rush to be free. Cheryl could not have suspected there was an even more powerful reason: his lover was pregnant. She only discovered that in March, when the results of the autopsy were made public.
Cheryl thought she must confront her rival, since it was useless to try to reach any kind of agreement with her husband. The two of them only communicated on trivial matters, and even then they were at odds, but once she understood the advantages of her offer, Kathryn Brown was bound to be more reasonable. Cheryl was going to suggest she could keep her husband; she would grant him a divorce and guarantee to remain silent, in exchange for financial security for Frankie.
On Saturday Cheryl had left around midday. The pain from the blow to her chest and what felt like a crown of thorns at her temples ever since the beating on Thursday had grown worse. With two glasses of liquor and a large dose of amphetamines in her stomach, she told Evelyn she was going to her therapy. “They’re just clearing the streets, se?ora, you’d do better to stay calm at home,” Evelyn begged her. “I’ve never been calmer, Evelyn,” Cheryl replied, then left in the Lexus. She knew where Kathryn Brown lived.
When she arrived she saw Kathryn’s car out on the street. This meant she was thinking of going out soon, otherwise she would have left it in the garage to protect it from the snow. On an impulse, Cheryl felt in the glove compartment for Frank’s pistol, a small semiautomatic thirty-two-millimeter Beretta, and put it into her pocket. Just as she had suspected, the key she had found was to the front door of the house, and she could slip in without making any noise.
Dressed in her sports gear, Kathryn Brown was about to go out, a canvas bag slung over her shoulder. She gasped in surprise when she suddenly found herself face-to-face with Cheryl. “I only want to talk to you,” said Cheryl, but Kathryn pushed her toward the door, screaming insults. Nothing was turning out as Cheryl had intended. Pulling the pistol from her coat pocket, she pointed it at Kathryn, intending to force her to listen. Far from cowering, the young woman burst out laughing defiantly. Cheryl slipped off the safety catch and clutched the gun in both hands.
“You stupid bitch! You think you can scare me with your damn pistol? Wait and see when I tell Frank!” shouted Kathryn.
The shot rang out of its own accord. Cheryl had no intention of shooting her when she pulled the trigger, and as she swore to Lucia Maraz when she told her, she didn’t even take aim. “The bullet hit her in the middle of her forehead by pure chance, because it was written, it was my karma and Kathryn Brown’s,” she said. It was so instantaneous, such a simple, clean act, that Cheryl did not register the sound of the shot or the recoil of the weapon in her hands. She could not understand why Kathryn fell backward or what the black hole in her face meant. It took her more than a minute to react and realize the other woman wasn’t moving, then to stoop down and discover she had killed her.
After that, all her movements were made in a trance. She explained to Lucia that she could not remember what she did in any detail, even though she had never stopped thinking about what happened that cursed Saturday. “At that moment, the most urgent thing was to decide what I was going to do with Kathryn, because when Frank discovered her it would be terrible,” she said. The wound had not bled much, and the stains were all on the rug. She opened the garage and drove the Lexus inside. Thanks to a lifetime of swimming and exercise, and thanks to her rival being so small, she was able to drag the body along on the rug and heave it into the trunk. She threw the pistol inside and put Kathryn’s key in the glove compartment. She needed time to sort things out and had forty-eight hours before her husband was due to return. For more than a year now the fantasy had been going around in her head that she should call the FBI and testify against him in return for protection. Above all she had to calm down: her heart was about to shatter. She headed for home.
In March, during the investigation into Kathryn Brown’s death, she was only briefly questioned. The prime suspect was her husband, whose alibi of being in Florida playing golf proved useless because the state of the cadaver made it impossible to determine the exact time of death. Perhaps if she had been questioned in the days immediately following the young woman’s murder, Cheryl would have given herself away, but the interrogation did not take place until two months later. Those months gave Cheryl the chance to make peace with her conscience.