The Kept Woman

  Reuben was out of patience. “Who, man? Who killed Jo?”

  “The woman upstairs.” He couldn’t tell if he’d made the right choice, but he had to keep going. “Her name is Virginia Souza. She’s a prostitute who met Jo in jail. They argued. Souza took out her revenge.”

  To Will’s great relief, Reuben started nodding, like that made sense. “Was it over drugs? What they fought over?”

  “Yes.” Will moved another millimeter, then another. His hand slid farther down the barrel. Too far to safely hold on to the stock. There was no way he could safely fire the rifle now. “Souza knew that Jo was rich, that she had money. She followed her to the party. She kidnapped her. She took Anthony.”

  Reuben nodded again. The reason was obvious. His wife had hidden her addiction. She would hide other things. “Bitch is dead now.”

  “That’s right,” Will said.

  “Jo, too.” He stopped to swallow. “She betrayed me. Betrayed everything we had. She didn’t listen to me.”

  “That’s what women do.”

  “They just take and take and spit you out like you’re nothing.”

  The muzzle of the Sig had tilted up again, but again not enough to clear Anthony’s head. Reuben was faltering. His muscles were twitching. His nerves were in array. His finger could pull the trigger by mistake or by design. Whether it was pointing at Will or at Anthony when it happened was going to be a delicate dance.

  “Stop moving,” Reuben said.

  “I’m not moving.” Will moved up.

  Reuben’s throat flexed as he swallowed. “She kept it from me. The pills. She stole that video. I know she’s the one who stole it. Ruined my life. My son’s.” He swallowed again. “My son.”

  Will was close enough now. He could only grab one thing: the gun or Anthony.

  Anthony or Will.

  All it came down to was which direction the gun was pointing.

  “It’s okay.” Reuben was looking at Will now, a flatness to his eyes. His mouth gaped open. His lips were blue. He was having trouble getting air. He blinked, slow. He blinked again, even slower. He blinked a third time, and Will lunged forward, his arm swinging through the air, backhanding Anthony out of the way.

  Reuben’s head exploded.

  Hot blood splattered Will’s face and neck. Bone was inside his mouth, up his nose. His eyes were on fire. He fell back, dropped the rifle. He clawed at his face. Strings of muscle and tissue caught up in his fingers. He sneezed. Blood sprayed onto the floor. He could barely see it. He was standing, walking backward like he could get away from the carnage, but the carnage was all over him.

  “Will!” Amanda yanked him forward by his arm. He stumbled, tripping over his own feet. She kept pulling him, then dragging him across the atrium, down a corridor where he bounced off the wall. He was completely blind. Carpet was under his feet. He tried to open his eyes but he couldn’t. Splinters were ripping apart his eyeballs—shards of Reuben Figaroa’s bone and teeth and cartilage.

  “Lean over.” Amanda pushed him down.

  Cold water streamed into his mouth, his face. Chunks of gray matter slid down his skin. He saw light. He blinked. He saw white porcelain, a tall faucet. They were in the bathroom. He was leaning over the sink. Will reached for the soap dispenser. It ripped off the wall. The bag burst. He took handfuls of soap and scrubbed his face and neck. He ripped off his shirt. He scrubbed his chest until the skin was raw.

  “Stop,” Amanda said. “You’re going to hurt yourself.” She grabbed his hands. She made him stop before he peeled the skin off his body. “You’re okay,” she told him. “Take a breath.”

  Will didn’t want to take a breath. He was sick of people telling him to take a breath. He stuck his head under a different faucet in a clean sink. He rinsed out his mouth. The water was pink when he spat it into the bowl. He rubbed his face, scratching the skin, making sure there were no more pieces of Reuben Figaroa in his eyes and hair.

  “Drink some more water.”

  He picked something out of his ear. Red grit, part of a molar.

  Will threw the tooth against the wall. He leaned his hands on the basin. His breath was like fire in his lungs. His skin burned. Phantom drops of blood slid down his face and neck.

  “It’s all right,” Amanda said.

