Known to the Victim, page 19
I tug up the carpet in one corner. Under it is . . . another carpet. Yep, definitely a half-assed job. I note the color of both carpets and leave that corner pulled up. I can imagine Castillo rolling his eyes at that.
Yeah, Gibson, the cops aren’t searching every damn country house recently for sale or rent, looking for that one where you pulled up the carpet.
I don’t care. It makes me feel as if I’ve done something.
As for the rest of the room, the only furniture is my cot, which has a pillow and blanket. Oh, and a portable toilet. On the toilet seat is a stack of magazines, bottled water, energy bars, apples and bananas. I’m allergic to bananas, and I can’t imagine Laura forgot that, not after the time she brought over “zucchini bread” she’d bought at a market and my EpiPen saved my life. Oliver had been livid. Laura claimed it’d been labeled Zucchini, so it was hardly her fault.
The bananas are a raised middle finger. So are the magazines, which are all library discards of Cosmopolitan. At least they have fiction excerpts.
Laura has taken my watch—because it’s a smartwatch, with other functions—so I have no idea what time it is. Did I sleep through the night? Is it still night? Late the next day? Who knows?
I do spend some time trying to figure out an escape. Even if I know it’s pointless, my sense of pride won’t let me be the victim who sits there reading Cosmo when there’s actually an escape route. There isn’t. One door. Solid and locked, and when I so much as push on it, someone outside tells me not to bother.
Was that Laura’s voice? Beth’s? Is Beth her accomplice? Or just someone she hired?
I attempt to talk to Laura again. She doesn’t bite. I attempt to hear that other voice again, to see whether it’s Beth or someone else. There’s no response, even when I rattle and bang on the door.
I make mental notes of what I see and hear. Yeah, that’s 99 percent pointless when I can only see this tiny room and can only hear the house creaking and occasional footsteps or a toilet flush.
Eventually, I break down and drink some water and eat a bar. Both are wrapped, which means they’re safe, right? Nope. Within twenty minutes, I feel the now familiar symptoms of sedation. I struggle to stay awake. I don’t know why. It’s just that sleeping feels like giving up and accepting my situation. Just like last time, though, the drugs work.
I wake once. There’s someone in the room with me. I’m still groggy, and the light has been turned out, so all I know is that I sense someone there. Then I hear breathing.
“Laura?” I croak.
A pressure on my bare arm. I yank, but someone’s holding it. The pressure becomes a poke. A needle.
I let out a yelp as cold fills my veins. Then I struggle, but hands hold me down, almost calmly, as if I am a struggling child. Within moments, I’m asleep again.
“Put down the knife and raise your hands!” a voice barks.
I try to open my eyes, but my lids feel like lead.
The voice comes again, even sharper. A male voice.
A cop.
Rescue.
I inwardly exhale in relief. I still can’t open my eyes, but that voice is like an angel’s song. They’ve found me. Laura is under arrest.
“Let go of the knife!” the voice snaps.
There’s a hard prod at my shoulder, a rough poke. I struggle again with waking and manage to open my eyes a crack. Harsh light blinds me.
“Amy Gibson! Put down the knife!”
Amy Gibson?
Me?
I pry my eyes open, and I expect to see a police officer bending over my cot. Instead, I’m staring at pant legs.
I’m on the floor? Did I fall off the cot?
I tense my muscles to try rising, and I make it up onto one elbow.
“Stop!” the voice booms, hurting my head. “Do not move until you have put down that knife.”
“Knife?” I croak.
There’s a movement, something just above my visual range. I lift my head and find myself looking into a gun. I fall onto my back as my hands fly up.
“Drop it now!”
Even as he says it, something falls from my hand. Something I’m only vaguely aware that my fingers have been wrapped around. Then I see my hands, raised in front of me. Red. My hands are red. I move one, and it’s sticky and wet.
Blood. My hands are covered in blood.
There is a knife on the floor in front of me, and my hands are covered in blood.
