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‘I was afraid to tell them! I couldn’t think. This has all been such a shock.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘Maybe they won’t find out,’ he says. He looks up at her, infected by her alarm. ‘I had nothing to do with what happened to her. I didn’t think our casual meetings meant anything. I thought she’d left him.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Becky says, forcing herself to calm down. She can see that Larry is starting to go to pieces; she must remain calm. She has to think. ‘You couldn’t have done it – you have a solid alibi.’ She sits down on the sofa beside him. ‘You were at that conference.’ She’d had a bad moment when the detectives were here, and she’d realized that the conference Larry had attended wasn’t that far from where Amanda’s body had been discovered. But he’d told the detectives that he’d been at the resort from Friday afternoon on, and it had reassured her. There would be people there who could confirm that, surely. But now she sees a terrible pallor come over him and feels the bottom drop out of her stomach. ‘What is it, Larry? What aren’t you telling me?’
‘I didn’t kill her, I swear.’ But there’s panic in his eyes.
She recoils a little. ‘Larry, you’re scaring me.’
‘Her car was found near the resort,’ he says nervously.
How he avoids it, she thinks. Her car, not her body. Like he can’t face it. She brushes the troubling thought aside. ‘But it doesn’t matter,’ she insists. ‘Not if you were at the resort the whole time.’ But now it crosses her mind – what if he snuck out for an hour or two? What if he’d arranged to meet her? Would he have been able to kill her then? Could he have? She feels frightened at the realization that she doesn’t know.
‘But what if people don’t remember seeing me?’ he says, shifting his gaze around the room. He doesn’t seem to want to look her in the eye.
‘Larry, what are you saying?’
He finally looks at her in fear, imploringly, as if she can somehow help him. But she’s afraid she can’t help him.
‘Larry,’ she says anxiously, ‘did you leave the resort?’
‘No.’
‘So what’s the problem?’
‘I checked in on Friday and went up to my room. I didn’t feel like seeing anybody. I – I’d had an argument with Amanda the day before – she said she didn’t want to see me any more – and I was upset, and exhausted. So I stayed in my room and did some work and then – I fell asleep. I didn’t wake up till almost nine. I missed most of the opening reception.’
She looks at him in disbelief and rage. Long seconds tick by, the room utterly still but for the pounding of her heart. Then she says, ‘Are you telling me the truth?’
‘Yes, I swear.’
‘Even I’m having a hard time believing that,’ she says. She realizes he has no alibi at all. ‘Where did you have the argument with Amanda?’ she asks, the gorge rising in her throat. ‘Did anyone see?’
‘It was over the phone.’
‘What phone?’
He looks away furtively. ‘We used burner phones.’
She can’t believe it – her husband, the father of her children, with a burner phone. She asks furiously, ‘What happened to the phone?’
‘I threw it from the bridge into the river.’
‘Which bridge? When? Fuck! They might have cameras, you know.’
He looks up at her, ghastly pale now. ‘The Skyway. On Sunday, on my way home from the resort. She’d broken it off – I figured I didn’t need the phone any more.’
‘You stupid son of a bitch,’ she hisses, and walks away.
Chapter Twenty-one
ROBERT PIERCE SITS alone in his darkened living room, sipping slowly from a glass of whisky. He’s thinking about Detective Webb – and his sidekick, Detective Moen – and what they might think. What they might have. They can’t have anything on him. They’re fishing.
They will certainly be looking at his next-door neighbour, Larry Harris, who was sleeping with Amanda. Robert doesn’t understand what Amanda saw in him, but she’d always been attracted to older men. Oh, he knew. He’s not stupid. He’d known about Larry for some time.
Then he got into Amanda’s secret phone. It wasn’t that hard – he just googled how to unlock Android lock screen without password. And once he did, how enlightening it turned out to be. Her calls, her texts, those two secret numbers. He called one of them and a man answered. As soon as he heard the man’s voice, he recognized it. Because after all, it was who he was expecting it to be. ‘Larry,’ Robert said.
‘Who is this?’ Larry asked, clearly startled.
‘It’s her husband, Robert.’
Larry had hung up the phone in a hurry.
There wasn’t any answer at the other number. It was this other number that concerned him more. The number that she sent those texts to, the ones sharing intimate, private details of their life together, the ones saying that her husband was a psychopath. Those texts enraged him. She must have been able to warn him that her husband had her phone.
And there were other things on that phone, too, that she hadn’t sent to anyone, that made him angriest of all. And even afraid.
He thinks about Becky. By now she must know about Larry and Amanda, if those detectives are any good at all. He suspects that Becky’s half in love with him. He hopes she keeps her mouth shut. It wouldn’t do for the police to think he had a motive to kill his wife. If Larry Harris tells them about that phone call, Robert will simply deny it. There’s no proof. No proof at all that Robert ever made that phone call.
No proof that Robert knew about her affair. Her affairs. As long as Amanda’s burner phone is never found. It must never be found.
He thinks back to when they first moved here. That insufferable party that Amanda insisted on going to. Sitting there watching her, so lovely, so unwittingly cruel. He wonders now if she’d made her selections that day, which ones she was going to screw. They’d only been married a year. How little he knew her then, her proclivities – her childish, inexplicable need to seduce older men. And how little she knew him then – the dark, cold centre of his soul. But they’d got to know each other better.
He knows that Becky and Larry are both home. There are lights on downstairs next door, even though it’s very late. How he’d love to be a fly on that wall.
Raleigh waits until everyone in the house is asleep. He pulls on his jeans, a T-shirt and his dark hoodie, and carefully opens his bedroom door. He knows his dad’s a heavy sleeper; it’s his mother he’s worried about. But he stands still outside his bedroom in the hall and he can hear each of them snoring their separate, distinct snores. Relieved, he creeps down the stairs, careful not to make a sound.
He pulls on his sneakers in the kitchen. He doesn’t turn on any lights. He’s used to operating in the dark. Quietly, he slips out the kitchen door to the garage, where he keeps his bike. He puts on his helmet, flings his leg over the bike, and as soon as he leaves the garage, starts pedalling, fast, away from the house.
He knows it’s bad, hacking into people’s computers. He started hacking for the challenge. How can he explain that to someone who doesn’t feel it? His parents wouldn’t get it, but any fellow hacker would know exactly why he does it. It feels great – hacking into someone else’s system makes him feel powerful, like he has control over something. He doesn’t feel like he has much control over his own life. He promised his parents – and himself – that he would stop. And he will. The risks are too great. This is his last time. He wouldn’t be doing it at all if he didn’t know for sure that the owners were away. And this time, he’s got a pair of latex gloves stuffed in his jeans pocket – he took them from the package his mom keeps in her cupboard of cleaning supplies. He’s not going to take any stupid risks, and he’s not going to leave any prints behind.