  “I know it’s all right.” He closed his eyes. It wasn’t all right. Blood was everywhere. In the sinks. Pooling onto the floor. The bathroom was freezing. He was shaking from the cold.

  “Anthony?” He clenched his teeth to keep them from chattering.

  “He’s safe. Faith has him.”

  “Jesus,” Will mumbled. He tried to regulate his breathing, to get back some sense of control over his body. He squeezed his eyes shut. “I wasn’t sure Faith had a line.”

  “She did. I did. All of us did. But he beat us to it.” Amanda started pulling paper towels from the dispenser. “Reuben Figaroa killed himself.”

  Will’s head jerked up in surprise.

  “The second Anthony was gone, Reuben put the gun under his chin and pulled the trigger.”

  Will stared at her in disbelief.

  She nodded. “He killed himself.”

  Will tried to play it back in his head, but all he remembered was the fleeting concern as he shoved Anthony out of the way that the kid would fall and hurt himself.

  Amanda said, “You did everything right, Will. Reuben Figaroa made a choice.”

  “I could’ve saved him.” Will wiped his face with a paper towel. The rough paper was like a cat’s tongue. He looked down, expecting to see blood but finding only the dark stain of water.

  Was Faith wiping Anthony’s face in another bathroom?

  When the gun had gone off, the boy had been standing as close to Reuben as Will had been. For how many years would Reuben’s son feel the slick fibers of his father’s brain dripping down the side of his face? How many nights would he wake up screaming, scared that he was suffocating on the gray matter and bone that he’d sniffed up into his nose?

  “Will,” Amanda said. “How could you have saved him?”

  Will shook his head. He had made the wrong choice. He’d felt it in his gut even as the lie had come out of his mouth. “Reuben would’ve put down the gun if I’d told him the truth about Jo. That she was alive. That he had something to live for.” He wadded up the paper towel into a ball. “You heard what he said about not leaving Anthony alone, that Jo wouldn’t want that. No way he would’ve pulled the trigger if he’d thought there was still a chance that his family was intact.”

  “Or he would’ve shot you instead. Or been shot by any one of us, because he stabbed a woman to death two floors above us. He shot another woman in the head. He beat his wife for nearly a decade. He threatened to murder his own son. Where are you getting this notion that there was some romantic bond between Reuben Figaroa and his wife that you could magically invoke and make everything better?”

  Will chucked the paper towel into the trash.

  “If you love someone, you don’t go out of your way to hurt them. You don’t torture them. You don’t terrify them or make them live in constant fear. That’s not how love works. It’s not how normal people work.”

  Will didn’t need Amanda to point out that there wasn’t much daylight between Angie and Reuben. “Thanks, but I think I’m going to pass on today’s parable.”

  Amanda didn’t respond. She was looking at his bare chest. The round, perfect Os that the cigarettes had seared into his flesh. The black tattooing left by the electrical burns. The Frankenstein stitches around the skin graft from when a wound refused to close.

  Before Sara, he would’ve scrambled to cover himself. Now, he was just intensely uncomfortable.

  Amanda unzipped her jacket. “I used to come watch you on visitation days.”

  Visitation days. She meant at the Children’s Home. Will had always looked forward to the visits until he started dreading them. All the kids were bathed and trotted out for prospective parents. And then the kid
s like Will were trotted back in.

  “I couldn’t adopt you. I was a single woman. A career gal. Obviously, I was unfit to take care of anything more than a pet rock.” She wrapped her jacket around his shoulders. Her hands stayed there. She looked at him in the mirror. “I stopped visiting because I couldn’t stand the longing. Not my own, which was hard enough, but your longing broke my heart. You wanted so badly for someone to pick you.”

  Will stared down at his hands. There was blood crusted into his cuticles.

  “I picked you. Faith picked you. Sara picked you. Let that be enough. Let yourself accept that you’re worth it.”

  He used his thumbnail to scrape out the blood. His skin was still pink. He shivered again from the cold. “She’s going to be alone.”

  Amanda helped him into the jacket. “Wilbur, women like Angie are always going to be alone. No matter how many people surround them, they will always be alone.”