“Lift your hands higher,” the man snaps.
I do. Then the scene comes into focus. Two police officers. A man and a woman. Both have their guns trained on me. I’m lying on an unfamiliar floor. There’s an open door behind the female officer, and beyond it, green fields under an early morning sun.
“Laura,” I croak. “You need to find Laura. She kidnapped me.”
“Keep your hands where we can see them.”
I do, and the female officer comes over with cuffs. I blink, but I don’t move. I’m too numb and drugged and shocked to move.
“I don’t understand,” I say.
“Stand up,” the female officer says.
“I . . . I’m not sure I can. I’ve been drugged. I’m sorry. I don’t understand what’s happening.”
“I need you to try standing,” she says, not unkindly. “If you can’t, we’ll help you, but I’d like you to try. No sudden moves. Okay, Amy?”
I nod. “May I use my hands?”
“You can.”
Even if I weren’t drugged, it wouldn’t be easy, rising with my hands bound, but I manage it. I stand, teetering and struggling to focus. I glance over my shoulder, being careful to leave my hands where they can see them.
Then I see something on the floor behind me. Blood. A pool of blood. My gaze lowers to a pile of what looks like wet clothing—
No, my gaze lowers to a body. A body covered in blood-soaked clothing, head thrown back, dead eyes open in outrage and shock.
“Laura,” I whisper, and my knees give way.
Chapter 23
The sight of Laura’s body evaporates any remaining shell shock from the drugs. I’ve been found with Laura’s stabbed corpse, a knife in my grip, my hands covered in blood.
I look over at Laura again, her sightless eyes staring at me.
Dead. Laura is dead.
Except in my mind, she’s been dead for years, and to now have her dead again? My mind can’t quite compute that, as if this is another trick.
It’s not a trick. Her empty eyes tell me that.
She’s dead, and I don’t know how to feel about that because she’d been the monster who shot Martine and framed Oliver.
And kidnapped me. That seems inconsequential now, or maybe that’s just me, shoving my own trauma aside.
Laura is dead, and I was found holding the knife, and holy shit, I was found holding the knife that killed Laura.
The officers don’t want to hear my explanations. They can’t do anything with them, and I know that. What are they going to say?
Huh, okay, that makes sense—you can go.
Deciding whether I did this or not isn’t their job. I’ve been found at a murder scene holding the presumed murder weapon. These cuffs are staying on, and I am going to the station and probably to jail.
So why do I tell them what happened? Because the fact that I explain does matter. Or, more accurately, if I didn’t try to explain, that would be a strike against me.
These officers can attest that I immediately started protesting with the same story that I will continue to tell because it is the truth.
Also, if I’m that cool and calculated, maybe I am still in shock.
No, while I am in shock, I don’t calmly relay my story. I’m freaked out, panicking, struggling to keep from going wild. Laura is dead. I was found by her body. I was holding the bloodied knife.
The officers manage to get me outside, as I struggle not to fight them. A pickup roars down a long dirt road, dust enveloping it until it reaches the house. Then a door flies open, and Castillo comes running, and again, my knees buckle, this time in relief.
“What’s going on here?” he says, bearing down on us. “Why is she in cuffs?”
“Sir, please step back—”
“I didn’t do it,” I blurt. “Laura’s dead, and I didn’t do it. She kidnapped me.”
Castillo’s face sets, hard and grim. “I know.”
“Now she’s dead. Stabbed. I was found holding the knife, but I was unconscious. She drugged my food. I woke up with these officers standing over me.”
“Sir, please—” the officer repeats.
“I’m three meters away,” Castillo says. “I’m a private investigator, and Ms. Gibson is my client.”
“That’s fine, but—”
“Amy? Dinah is in court getting Oliver’s bail. I can’t get through to her, but I’ve left messages. I’ll meet you at the station.”
“Sir . . .” the officer says.
Castillo lifts his hands. “Still staying where I am. I’m not interfering or trying to stop you.”
The officers put me into a car.
“They’ll have summoned backup,” Castillo calls over to me. “They’ll need to stay until it arrives before they can leave. I’ll wait here with you.”
“Sir . . .” the officer warns.
“Show me where I can wait that doesn’t threaten your scene, but I am waiting. Like I said, she’s my client, and she’s just been framed for murder. I’m not going anywhere.”
The only way I can process the rest of the day is to imagine scripting it for my podcast. I’d never admit that to anyone for fear of sounding exactly like what I’ve been accused of being—an attention hog who’ll mine any personal crisis for subscribers.
I will never actually record that episode. The police don’t deserve it. They are doing what they must, under the circumstances, just as they did when Martine accused Oliver of shooting her, but that doesn’t make it any easier. I am terrified and trying not to freak out, knowing if I freak out, they can use that against me, but also knowing if I’m too calm, that also acts against me, and how the hell am I supposed to be?
Innocent. Act like I feel, frightened and confused. I’m in a police station, being questioned by people who think I stabbed my sister-in-law to death.
And that’s not even the worst part. This is what would be hard to explain in a podcast. Being questioned is actually easy, because at least it feels like progress. That only takes a couple of hours, split over several sessions, and Dinah is there with me. The rest is waiting. Endless waiting, alone and terrified and barely able to process what happened, what is happening.
Laura is dead, stabbed to death, and I’ve been framed for her murder. Not just accused of it, but released from the room where she’d been holding me captive and staged to look as if I’d murdered her.
I remember someone in my room, the prick in my arm and the cold coursing through my veins. I’d woken just long enough to register someone there, in the darkness.
Was it Laura, making sure I stayed asleep with a stronger sedative?
Or was it her killer, having known I was there and planned it enough to bring a sedative injection?
The point, for Dinah, is that I was clearly drugged. She insisted on a toxicology screening. The results of that are still pending. She also had photos taken of the site where I claim to have been injected—and there’s a pinprick wound to support that.
I didn’t kill Laura and then randomly fall asleep over her dead body. I was clearly drugged, and even the police recognize that, though in their version, I fought back despite being drugged. They are also allowing for the possibility that I killed Laura in a drug-induced psychotic state.
Is that possible? Laura injected me with something that reacted wrong, and instead of knocking me out, it put me into a psychotic state? I overpowered her and killed her and don’t remember it?
I won’t say that’s impossible. I can’t. I can only tell my story. My food was drugged, and I drifted off, but then someone injected me, and that’s the last thing I remember.
The theory Dinah gives the police is that the food drugging was meant to put me to sleep during my captivity, so I’d be as little trouble as possible. The injection was with something stronger, to ensure I didn’t wake up while being moved and positioned beside Laura’s dead body.
That’d be my interpretation, too, but I let Dinah do all the explaining. If I theorize about what happened, then it sounds as if I’m fabricating a narrative or, worse, that I already had one and fashioned the crime to fit it.
The police seem to accept that I was kidnapped. There’s the room where I was kept, complete with everything I remember about it, down to that spot where I pulled up the carpet. Also, Dinah and Castillo had reported me missing, possibly taken against my will. My messages to Castillo got that ball rolling.
It turns out that Castillo hadn’t gotten my messages because he’d been asleep. After multiple long nights of work, he’d set his alarm for a twenty-minute catnap. Only it hadn’t gone off. He’d slept for two hours, with his phone intentionally silenced for twenty minutes of peace.
When he woke, he got my messages and called. Getting no response, he contacted Dinah. They went to my apartment and found no sign that I’d returned after meeting with Greta’s old roommate.
From there, Castillo went to the coffee shop, and one of the staff recognized my photo and said I’d been with another woman, and we’d gotten into the back seat of a rideshare together. A security camera in the area had picked up the rideshare car idling in front of the coffee shop. The license plate was stolen. The car wasn’t registered with the rideshare company, who’d had no drop-offs or pickups at that coffee shop that day except mine.
At that point, Dinah reported me missing.