  He knew that. He had seen it all of his life. Even when Angie was with him, she still held herself apart. “Do you think we have a case against her for letting Delilah die in the trunk of her car?”

  “With Jane Doe as our only witness? No security footage, no DNA, no incriminating fingerprints, no smoking gun, no corroborating testimony, no confession?” Amanda laughed at the futility. “It’s Denny who’s going to suffer. I can keep him out of jail, but he’ll lose his job, his pension, his benefits.”

  Will didn’t want to feel sorry for Collier, but he did. He knew too much what it felt like when Angie threw you to the wolves.

  “Let me get this.” She tried to zip the jacket. She couldn’t get it closed past his chest. The bottom was too short. The waist hit him above his navel. “I’ll have to buy you another shirt before you go back out there. You look like a Filipino sex worker.”

  She meant it as a parting shot, but he couldn’t let her go yet.

  “It’s never going to catch up with her, is it?” He said, “The people she hurts. The damage she does.”

  “Trust me, Will. Life always makes you pay for your personality.” Amanda gave him a rueful smile. “It catches up with her every single second of the day.”

  Eleven Days Later: Saturday

  Chapter Fourteen

  Sara stood in her kitchen, watching the noon news as she ate a bowl of ice cream. After ten days of speculation, Ditmar Wittich was finally giving an interview. He sat with a scaled model of the scuttled All-Star Complex behind him, delivering a diatribe about how the project was still a good idea. He might as well have been speaking gibberish. The reporter clearly only cared about sentences that contained the words Rippy or Figaroa.

  Wittich said, “The complex would bring thousands of jobs to the city.”

  Sara muted the TV. Other than the German accent, she had no idea where Will got the Goldfinger reference. Wittich was much more of a Stromberg.

  She dumped the rest of the ice cream into the sink. Probably not the best choice for lunch, but it beat day drinking. When she glanced back at the TV, the screen was split between Wittich and that video that was being called the Rippy Rampage. Sara wanted to look away, but she couldn’t. Hardly anyone in the world could. Someone at the GBI had leaked the file from Angie’s iPad. Amanda was on the warpath, which to Sara’s thinking meant she was probably the culprit.

  Angie had been right that the video was damaging, though probably not for the reason she had assumed.

  The film that Reuben Figaroa had made of himself and Marcus Rippy raping a drugged Keisha Miscavage had shattered internet viewing records. Unfortunately, all that people could talk about was the last three seconds of footage when, off camera, a door is slammed open, a hand reaches out to swat Reuben’s iPhone away, and a woman screams the beginning of what is obviously the word motherfucker.

  The blur of pink before the video goes black is almost lost to the naked eye, but slow down the frames, and you can see the custom-crafted Italian leather stiletto kicking Keisha Miscavage’s head. The ostrich skin shoe is dyed bright fuchsia. There is a gold R embroidered on the toe.

  Will had recognized the shoe immediately. He had a thing for shoes. He remembered that LaDonna Rippy had worn the stilettos to the one and only interview her husband had submitted to during the rape investigation.

  Marcus Rippy was freely giving interviews now. He’d turned on his wife, insisting that he and Reuben had just been having a little fun with Keisha Miscavage. The video backed him up. Keisha was drugged but showing no outward signs of injury before LaDonna entered the room. According to Marcus, it was LaDonna who had done the real damage.

  So, here was Will’s new case: LaDonna had beaten Keisha. LaDonna had choked her, punched her, strangled her over the course of five hours. LaDonna had left the bruises on Keisha’s back and legs and put her into a coma that had kept her in the hospital for a week.

  The forensic evidence backed this up. LaDonna’s DNA had matched the sweat and saliva found on the victim’s body. Keisha’s DNA was found in the spots of blood on LaDonna’s pink shoes. The prosecution wasn’t open and shut—with the Rippys’ money, nothing was ever a sure thing—but there was also a documented pattern of behavior.