How did they get all that done so quickly? They didn’t. I’d been missing for thirty-six hours. I got into that car at 5:40 on Monday afternoon, and the police found me over Laura’s body after receiving an anonymous tip at 5 a.m. Wednesday morning.
The Crown attorney wants me to confess to killing Laura in self-defense. I escaped the room, semi-drugged, got hold of a knife and stabbed her to escape. That’s a valid defense, according to them.
Yeah . . . As someone who’s spent her academic and professional career studying domestic abuse, I know that self-defense is never a simple “get out of jail free” card. It’s also not what happened.
I tell my story. I tell it again and again, and I do not waver because it’s the truth.
Between interviews, I am alone in a cell, and I don’t know how to cope with that. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve treasured those rare moments when I literally cannot be doing anything. Those moments when I can ignore the poke in my head that says, if I’m so much as standing in a cashier line, I should be answering emails or reading a journal article or doing something productive because I do not have time to just stare into space.
Now I have hours of that, without my phone, without a book, without anything, and my brain feels like an animal trapped in a cage. I am alone with my thoughts and fears and panic at a time when all I want is distraction. I find it by mentally writing those damn podcast scripts that I’ll never record.
The police can hold me for up to twenty-four hours without laying charges. They hold me for twelve, and then they announce that I’m free to go, and no charges will be laid at this time, pending further investigation, do not leave the city and so on.
All I hear is the first part.
I am free to go.
I step out of the holding-cell block, blinking and disoriented. Then I see a face. Oliver’s face.
There’s a moment where I think we’re just passing in the halls, a grotesque coincidence, two siblings framed for murder seeing each other at the police station. Then I notice how he’s dressed—in a button-up shirt and loafers, shaved, his hair perfect—and I remember he got bail this morning. The evidence of that ordeal is still etched on his face, drawn and haggard. Then he sees me and lights up, breaking into a jog that has my guard raising her hand in warning.
When Oliver reaches me, the guard murmurs, “You can go now,” and I fall into his arms. He holds me tight, and I breathe in the smell of his shaving lotion, so familiar it makes my eyes tear.
“You’re safe,” he says. “It’s all over.”
Is it? I’m still under suspicion. Compared to Oliver’s situation, though—out on bail with trial pending—my ordeal at least might be over.
“I’m sorry for what happened to you,” he whispers as he hugs me. “For the charges, yes, but for everything else. You were kidnapped, and then you had to deal with this.”
My knees quake, and the tears squeeze out. I’ve been trying so hard not to feel sorry for myself. A woman is dead. But Oliver is right. I was kidnapped, and instead of being whisked to a hospital, surrounded by friendly faces, I was put in jail, with only a brief visit by a doctor whose stony expression suggested I deserved all my scrapes and bruises.
I cling to Oliver until I become acutely aware that we’re in a public place, with people slipping and dodging around us. Then I wipe my eyes and straighten.
“We need to get your things,” Oliver says. His mouth quirks in a dry smile. “I know the drill.”
“Can I . . . Can I step outside?” I say. “Please. I won’t go down the stairs.”
He hesitates. Then he sees my desperation. “Okay, just . . .”
“Stay on the steps,” I finish.
He leans in to squeeze my shoulder and kiss my cheek. Then he strides toward the desk while I make my way outside.
I step through those doors, and my knees threaten to buckle completely. I won’t say it’s the blast of fresh air, because we’re in downtown Grand Forks and the air stinks of exhaust and cereal from a nearby factory. It’s freedom, though. I am outside. The only thing holding me back is that promise to Oliver, as much as I long to break it and run down the stairs and just keep running until I collapse in giddy exhaustion.
I went from captivity to jail, and that hadn’t fully hit me until I stepped out those doors. As hard as I’d tried to be positive in that farmhouse bedroom, I’d known there was a chance I might never leave it. As hard as I’d tried to be positive in that holding cell, I’d known there was a chance I might only leave it to be transferred to a jail cell.