  LaDonna Rippy was a jealous woman. Will had found three previous out-of-court settlements where victims had been paid for their silence. A woman in Las Vegas was still managing to tell her story despite LaDonna breaking her jaw and busting out her teeth. Another woman in South Carolina from fifteen years ago was shopping a tell-all book. There would be more because there was always more. It seemed like Marcus Rippy’s wife was looking at serious prison time.

  Whether or not Marcus was looking at the same was up to a jury to decide. The world could come up with all kinds of excuses when a man raped and beat a woman. Not so much when a woman was the one doing the damage.

  Sara couldn’t let herself sink into this depressing quagmire again. She turned off the TV. She called up her song list and put on Dolly Parton. She kicked the vacuum into the kitchen. She rolled up her proverbial sleeves and started taking everything out of her cabinets so she could clean them.

  This was back to her normal level of stress management, though Sara had spent plenty of time watching Buffy on the couch and drinking way too much alcohol. Will had been tied up closing the Reuben Figaroa case and opening new ones against LaDonna and Marcus Rippy. His late nights and early mornings had him staying at his house so he wouldn’t deprive Sara of her sleep. They were depriving each other of much more than that. Yet another thing that was going wrong. Sara knew from her first marriage that the only surefire way to stop having sex was to stop having sex.

  Not that sex would be any more than a temporary solution. There was still the larger issue of what had happened with Angie and Will and Will and Sara, and Sara couldn’t fix that on her own.

  The phone rang. She bumped her head on a drawer. Sara let out some choice words as she reached for the phone on the counter.

  “It’s me,” Tessa said. “I’m in a phone booth. We’ve got four minutes before my money runs out.”

  Sara turned off the music. “Why are you calling from a phone booth?”

  “Because your precious niece dropped my cell phone down the hole in the outhouse.”

  Sara covered her mouth to muffle the laughter.

  “Yeah, it’s really funny that my phone is encased in shit and I’m going to have to stick my hand down there and fish the fucking thing out.” Tessa’s missionary work was more about helping people and less about watching her language. “I am literally in the middle of nowhere. I can’t just walk up to a Verizon store and buy a new one.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Probably scribbling in my books and cutting up my clothes.” Tessa sighed. “She’s with her father, who is making sure I don’t kill her. And don’t tell me I was just as bad when I was her age. I already got an earful from Mama.”

  Tessa had been just as bad, but mentioning their mother was enough to drain away any desire to tease. “I got an earful, too.” br />
  “She’s worried about you.”

  Sara pushed herself up onto the counter. “There’s a fine line between being worried and being self-righteous.”

  “What’s that, Kettle? Pot can’t hear you.” Tessa changed the subject before Sara could come up with a snappy retort. “Have you had the Talk with Will yet?”

  The Talk. The reckoning. Sara was dreading it as much as Will.

  She told her sister, “I’ve been giving him some space. All that stuff with Reuben Figaroa and Anthony and . . .” She didn’t have to remind Tessa of the details. The story of the hostage standoff in the mall had made it all the way to South Africa. “I just didn’t want to pile onto him: ‘Sorry you witnessed a horrific suicide, but let’s talk about our relationship.’”

  “You’ll have to get around to it eventually.”

  “What’s the point?” Sara asked. “What’ll happen is, I’ll say what I have to say and he’ll nod a lot and look down at the floor or past my shoulder and he’ll rub his jaw or pick at his eyebrow and at the end of the day, he won’t tell me anything about how he’s feeling because he thinks he can just pretend it away and we’ll be fine.”

  “Ohhh.” Tessa drew out the word. “You didn’t tell me Will was a man. Now all of this suddenly makes more sense.”

  “Ha-ha.”

  “Sissy, you keep saying to me again and again that he won’t talk, but what are you saying to him?”

  “I told you I was giving him space.”

  “You know what I mean,” she countered. “I can see you being all stoic and logical and letting him think this is some sort of math problem that has an X or Y solution, when inside, you’re about to die, only you can’t let him know that because you’re worried about looking like some damsel in distress.” She stopped for a breath. “Lookit, there’s nothing wrong with being a damsel. It’s not a man/woman thing. It’s a human thing. You like taking care of him. You like feeling needed. There’s no sin in letting Will have the same thing with you.”